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.
Tags: activities, exercise generator, textivate
Thanks, Sean – excellent product. It will save me hours of work!
I loved this tool, Sean! Thanks for sharing it here
Marisa
Hi Jeremy – Textivate has added a lot to my website and my classroom. Students love it
Hi Marisa,
A Happy New Year to you. I loved Textivate the second I pressed “textivate this” and saw all those activities pop up. The guy who made it has put a lot of work into it and is currently revising and adding to it. Please spread the word
Best wishes.
thank you for this excellent tool! One of the best I have used.
Hi
I wonder if you could do a lesson on Korean suicides. I read that it stands at over 15, 500/per year. I think we need to discuss this in more depth…besides my Korean students need how severe this social issue is.
Hi Darrell,
Thank you for your suggestion. Your lesson is here: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1301/130116-suicide.html
It’s for pre-int (+) – Hope you like it.
Best wishes,
Sean
Thank you for creating such a wonderful site for ESL students, ‘Breaking News English’ offers excellent reading comprehensive activities. My students love your lesson plans on current events. I just don’t know when you find time to create and publish so nice materials. Thank you for sharing with us the magic of Taxtivate.
Neli
Thank you Neli
Wow, this is a very good tool. I just checked it out and will be incorporating it in my ESL teaching. Thanks!
Sean, I’m wondering if you’d create some kind of tool that allows us to create with one click all the activities you create with your news articles! Haha…
Hi IELTS Singapore – I’m looking for that tool too