The ###chunked### marker (added to the top of the main text box) is a hangover from Textivate that you may not be aware is available on TextActivities. Read on for information about how to use this feature and what effect it will have on the activities created.
How do I use ###chunked### ?
You add it to the top of your main text box on its own line. You then separate your text into chunks by adding linebreaks between chunks. See the image above. It means that any paragraph breaks have to have 2 linebreaks. Single linebreaks are ignored when it comes to using the text for all of the rebuild activities -- they are only there to tell the website where to split up your text.
What does ###chunked### do?
It affects the way that the text is split up into blocks for certain activities from the "Blocks" section of the "Text-rebuild" activity menu: Multi-choice (1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in 6), Jigsaw rebuild (6, 8, 12, 18, 24)
Normally, the text for the above activities is broken up into blocks using word counts. For the Jigsaw rebuild activities, the website breaks the text up into roughly equal sized blocks by word count. For the Multi-choice activities, it will attempt to break the text down into a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 30 roughly equal sized sections by word count, depending on the number of words in the text.
For a chunked resource, however, the divisions set by you become the main dividing points in the text.
It will still aim to make each block of text fairly equal in size, but it will split it up into chunks (or groups of chunks) rather than into words, so that the end of a jigsaw block should be the end of a chunk, and the start of the next block should be the start of a new chunk (always provided there are enough chunks specified for the number of jigsaw tiles in the activity).
So what does that look like in practice?
Well, you'll see the biggest difference if your text is fairly short (under 150 words, say), and especially on the Multi-choice activities. Look at the 2 screenshots below:
Multi-choice (1 in 3), a normal un-chunked resource
Click here to try the activity shown above
Multi-choice (1 in 3), a chunked resource
Click here to try the activity shown above
You'll see that in the ###chunked### version, the text options are much shorter, matching the chunk definitions that I set when I created the resource, and there are more sections, requiring more interactions: 30 instead of 13 for the un-chunked version of the resource.
Bear in mind that for a longer text (of say 250 words+) you might not notice much of an obvious visible difference, since the size of each section / the total number of sections may well be very similar (since we are ultimately limited by a maximum of 30 sections). But even then, the beginning and end of each chunk should be set according to the chunks rather tha word count alone.
Bear in mind also that where the number of chunks is greater than the number of sections required for the activity, chunks will be combined. And where the number of chunks does not divide neatly into the number of sections you may end up with some blocks of text that are bigger or smaller than others, which may make it look a bit unbalanced.
And of course, if the number of chunks as defined by your text is less than the number of sections required for a particular activity, the chunks will be split up into smaller chunks / words (this time using word count).
N.B. The ###chunked### marker affects the way the text is divided up for worksheets too.
Hope you find this useful :o)