What are "protected" resources in textivate?

"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

More on textivate sequences

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

Resource preview option.

Sequences based on activities from more than one resource




Parallel texts / extra texts along with a textivate resource

You may be aware that we've recently added the facility to embed an image or a video to appear alongside textivate activities?

(No? Here's some info about embedding videos. And this post is about embedding an image.)

Well, it occurred to us that you could add a parallel text to a textivate resource and have this appear alongside your activities. This would allow for all sorts of possibilities. e.g. guided translation & find the French / Spanish / German etc

We've now incorporated all of these extra features into a new "Extras" tab.

Read more »