Textivate takes any text that you type (or paste) into the textivate textbox and turns it into multiple interactive activities (and worksheets).
Here's what you do.
1. Go to the textivate home page : www.textivate.com
Follow the above link or type the url into a web browser.
You can get to the home page from any of the textivate screens by clicking on the "textivate" icon that appears at the top left of the screen. From the menu screen you can also click on the "Back to textivate home page" button.
2. Empty the text box.
When you arrive on the homepage, you may see a default "Welcome to textivate..." text, or another text (depending on whether or not you've been there before). To make your own resource, you need to clear this text first.
To do this, simply click on the "New" icon:This will leave you with an empty textbox, which looks like this:
3. Type or paste in your text.
This can be any text of up to 500 words, although as you approach that limit you may find that fonts get a bit squeezed, especially on smaller screens such as mobile phones.
Here's an example of the sort of text that you could use:
J'habite une petite maison dans un village à la campagne.
Chez moi il y a six pièces en tout.
Au rez-de-chaussée il y a une cuisine, un grand salon et une salle de bains. Il n'y a pas de salle à manger chez moi.
Au premier étage il y a trois chambres.
Dehors il y a un grand jardin avec beaucoup d'arbres. Il y a aussi un garage.
J'aime bien ma maison parce que j'aime le jardin, et j'adore habiter à la campagne.Once you've typed or pasted in a text, you can click on the "textivate>>" button (see the screen above) and this will take you to a new page with lots of links to the activities that have been automatically generated based on your text.
e.g. for the above text you would see something like this:
(Each button on the left-hand menu is a link to a different interactive activity based on the same text.)
You won't be able to get any further than this without a log-in, so if you have a textivate log-in, go back to the textivate homepage (using the "textivate" icon at the top left or the "Back to textivate home page" button) and log in.
Users with a student log-in: simply log in using the username and student password and you'll be able to access all of the interactive activities based on your text. You'll also be able to save your resource in local storage (see 4b below) but not upload it to textivate.
4. Save your resource (requires log-in).
You have a couple of options:
(a) Upload the text to textivate (requires non-student log-in)
Click on the Upload icon:
Then depending on your subscription level, you can choose to upload the resource as Public, Shareable, Private or MySite. (See this blog post for an explanation of these.)
You can add tags to your resource to make it easier to search, and you can add extra info about your resource, including links to a webpage, video, image etc.
See this video about uploading resources to textivate. (NB. the interface is out of date in this video, but you can see the upload process quite clearly...)
Resources that you have uploaded to textivate can be accessed later via the Search / Browse icon and selecting the "My resources" option.
If you make changes to your text after uploading it, you should see a new "Save" icon appear at the top right of the textbox:
Click this icon to save changes to your resource. (This replaces the existing resource on the server, whereas clicking on the Upload icon again would upload a separate copy of the resource.)
(b) Save your resource in local storage
Click on the Local Storage icon:
Click on "Save" and type in a name for your resource.
Resources stored in local storage can be accessed at a later date via the same icon (and choosing "Open").
N.B. Resources stored in local storage will be deleted if you delete your browser's cache / temporary internet files. Note also that you cannot share resources stored in local storage via a URL.
That's all there is to it.
Further reading: