STUDY MY OWN TEXT
This guide assumes that you have a student account on TextActivities.com
Sign in and go to the "Resources" page, and you'll see that there is a "STUDY MY OWN TEXT" button (see image above). Click this to access the page that allows you to create a new student resource (or edit an existing one).
NEW / START AGAIN / IMPORT
At the top of the page you'll see 2 buttons (see image above): "START AGAIN (new resource)" and "IMPORT (exported resource)"
The "START AGAIN" button clears any data that may have been left on the page from a previous visit, so that you can start a new resource.
The "IMPORT" button allows you to paste in a resource (a block of text) that you have previously exported (which we'll come back to later in this guide).
If this is your first time creating your own resource, you can ignore these 2 buttons.
The yellow info box explains what is required to make a minimum viable resource. Give it a quick read through. It explains, among other things, that your resource data is automatically updated as you make changes, and that you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and try it out at any point.
It also says that a viable resource must have at least one of the following:
- a TEXT in the foreign language
- a set of MATCHING items in the foreign language and your own language
SET THE RESOURCE LANGUAGES
Before you can start on the resource proper, you need to tell the app the languages for your resource:
- The language that you are studying (French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc)
- Your mother tongue (normally English)
This is essentially so that the app knows which text-to-speech voice to use and for which elements of the resource.
MAKING A TEXT-REBUILD RESOURCE
If you want to make a resource based on a "Text" -- gapfills, reordering, spelling activities etc. based on an actual text -- type or paste it into the "Text" input box (see above image).
(If you don't want to make a "Text" resource, you can skip this section all together).
Text to speech is enabled by default (yellow box).
Those additional activities (light blue box) are entirely optional. You can ignore that section and move on down the page.
MAKING A VOCAB / MATCHING RESOURCE
If you want your resource to include vocab activities, enter your items into the "Vocab / Matching" input box.
(If you don't want to make a "Vocab / Matching" resource, you can skip this section all together).
Items need to appear as one matching pair per line, separated by ==, like this:
one==uno
two==dos
three=tres
four==cuatro
etc.
It doesn't matter which way around you type them -- foreign languge first or English first -- as long as the list is consistent.
NB. You must tell the app which language is which by using the 2 language selectors above the input box.
By default, the items will appear in your activities in random order (green box), and text-to-speech audio is enabled (yellow box).
ADDING AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The parallel text is entirely optional.
It is a way for you to include a translation into English of your foreign language text, which will make it a lot easier to do many of the text rebuild activities.
The parallel text options will usually be OK if you leave the defaults in place (yellow box).
TRY THE RESOURCE / EXPORT FOR LATER
At the bottom of the page you have the section shown in the image above.
You can click on the "TRY MY RESOURCE NOW" button to try your resource at any point. It will open a new tab in your browser each time you click this, so it makes sense to close that tab each time you finish practising. Or you can refresh the tab containing the practice activities so that it updates to the latest version of your resource.
The "Export" option is for if you want to practise the same resource on a different device, or if you want to have access to more than one resource and save this one for later. It will export the resource as a block of text that you can store in a Word doc, a note, a txt file, etc, so that you can copy and paste it back in later using the "IMPORT" option mentioned earlier (the button at the top of the page).
Remember that every time you revisit this page on the same device in the future, whatever data you left on the page will still be there. If you arrive on the page and you decide you want to clear this data, simply click on the "START AGAIN" button.
THE END RESULT?
You'll end up with a student resource based on whatever text and/or vocab you entered. Since this is a student resource, no completion or score data is uploaded to the servers.
You can study the resource using the "Resource view" tab (see image above), which allows you to play the text-to-speech audio for the vocab items and for the text itself. You can even record yourself and compare how you sound with the text-to-speech model.
Depending on what sort of data you included, you'll see an activity menu on the "Activities view" tab (see image above) with sections for "Vocab / Matching", "Text rebuild" or both of these.
Pay attention to the checkboxes etc that allow you to decide the matching mode for vocab activities, and whether or not text-to-speech audio is available for text rebuild activities.
Hope this helps :0)