SentenceBuilders subscriber Julia Morris has produced a REALLY USEFUL video user-guide for users of SentenceBuilders.com, which she has shared via her YouTube channel.

It is aimed at those users of the site who wish to use the authoring options to create their own SentenceBuilders (which, to be fair, is most of the teacher subscribers...)

Julia's guide deals with most aspects of creating your own resources, including:

• Clearing data to start a new resource
• Hints on adding content, including capitalization, etc.
• Using the various SB tools to add rows and columns, split and merge cells etc.
• Factors influencing SB design
• Colour-coding of SB cells
• Understanding "flow" (in-depth explanation with examples)
• Adding vertical columns to enable "flow"
• Excluding "impossible" routes / enforcing certain combinations (cell exclusions)
• Using the "SB routes / Cell combos" pop-up
• Using the Transformations pop-up
• Excluding certain words from gap-fills
• Introduction to vocab chunks and TTS transformations
• "Verify now"
• Uploading your resource

Here's the video. Enjoy!

Julia's video guide is a really good accompaniment to this (written) user-guide: "Creating [complex] interactive SentenceBuilder machines that work"

Hope you find this useful :o)

This post will give an overview of the new "complex" SentenceBuilder authoring page and talk you through some of the many considerations involved in designing and producing the perfect interactive SentenceBuilder.

SentenceBuilder Design

Before embarking on creating a resource -- and before you start working with the authoring tool -- it really is worth spending a bit of time thinking about the design and layout of your SentenceBuilder table. Maybe plan it out on a piece of paper. That's what I often do -- just a rough idea of the types of structures that I want an SB to focus on and how to fit these together.

It helps, of course, to have some idea of what the options and constraints are, otherwise you're just operating "blind" as it were. So definitely have a good read through this user guide. And you'll find that this design process is easier each time you do it. Practice makes perfect seem more achievable :)

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