Templates for making language learning exercises - Users' responses

Name: David Thompson

Message: Hi. I have been creating some exercises using your web-authoring tool and ha ve enjoyed it very much. However, when I create one that uses a form to send the data in the exercise by e-mail, I get an "internal server error" response when I hit the submit button. Is something happening with the server or with the cgi used to proce ss the data? Thanks for your help.

Name: Maria Morrell

Message: I love your exercises, and am experiment ing with the most useful approaches for applying them to teaching foreign languages. However, I do not quite understand how to incorporate diacritics without actually typing in the ASCII code. Do you have any suggestions?

Name: Lisa Gasbarrone, French, Fraknlin and Marshall College

Message: I'm having too much fun playing with these forms! I'd love to customize a whole set of them for my beginning French class in the fall, but there's so little time. This is a great service. I really appreci ate what you're offering for those of us who like to use interactive computer exercises in and outside of class.

Name: Arttu Tenkila

Message: This is a great program, but how can I delete exercises from the web after I no longer need them?

Name: Heikki Järvenpää

Message: Hi! I`ve found your site extremely helpful, but I´d like to know how I can remove those files from my main page that I don`t need.

Name: Vasu Renganathan

Message: If you send a message to: vasur@sas.upenn.edu, I will be able to remove/edit the pages.

Name: james steedley

Message: have a quiz for a cross-word puzzle

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: I have found WebAuthor a most useful tool for creating interactive exercises. As I'm concerned mainly with teaching Reading Comprehension of technical texts, I think it would be very useful to have the possib ility of including a text, from which students could then obtain information to work with True/false or Yes/No questions, cloze or multiple choice exercises,etc. Look forward hearing from you soon.

Name:
Email:
Message: Item numbers 8 and 9 in the options can be used to include text, pictures and sound on a page along with true/false, yes/no, multiple choice type of questions. Please have a look at the sample pages I have i ncluded under these options.

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: As you suggested, I tried exercises 8 and 9 but still cannot find where to place the problem text from which the student would be able to infer the answers to the proposed exercises.I would like the text to appear in the resulting page, followed by questi ons, T/F, etc. Maybe I'm not clicking the right options. Could you please help me? Your suggestions will surely be very useful. Thank's a lot Laura

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: First of all, I'd like to apologize for bothering you all the time with my questions. The fact is that I've found WebAuthor so interesting that I'm trying to understand how it works in depth. Plese, tell me what I have to do when I find that I've made any kind of mistake and the page has already been done. Is there any way to return to the composing page, correct the mistakes, then press"make it" and find that the mistakes have been corrected?. For the time being, I return to the composing page, correct t he mistakes, but when I press "make it" another file name is requested. Thanks a lot.

Name: Vasu

Message: Dear Laura,
Don't worry about giving many new names. Keep giving new names whenever it asks for one. I would suggest name your files with numbers in increment as in present1.html, present2.html and so on until you get the correct form. After you make a page with yo ur satisfaction, write down the name of the files. Both the correct ones and the wrong ones are listed in your master file - let us say you gave laurapage.html. In laurapage.html, you will see links to both right files and the wrong ones. If you send m e a message with the name of your masterfile and the name of files you want to keep and the ones you want to delete, I will have it done for you. Is laurapage.html your file (laurapage.html)? If so, I removed the link textcomp1.html, which seemed to be an incomplete one.
I think what you want to do is like: laurapage1.html where a chunk of text is entered in the first field followed by a Cloze test. If you choose the option 8 or 9, after you ent er number of questions (including the field for reading comprehension text), you will choose "Reading Text" for the reading text field in the next page, and in the following field you will enter your Cloze exercise (with the format {word1,word2,word3} for cloze), with the option of either fill-in cloze or pull-down cloze chosen. Similarly, you can use multiple choice, yes/no, true/false etc., based on the reading text that is provided in the previous text field.
I hope it helps!!!
Vasu.

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: Thank you so much for your help. I've at last composed an exercise of the kind we usually give to our students. Now, is there any way in which I can give format to the text? (I mean underline headi ngs and subheadings, for example, or highlight parts of the text, or place headings and subheadings in different lines, justify the text, etc.) Thanks again

Name: Vasu

Message: You can use HTML tags such as for bold to end bold; for underline, and so on in the text field so you can format your text the way you want. Unfortunately, you can not do the text formatting visually as we would do in any word processor program such as Word, WordPerfect etc. You can also use Word's "Save as HTML" option and paste the source text in the reading text field here.

