The post discusses the student password options in textivate and shows you how to set up classes and individual log-ins for your students. (Premium / Group subscribers only.)
Please note that this post was written before the arrival of individual student passwords on textivate. These now make it possible for students to complete a sequence in multiple sessions on multiple devices. With this in mind, many of the considerations regarding time available, devices available etc are no longer so important. That said, many of the points below address other important issues related to sequences, so it is still definitely worth a read.
I just wanted to share this with readers of this blog, because it made me smile :)
Following my blog post yesterday about creating a sequence of several (mostly sequencing) activities based on the same short story, with the activities gradually increasing in difficulty, and with the focus on speed AND accuracy... today I received the following email on the moretprs yahoo group email, from Ann Schroeder of Cincinnati, Ohio:
"I have been playing with the Moggin sequence that you sent (http://www.textivate.com/sequence-w4njn1). I teach German and know just enough Spanish (from TPRS conferences, of course!) to impress the students. I don't really know enough to actually read that text (maybe 60-70%). I tried the activities to see how much my German kids really have to *know* in order to complete the work (versus using quotes and punctuation to guess.)
"The first couple were easy for me. Now, on the 3x5, I'm challenged, but I've seen the text enough times that it feels do-able. It's forcing me to look at the text more closely, distinguish between what the boy says and what the girl says, and understand the smaller words that I was originally able to ignore."IT'S BEAUTIFUL!!! It's exactly what I want to happen with my students! I can't say enough great things about textivate. And if you already subscribe, don't forget to browse the blog every once in a while for ideas like this. Fantastic!"
And then a little later, this:
"And an update: I just went to the Spanish teacher and retold a truncated version in Spanish during lunch! Yay!"
Really made my day :0)
This link opens the activity shown in the image above:
http://www.textivate.com/frames.php?ext=50069143432406z&res=m_1in4-50069143432406ze1
This is a cool way of checking and reinforcing understanding of key elements of a text. In this case it is a very short text, but the same principle could easily apply to any text.
What we have here is essentially a reading activity with a multiple choice matching activity. Note the following:
Below is a link to a sequence of Spanish reading activities which start easy and get progressively harder. Each activity has to be passed with a fairly high score. All of the activities are based on the SAME text, so the content is repeated over and over.
This post explores a new feature in textivate sequences. (Don't know what a sequence is? Look here for starters.)
>> TRY THIS SEQUENCE <<
The above sequence (in French) is based on 9 separate resources, each one dealing with a different section of the same story. (It's a description of the action from a Simon's Cat video called Fly Guy -- the sequence is actually made up of all of the activities featured on this blog post.)
If you try out the sequence, you'll see that as you complete one activity and click on the "Next" button, you are taken to a different activity based on the next piece of text -- each piece of text is actually a separate textivate file.
So how is this done?
Well, the easiest way is to open textivate in 2 separate browser tabs: one with an empty text box so that you can create your sequence and one that you use to open resources and get the urls.
Start by typing the following into your empty "Show all" text box:
"Protected" resources are intended for these sorts of situations:
- you want to set a textivate activity but you don't want students to be able to access the resource on the textivate home page or access any of the other activities for the resource;
or... - you want to set a textivate sequence as a test / assessment, so it's important that students can't access the source text.
Click the "protected" checkbox to add ###protected### to the top of your textivate resource in the "Show all" box (you won't see it in the "Text" box). This has the following result:
- via the share icon, all links (and embed codes) for individual activities have a longer "scrambled" url with no reference to the original resource url
- similarly, if your resource contains a sequence, the sequence link will also have a different type of "scrambled" url, with no reference to the resource url, so students can't open the original resource in a new tab or window
The idea is essentially to try to stop students getting access to the resource home page. (Note that links to the menu screen and the home page are not scrambled.)
N.B. If you are going to make a resource "protected", it is a good idea...
- NOT to list your resource as a public resource -- make it shareable instead
- NOT to give students a link to the home page or menu page for the resource to get the sequence link themselves -- this defeats the object of what you are trying to do
Is this a useful feature? See what you think...
Spanish, reading comprehension sequence
French, reading comprehension, single activity
EFL - PET reading test - single activity sequence
And in case you're wondering, yes, you can still use the url tweaks to modify the landing page for your students if linking to a single activity.
:0)
Related posts:
Introducing Sequences on textivate
LIGHT - an embedded KS3 Science sequence of 10 activities
Chez moi (a textivate sequence = a substantial bit of homework)
How to submit work at the end of a textivate homework sequence
Sequences based on activities from more than one resource
There's a renewed focus on translation in Modern Languages teaching in the UK. The GCSE exam will soon include some form of translation to and from the target language.
Exactly what form that will take remains to be seen, but I thought I'd put together a post on the ways textivate can be used to help create scaffolded translation activities -- with varying levels of support provided to the student.
This post focuses on translation into the target language, which is where I think textivate can be more useful.
Parallel texts
The parallel text feature of textivate allows you to specify an additional text to appear alongside the textivate exercises. (See this blog post for more details.)
If this parallel text is in English, it's a great way of providing structured translation practice.
And you can provide translation-type activities at various levels, ranging from putting chunks together to putting words together to filling in letters etc. See the examples below. The ones toward the end of the list are more like true translation activities.
This post features an activity sequence based on this text:
Light can be reflected from a shiny surface like a mirror. It can be made to change direction by the shiny surface. If a ray of light passes into an object with different density - like air to water, or air to glass, the light will also change direction, but this is called refraction. The light is slowed up as it passes into something which is more dense, like air to water, just like we go slower when we try to run through shallow water. The light bends towards the normal. Light speeds up when going from water to air, (from more dense objects into less dense objects). This will refract the light away from the normal. A prism refracts light rays and splits up white light into the colours of the spectrum - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
The text was provided by a KS3 Science teacher a few years ago, along with a whole load of other texts and lists of keywords which were used in a series of TaskMagic activities (they're still available to TaskMagic3 users now from here).