EDL 2012

To mark this date (or simply to provide information on any issue), I decided to try out Textivate, a web tool that creates instant interactive text based activities.
I started by pasting a text into the Textivate window, clicked on "Textivate now" and it automatically gave e 27 different exercises / variations to choose from. By clicking on one of the squares, ranging from scrambled sentences to gap fill exercises, we instantly have an interactive activity. It's fast, useful and, above all, involves no prep time from the teacher; furthermore, these automatically generated activities, allow us to use the same text over and over again because each time we click for an exercise, it shows us a different text order, a different set of gaps, etc.
The problem with these online / interactive activities though, is that most of the time, I don't teach in computer rooms and when it does happen, some of them are not even running... In this case, well, yes, worksheets: copy and paste what you get, print and hand out.
What you have below are the ones I chose for my class but here I'm including the whole text so that you can have the original version. In what concerns the exercises, I chose one first example in which the text is disorganised and students have to put it in the right order by dragging and dropping the so-called "tiles" - beware that the columns are ordered horizontally!

Click below to access the activity. (Opens in a new window on touch devices.)

Click here to open the above activity in a new window.

In the second exercise, the text has no spaces and no punctuation; in the third one, all vowels are missing. As it so often happens and there are no computers available, we can copy, paste and print the different activities and work in groups to promote cooperation and some competition. With time, I would even copy these 6 (can be even more!) parts of the text, cut them into slips of paper for the students to order. In any case, there should be at least a follow-up with questions, either written or dictated by the teacher, and the answers written down by the students.

Click below to access the activity. (Opens in a new window on touch devices.)

This exercise may only be accessed via this site.

Some examples are posted here but all the documents and activities I referred to are here.