My favourite find of 2012
Every so often, but nowhere near often enough, a great tool comes along that enhances how you work – that you think is totally great.
I found such a tool in late 2012. I immediately fell in love with its simplicity and what it offered to teachers and students, both in the classroom and on my website.
That tool is Textivate, from the maker of Task Magic.
Textivate’s simplicity
You paste a text of up to 500 words into the text box.
You press this button.
You press this button.
You then instantly have these 26 exercises:
What are they?
Examples of all 26 activities are here.
- The first 15 are text reconstruction drag ‘n’ drop activities.
- The next four are multiple choice reconstruction activities.
- The 20th is a cloze. The default gives you no choice of where the gaps fall, but Textivate provides you with the option to choose.
- #21 removes all the spaces from the text and requires students to click where they think the spaces are.
- The last five activities have had vowels or consonants removed (or a combination of both), the text with only the initial letter given, and a text that students have to put back all the letters.
Share or embed the activities
There are two “Share” buttons after you press “textivate now”:
1. Click on the one top-right of the 26-activity grid and you will get a link to that 26-grid page.
2. Click on any of the 26 activities and you fill find another top-right “Share” button. This will give you the url of that individual activity and the embed code. You can tweak the activity height/width – recommended for activities that have a lot of drag ‘n’ drop tiles.
If you know of any other sites like Textivate, please let me know and I’ll add more activities to my sites.
Thank you.
