Cloze or Gap Fill Software or Services Help?

Apr 19, 2011

I've used Hot Potatoes for these types of exercises before, but wondered if anyone had discovered any great programs recently to create cloze/gapfill exercises. Along these same lines, is having multiple fill in the blanks within one screen on a Quizmaker quiz something that's ever been discussed?

P.S. I had to turn compatability on in Internet Explorer 9 to post to this forum. May just be a hiccup on my end, but thought I'd mention it.

Todd

25 Replies
Jeanette Brooks

Hi there Todd,

I haven't used Hot Potatoes before, but regarding your question about multiple fill-in-the-blanks, maybe one or more of the following ideas work for what you have in mind?

Jeanette Brooks

Hi Gonzalo - you could take a look at this other discussion for an idea & source file regarding how to create cloze-style questions in Storyline - maybe that would help you create the type of exercise you're wanting? Storyline has a lot of flexiblity for building all sorts of different learning experiences, so if that's not quite what you're looking for, feel free to share your needs and maybe we could come up with a different approach!

Regarding your question about embedding Hot Potatoes in Storyline... I'm not very familiar with that tool because I haven't used it before, but if you can export your Hot Potatoes content as a Flash interaction or place the content on an html page, you could certainly embed that in Storyline. If you create a Flash file, you can embed the Flash file like this, and if you place the Hot Potatoes content on an html page, you could add it to Storyline as a web object.

Gonzalo Rosetti

Jeanette Brooks said:

Hi Gonzalo - you could take a look at this other discussion for an idea & source file regarding how to create cloze-style questions in Storyline - maybe that would help you create the type of exercise you're wanting? Storyline has a lot of flexiblity for building all sorts of different learning experiences, so if that's not quite what you're looking for, feel free to share your needs and maybe we could come up with a different approach!

Regarding your question about embedding Hot Potatoes in Storyline... I'm not very familiar with that tool because I haven't used it before, but if you can export your Hot Potatoes content as a Flash interaction or place the content on an html page, you could certainly embed that in Storyline. If you create a Flash file, you can embed the Flash file like this, and if you place the Hot Potatoes content on an html page, you could add it to Storyline as a web object.


Thank you Jeanette!

Is there a way to create the same kind of cloze but in which the student has to complete the gaps with written text?

In language learning, we make a distinction between recognition and production. In the same fashion, although the gapped-text is the same, drag&drop and fill in the blanks are not.

Cheers

Gonzalo Rosetti

Karen Loftus said:

I created something that cannot be scored, but once you get to the 2nd interaction it also affords the same outcome you might be looking for. 

In the meantime, I'm not familair with Hot Potato.  I'm going to look into it! -k


Thank you Karen for your post, I couldn't see the link, though.

I have just mentioned Hot Potatoes because it has been in the market for some years now, it's free and wide spread among language teachers in my country. It is far from being professional or good-looking. However, you can get a multiple-gapped text in which each gap is considered a response ... and all done with a couple of clicks!

Jeanette Brooks

@Gonzalo - It would be great if you could share a feature request with our dev team regarding what you would like to see for question-building tools. Feature requests from the community are a big factor in determining the direction of future enhancements. Thanks so much!

@Karen - Looks like you attached just the story.html file of a published course... might you have a link to the content? (Or if not, maybe you could just attach the story file?)

Gonzalo Rosetti

@Karen,

Thank you very much for your contribution; it can give me time until the Storyline people work on this feature we are asking for!

@Jeanette,

I have been trying to send my request but I got this message every time: We are having trouble posting your request. Please try again in a bit. The bit has been quite long! It's weird because posts are answered really fast!

My feature request reads:

We would like to create drag & drop, choose from a menu and fill in the blanks cloze exercises with several gaps in a paragraph; in which each gap is considered a unique response; and therefore it counts for in the Result slide.

After submitting, the students may go back to the gapped paragraph and work on the gaps s/he got incorrect.

I will try to put this request through tomorrow, hope the try in a bit is enough.

Cheers

Jeanette Brooks

@Karen - Really nice example, thanks for sharing that! Using multiple choice questions for the assessment is a simple & elegant solution!

@Gonzalo - I apologize for the trouble with the feature request form! I'm seeing the same issue. I reported it to the team and I expect we'll have things working again soon. I will let you know as soon as I find out more. Thanks for your patience!

Jeanette Brooks

Thanks again for your patience Gonzalo - I just now submitted your feature request on your behalf. Looks like there was a little glitch with the form's ability to accept special characters (such as "&") in the field text... fix is in progress right now so that it doesn't impact future feature requests. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention!

Jeanette Brooks

Hi Donal,

Right now there isn't a specific cloze-style question type in Storyline, but this previous forum post might help you achieve what you want. Thought we don't share info about future enhancements or updates prior to their release, our development team definitely welcomes feature requests, so I invite you to share your needs via our feature request page so that our dev team's aware of what improvements/enhancements you'd like to see. Thank you!

Jeanette Brooks

@Nick - Yes, you could certainly use variables and triggers to accomplish partial scoring, but it does require a bit more work, because you have to create the logic yourself, with variables and triggers. Here's an example of how that could be done:

https://jeanette.viewscreencasts.com/5f7e27c887be2c6682c563fae01ee4bb

And I've attached the source file in case you'd like to take a look. Hope that helps.

Jeanette Brooks

Nice, Nick! Thanks for sharing those examples! Love to see what people come up with, and I like the alternate version you designed (where each blank is actually a separate but similar-looking slide). Really appreciate you posting your ideas here - I'm bookmarking this because I know it will help others. Have a great weekend!

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