Converting your old TaskMagic files to the new TaskMagic3 format

In TaskMagic3, files save as binary rather than text files.

Images and sounds are embedded in the file rather than being kept in a separate folder.

This makes it much easier to use all TaskMagic files over an internet connection, over a VLE etc, whatever the user’s browser.

Files can also be transported, emailed etc without zipping, and you don't have to remember to always copy extra 'pics' or 'sounds' folders along with your exercise file.

TaskMagic3 has a built in batch-convert facility, so that you convert multiple files to the new format. And it converts all file types at once - TextMatch, PicMatch, SoundMatch, Pic-Sound, GridMatch, Mix&Gap, Dialogues and Multi-Choice

It's dead easy to do.

All you do is open the file browser in TaskMagicCreate (TM3) and browse to a folder containing older style TM files. (These are the ones with an uppercase extension and no number 3 at the end: MDL, MDP, MTX etc)

If you browse to a folder containing these older file types (and where no TaskMagic3 equivalent exists) you will see a button with "TM2 > TM3" on it.

Click this, and it automatically converts them all (and keeps a copy of the original file.)

See this quick video which demonstrates how it is done. (NB. There's no audio.)

AQA AS style cloze exercises using TaskMagic3

There's a pdf cloze exercise below based on an article from BBC Mundo. It requires students to put a verb or adjective into the correct form according to the context, just like one of the exercises on the AQA AS exam.

The other file is a TaskMagic3 individual exercise file (_tx3). You'll need version 3.2 or later of TaskMagic to open this. It opens directly to

TaskMagic Tutorial - (3) Creating Your own Mix & Gap files (exploiting a text)

This post contains a series of video tutorials on creating Mix and Gap exercises in TaskMagic3.

1. Introduction to the Mix and Gap edit screen + the auto-generated exercises

Type or paste any text into the Mix and Gap edit screen, click "View Exercises" and you immediately have up to 16 automatically generated exercises based on reconstructing your original text: