1. Type or paste in a text into the Mix and Gap editor screen
You can type or paste in any text of up to 500 words.
There are various sources of texts:
- The internet; news feeds; short articles etc.
- Your text book: this allows you to create resources based specifically on the book that your students are using in class.
- Past exam papers.
- Letters, songs, poems, etc.
- Your imagination :o)
- Students can type or paste in their own corrected written work, which can then be use to help them to learn their text, or shared with other students for extended text manipulation practice.
There are a variety of gap-filling and sequencing activities.
Here's a link to the TaskMagic3 Mix&Gap file - mtx3 - from which the pdfs were printed. It provides access to loads of interactive exercises. (Requires TM3)
:0)
http://www.muyinteresante.es/ia-que-debe-su-mala-fama-el-martes-y-trece
There are 9 pdf files in all, all printed using dopdf - http://www.dopdf.com
The pdfs are based on a Mix and Gap file containing the text, which is also included (mtx3). This file provides a wide variety of interactive exercises for use with PCs or with an interactive whiteboard. It requires TaskMagic3. If you haven't got TaskMagic3, you can download a 30-day trial from the TaskMagic website (doesn't require registration or anything - just download and install it).
There are 11 pdf files in all, all printed using dopdf - http://www.dopdf.com
Anyway, as well as the poem and the link to the previous resources, there was also a link to a TaskMagic2 Text Match file. This really brought home to me a major improvement in TaskMagic3 compared with previous versions: in earlier versions of TaskMagic, any text that you put into Mix&Gap would be converted into one block of text, so it wasn't really possible to make exercises based on formatted text such as letters, recipes, songs, poems etc. TaskMagic3 makes it possible to create all sorts of interactive and printed resources based on these kinds of texts, as you'll see from the resources posted here.
The resources below are all based on the texts of the AQA GCSE French Higher Reading paper from June 2010. Here's a link to the paper on the AQA website.
Each question from the GCSE paper was made into a TaskMagic3 Mix and Gap file.
There are 11 pdf files in all, all printed using dopdf - http://www.dopdf.com
What activities can you use to settle the class as soon as they come in?
How can you give them all something to focus on, so that when everybody is there, and you're ready to begin, you can get on with the lesson?
NB. The context for this blog post is a situation where students turn up to the class in drips and drabs, maybe because they've just had PE, or they're coming from different parts of the school, or they've just had lunch, or whatever. (I don't want to get into a discussion about whether or not we should make students line up outside the class until they are all present and silent, as that is not what this post is about.)
The suggestions below are based on using a projector or interactive whiteboard (IWB), and they are examples of things that you can just put up on the screen and leave there, requiring no interaction with the board or your computer until you are ready to move on.