I have made some changes in your textcomp2.html and made a new file called textcomp3.html by adding some formatting HTML tags. Both of these files are still listed in your masterfile called laurapage.html.

-Vasu.

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: Here I am, struggling to properly handle Webauthor. I have just made two more exercises. One is "comprhtext1.html", which appeared once in the screen but then I couldn't find it within "laurapage" or anywhere else.The other is "quickread.html", in which I included a text that did not show up in the screen. Nor could I find the name of the file within "laurapage"afterwards. Could you please give me any idea about what could have happened? Thank you very much. Laura

Name: Vasu
Email:
Message: comprhtext1.html is included in comprhtext1fr.html as it was made using the option "Multiple choice with instant feedback". Similarly, the "fast reading" exercise gives a new name with the word "frame" as in framequickread.html, so you will get the frame interface. For some reason, the exercise page you made was linked to a wrong url, and I fixed it. I see that your reading text doesn't fit in the window. This may be avoided by using in your text. Otherwise, the user has to stretch the window to read the entire text.
So, you didn't really make any mistakes and all your files are in the server and are properly linked in laurapage.html.
I can understand your problems. The WebAuthor page is not very user friendly, due to certain server side restrictions. For example, the users are not allowed to delete any file, but only allowed to add more files. Also, some of the output code needs to be modified somewhat to suit the needs of the users, this can not be done on the fly...

Name: jenny wilson

Message: This is actually a question and not a comment. I failed to do concrete proof-r eading and I made an error on the exercise that I created through your program. Please, let me know if it can be correct and how. I used the create your own paragraph section with the option of dragging and clicking the response. The actual error that I made was in the paragraph and not one of the choices. Thank you for your time and effort. J. Wilson

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: Could you please delete the following exercises from my page (laurapage.html)? Thank you very much in advance. engdept.html; engdept1.html; textcomp.html; engcloze.html;textcomp2.html;prueba.html;prueba1.html;prueba2.html;prueba3.html;framequickread.html

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: Could you please delete these files from laurapage.html? Thanks a lot.Laura (readcompreh.html; readcompreh1.html)

Name: Laura Macagno

Message: Dear Vasu: I've been trying to do the exercises stored in my page and to send them to a colleague, just to check if the answers were successfully delivered. In the case of two or three exercises, the answers could not be sent. A message appeared in the screen, telling me that the URL had not been found. There was no problem at all with the remaining exercises.¿Do you know the reason why this happened? Thank you very much for your help.

Name: Pamela Ellis

Message: Thanks for the great site and opportunity to create web assignments. I was able to create my little exercise and put a link to my web page, but the problem I encountered was uploading the html code to my dre amweaver program. The code worked with the exception of the boxes to the right of the screen that provide the responses. So, when I click on my responses, nothing shows up in my white box to the right of the answers. You can review the results of my cut and paste by going to my web site and the following page. http://www.swc.cc.ca.us/~pellis/avoir.htm Can you let me know how to clear up this problem? Question...am I essentially able to copy any of your html code an d copy paste to my web program (ie. dreamweaver)? Also, I did not yet try to do an exercise with submit buttons that will email my students work to my email address. Should I be able to do that from your site? Thanks so much

Name: Pamela Ellis

Message: I have the same question as another "user." Is there any way I can go in to change my errors from a page that your server maintains?

Name: Vasu Renganathan

Message: I see your file saved in http://larrc.sas.upenn.edu/web/french120avoir.html. If you would like to make any changes in this file using DreamWea ver, you would need to save the file in your desktop using the options "File" > "Save As" in the browser after you load this page; and then open it using DreamWeaver. After you make changes, email the code to me via. attachment. I can update it in our server. For security reasons, we restricted the users from editing pages that are already saved. While you make the pages, you can always go back to previous pages, correct the errors and remake the file with different name. Regarding your question about sending answers by email: Yes, you should be able to use our server's facility to get your students email answers to you directly.

Name: Jenni Matthews

Message: Hi, I teach Indonesian in a small high school in Australia. I have had a good look at some of the example exercises and especially like the one where I wan put a passage up on the web. I would really like to be able to send my students to a search page so they could find all exercises that were created for Indonesian by me. I like your ideas. I have played with QUIA, but I think that is a bit gimmicky. what you are doing is a lot more interesting..no ads, no real promotion actually...I certainly will be promoting your site to others. Thanks a lot, Jenni Matthews

Name: shree

Message: Vasu, Great Work at making Indian Language teaching easily accessible on the web. I like your interactive methods for teachins Tamil as well as the various facilities for creating different tests. Is it possible to extend this to other scripts also? Can we do it just by changing the font/gifs? Please let me know. Thanks!

