Until now (6th November 2024) SentenceBuilders activities requiring text entry (typing with a keyboard) have always required students to type out the target sentence 100% accurately, matching the target sentence in all aspects, including:

• Accents
• Case-sensitivity
• Punctuation

And that system has worked great for the last 3 years or so.

Except that I have heard on numerous occasions that students can find it frustrating when they are penalised for not typing a capital letter, or for neglecting to type a comma (often arbitrary) into a sentence.

I also considered the text entry requirements for my other web projects (TextActivities, TeachVid, Textivate), where students simply have to type in the missing letters -- punctuation, accents, upper or lower case are not a factor in determining student scores -- and wanted to offer something on SentenceBuilders that brought it more into line with those other sites.

Having consulted users of SentenceBuilders I decided to add the ability for teachers to relax the text entry requirements, should they wish to do so.

STRICT OR RELAXED?

For each of the 3 categories mentioned above, teachers can now decide whether the text entry requirements are strict (the default) or relaxed. See the info below.

• Strict = students must type or insert all accents (default)
• Relaxed = students can ignore accents

• Strict = students must type the correct case - upper or lower
• Relaxed = students can type any case

• Strict = students must type ALL punctuation
• Relaxed = some punctuation after words [ ,.;:!? ] is not required

CHANGING THE SETTINGS

Resource page

Use the new keyboard button to access the text entry accuracy settings. Once set, these are stored in cookies in your browser.

Both teachers and students have access to these settings, but note that these settings only affect the activities (including circuit activities) on the resource page, not on assignments or competitions.

Setting assignments and competitions

When setting an assignment or a competition, you'll see these options in the final stage.

Note that they are always strict by default (i.e. all red).

You can also change these settings when editing an assignment or competition.

CAVEATS

In both the the resource page image and the class page image (setting assignments) above, you will see that there are a couple of caveats:

1. these settings do not affect text entry for Chinese or Japanese
2. these settings do not affect any "SB Context" activities

I hope you find this new feature useful :o)

If you've already had a go at making your own SentenceBuilder resources on SentenceBuilders.com, you are likely to have experienced issues with sentences which don't appear quite as you would like them to.

Maybe you've wanted to know how to include annotations in the SentenceBuilder but not have these appear in the sentences that it generates? e.g. markers for masculine and feminine, such as "(m)" or "(f)"

Perhaps you've wanted to know how to make the English items appear in the correct order, for things like nouns and adjectives? e.g. "une voiture rouge" = "a car red" ???

Or how to solve the word order issues in German, especially around verbs being sent to the end of the clause? e.g. "Ich bin ins Kino gegangen" = "I am to the cinema gone" ???

These problems occur because sentences are generated (in both the L1 and the L2) by simply combining the items as they appear in the SentenceBuilder, moving from left to right.

You need to add something extra -- beyond just the SentenceBuilder contents -- if you want your SentenceBuilder to generate sentences that work.

And that something extra is... 

Read more »

We thought we'd get ready for the new academic year 2022-23 (Northern hemisphere only, I know...!) by adding a couple of exciting new Assignment features that some of our users have been asking for for quite a while:

1. Delayed start: i.e. assignments that become available from a specific date & time.
   
   This allows you to, for example, set assignments that only become available once a lesson starts, or once school is finished, or on a particular day. Great for setting cover work, for example. But also really good for planning in advance without being worried about students tackling assignments before they are ready to do them.
   See this blog post for full info about this new feature :)
   
   

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2. Audience: i.e. the ability to set an assignment for specific students as well as for the whole class.
   
   The new "Groups" feature that accompanies this upgrade makes it really easy to set assignments for a predefined group of students within your class, or you can simply select from the student list. Great for setting differentiated work. Also really good for setting catch-up assignments, or for reassigning to those who have missed or uncompleted assignments.
   See this blog post for lots more info about this new feature :)
   
   

The image above shows both of these features in the new Assignment pop-up, accessed via the Assignments tab of all of your classes on SentenceBuilders.com

We hope these 2 updates combined will offer you much more flexibility when it comes to setting assignments via our platform :o)

From launch in 2021 until 25th August 2022 it was only possible to set Assignments for a whole class on SentenceBuilders.com 

That's now changed :)

Read more »

The ability to schedule assignments -- i.e. to make them available from a certain date & time in the future rather than having them immediately available -- is one of the most requested features on SentenceBuilders.com...

Read more »

16th April 2022 marks 1 year since SentenceBuilders was launched.

It's been a busy year!

Let's look back at how the site has developed in its first 12 months.

1. SB Premium Content

The original concept for the SentenceBuilders website was as a vehicle for providing interactive SentenceBuilders and interactive activities based on the SentenceBuilders from the best-selling Sentence Builders books from The Language Gym. (We only decided to add some rudimentary authoring functionality in the few weeks prior to launch!!)

So how has the SB Premium content developed in this 1st year?

THEN...

Read more »

On SentenceBuilders.com there are several ways that students can get involved in interactive activities -- each involving a certain level of performance tracking -- so there's plenty of feedback available to teachers on student progress, effort, accuracy and time spent.

1. ASSIGNMENTS

On SentenceBuilders you can set assignments based on any resource, whether an "SB premium" resource (created by the SentenceBuilders team for the website), or a "community" resource (created by our users).

Assignments can be "pre-defined" or "DIY"...

Read more »

Very often the direct translation of chunks within a SentenceBuilder into English can produce L1 English sentences that are far from ideal.

Here's a German example:

In this example the English translation for the sentence (e.g. I ate ice cream) has been split across the first SB row so that it matches the German, as we would expect. In fact, though, the sentences generated by the SB are, for example:

Ich habe Eis gegessen >> I ice cream ate
Du hast Fußball gespielt >> You football played
Sie hat eine Tour gemacht >> She a tour did

This is logical and inevitable if the language is entered into the SB in this way and the sentences are not transformed.

So how can we improve on this?

Read more »

Inside the "Edit" tab of every class there is now (as of 28th March 2022) a "Manage teams" button. When you click this, you see a pop-up that looks something like the one in the image above.

This pop-up allows you to define teams for TEAM COMPETITIONS :)

When you go to set a Competition for your class, you'll now be asked to choose a "Competition mode", which means choosing between individuals or teams.

Here's how the competition teams settings work:

Read more »

Below you'll find a few "walk-through" videos in which I attempt to talk you through the process of converting a basic paper-based / column-based sentence builder into something that will work on SentenceBuilders.com, avoiding many of the pitfalls that are explained in detail in this blog post: "Creating [complex] interactive SentenceBuilder machines that work"

The video preview image for each video shows the finished SentenceBuilder. I've also included links to versions of the finished resources on the SentenceBuilders website (accessible by those who have a subscription).

French - Giving my name and age

The video:

The link to a similar finished resource:
https://www.sentencebuilders.com/resource/17

French - School subjects, likes and dislikes

The video:

The link to a similar finished resource:
https://www.sentencebuilders.com/resource/48

Spanish - Describing people - "ser" + adjectives (m/f/pl)

The video:

The link to a similar finished resource:
https://www.sentencebuilders.com/resource/68

Hope you find this useful :)