LATEST ADDITIONS

What's new in Textivate?

Well, there's a new version for a start :)

It's called TextActivities, and it is essentially Textivate 2.0, but with so many changes from the original that we had no option but to launch it as a totally separate website.

Those familiar with Textivate will recognise in TextActivities many of the activities and pedagogical features of Textivate, but delivered in a completely different way, with a totally new interface, a completely different approach to classes, school management, resource creation, student logins and assignments, and hopefully a much more intuitive work flow.

While our hope is that current Textivate users will value the many improvements and will want to migrate to TextActivities, the original Textivate will remain in place (although it is unlikely to be developed further).

Subscribers to TextActivities can import their Textivate resources onto the new platform one by one, as and when needed, even after their Textivate subscription has expired.

See this post on the TextActivities blog for a comprehensive list of the differences between TextActivities and Textivate.

Read on for a list of previous Textivate updates...

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New menu screen

We've completely revamped the menu screen (above). 

This new version makes it much easier to read the text / matching items on the menu screen.

It also has words on the menu, rather than images intended to represent each activity.

And many activities that are essentially the same, such as all the tile activities, are now accessed in submenus.

Here's what it used to look like (if you've never used textivate, or if you've forgotten already...):

Here is a link to the menu as shown in the first image above. Have a play with it: http://www.textivate.com/menu-7rfjn1?colscheme=blue

We hope you like the change.

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What's been added to TEXTIVATE since the beginning of the last academic year?

New features are being added to textivate all the time. 

To give you an idea, if you've been using textivate for the last 12 months (September 2015 - August 2016), these are all the new features that have been added to textivate in that time. Click on the links for more info:

  1. Challenges (September 2015) - in-class competitions for individuals or teams
  2. Match Jumble (October 2015) - new match activity
  3. Drop-down box navigation (November 2015)
  4. Split by sentence (November 2015)
  5. Improved options for non-roman-script languages (November 2015)
  6. Jumbled words (November 2015) - new text activity
  7. Word invaders (November 2015) - new text activity
  8. Football (January 2016) - new text and match activities
  9. 3 in a row (January 2016) - new text and match activities
  10. Space specifications (January 2016)
  11. Flashcards improvements (January 2016)
  12. Speed read (February 2016) - new text activity
  13. Text to speech (July 2016) - new feature to add speech functionality to almost all your textivities
  14. Switch matching items (July 2016) - improvement for match resources
  15. Flashcards clues options (August 2016) - makes flashcards much more versatile

Challenges are just one of many new features added to textivate in the past 12 months...

Drop-down boxes to replace +tiles and -tiles buttons

We've made a small change to the way that you navigate between some of the activities on textivate.

The +tiles and -tiles buttons have gone and have been replaced by a drop-down box (see the image below).

This makes it easier to navigate directly to the number of tiles that you want to see in your activity.

These changes have been made to the following screens on the text side:

Tiles (all), Horizontal, Paragraphs, Next Word, 50:50, Initials, Empty, Anagrams

...and the following screens on the Match side:

Shuffle Match, Switch Match, Click Match (all), Memory (all)

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Multiple-resource sequences

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:

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Red herrings in user-defined gap-fill

If you make a user-defined gap-fill on textivate (as explained here and here) you can now add "RED HERRING" words to the word list.

These are words that cannot fit into any of the gaps that you have selected and they make the exercise more challenging for the student.

To add red herrings, first create your user-defined gap-fill by clicking on the "User-defined gapfill" button on the textivate home page:

With the user-defined gap-fill edit screen open, scroll down to beneath the box containing your text and you should see a section like this:

You can add extra words (or groups of words) into this box, separating your red herrings with semi-colons, like this:

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