Name: Ingrid Chafee

Message: This is an absolutely wonderful tool for busy professors! I've made 2 or 3 exercises in the past week. I have encountered two problems: I can't make the "cloze" exercise work all the way through. When I give the right answers myself, sometimes I get no response; sometimes I get the response "enter your answer first". I tried looking at the html code and comparing the successful and unsuccessful questions, and I see no difference at all. All of the answers involved multiple words with spaces. The file resides on your server at http://larcc.sas.upenn.edu/web/ihc3.html The other problem I encountered was in putting words in quotes in a feedback text provided for multiple choice. HTML is sensitive to quotation marks, and I had to go back and use ASCII symbols for the double French brackets. I use the US International keyboard which provides my other accent marks. This is great, in general! Thank you!

Name: Vasu Renganathan

Message: Hi, I use single quote for Javascript delimitters. So, the following example: checkans('4', 'n'y répondez pas') won't work because it uses the accent mark inside two single quotes. You should instead use n` or something else, but not n' or n", as it causes Javascript error. The same is the case for using double quotes as in "test" in some cases. Both single quote and double quotes are used as part of scripting. There are some tricks to overcome these situations in scripting, but such tricks are not implemented yet. Have a look at: http://larrc.sas.upenn.edu/web/ihc3fixed.html

Name: Diana Papazian

Message: How can I correct mistakes on the created page once it's installed? Thank you

Name: Vasu Renganathan
Message: You have to download the file in your desktop and make changes to it. We are sorry that we don't have this feature automated yet.

Name: Yvonne Bauer, German teacher in Malvern
Message: How did you create the wonderful body parts activity that is on your page. Which tool did you use. Thanks for your help.

Name: Damien Page
Message: This site is fantastic! I've been using the interactive reading exercises creator and it's proving to be invaluable. However, I tried to use it today and it doesn't appear to be working. Will it be fixed. Many thanks for providing such a great resource

Name: David Smeltzer
Message: Sir, Your program seems great, but I did have difficulty when I copied the source code into Front Page. Is it not compatible with this program? Would it work better by copying it into Word? How do I do this so it works. Also, could you please delete my trial test called "give it a try", as I had NO idea it would be for public consumption. I just made up stupid answers and wouldn't want anyone to read them. thank you.

Name: Damien Page
Message: Great resources. The interactive reading doesn't seem to be working. I've come to rely on it!!!!!

Name: Kay Levein
Message: Very useful resource, thanks. We have a vocaublary builder(http://www.vocaboly.com/) which can generate multiple choice vocabulary test, these are generated sample test:http://www.vocaboly.com/vocabulary-test/, please have a look.

Name: Don Jacques
Message: Friends, I teach Latin at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School in Columbia, SC and use your Gloss Maker extensively for my classes--to the great benefit of my students. We are all much indebted to your for your good work and for your generosity in making it widely available. I have hit one snag of late. We are a Mac school and will be using the OS X.3 system this coming year. I find that the Apple Safari browser does not support your activities. Is it a javascript issue? Is it resolvable? At least I can still use IE 5.2 if need be. Again, thank you for all that you do.

Name: Priscilla Jones
Message: Is this tool FREE or do I have to purchase some type of software? Is it necessary for me to have anything specific on my personal computer at home. I wanted to know the answers to these questions before I spent too much time looking for a strategy to put questions on line for my students. Thanks in anticipation of a quick response Friday, July 23, 2004 10:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Name: Willow
Message: The link to create Exercises in Combination (With answers generated in HTML page for instructors)lead me to 404 Page Not Found

Name: Daniel Walter
Message: Greetings! I was looking at your site (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/plc/larrc/webauthor.html) and thought that this link (http://www.realliteraturedir.com) would make a great addition as a text link on your page.This is a site which will give Author biographies and information on authors. Hopefully the visitors coming to your site will surely be benefitted by this link. Thus,I will really appreciate if you approve our site (http://www.realliteraturedir.com). Looking forward for a favorable response from your end. Here is my linking code.. Online Literature Library - The site contains information about Authors Biography and their Literary works. You can also Download ebooks from this website, its totally free. Thanks for your time. Kind Regards, Daniel Walter