DO THIS whenever you want to make a new textivate resource...

Textivate can do a lot. 

It can make activities based on a text, on matching items, or both; sequences and challenges; resources with additional parallel text, an image, audio or video... and all of this based on user input. 

All of this user input is introduced into textivate using the "tabbed" front page:

All you need to do is click on the appropriate tab and key in the data or click the options. (What you then see in the "Show all" tab is what the user used to have to key in manually, before we introduced the tabs -- it used to be a LOT more complicated...)

BUT here's the problem:

Unless you delete all of the content from all of the text boxes, there will usually be something left behind that you might not be aware of. This might be the default welcome text (and matching questions and answers), or maybe the text / matching items from the last textivate resource that you opened or viewed on that particular device. If the last resource that you accessed also had a parallel text or video, this will also be stored.

Textivate does this on purpose, so that you can close your browser and next time you open textivate you'll go straight back to the last resource you were working on (or to the default text, if it's your first time on textivate).

So I often come across resources where the text is what the teacher intended to include, but there are also matching items from a previous resource, or the default matching items. Or maybe the teacher intended to create a matching resource, but their resource ends up containing the default text as well, or the text from another resource (very often in a different language!!). I can only imagine the confusion this must cause for students working on those resources...

THE GOOD NEWS is that it's SO-O-O-O easy to prevent this.

Simply click on the "New resource" icon:

This will clear everything: the text tab; the matching tab; any extras; the sequence information; and obviously the "Show all" tab will be empty too.

Get into the habit of doing this whenever you want to make a new resource, BEFORE you do anything else.

:0)

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