Making Easy Writing Template Easier

IntelliTools Classroom Suite® ships a very popular errorless writing template, Easy Writing. While the finished activities are indeed very easy and fun for students, creating new activities with the template can be tricky unless you understand some of its quirks. This tip will explain some of these, and at the end there is a link to download a modified Easy Writing template that avoids two of these pitfalls entirely. To try out an activity built in this modified template, click here.

The instructions suggest that you put a picture into each button, give the button a name that is your sentence beginning, and also change a button action, Type text, to type in the sentence beginning. If you follow these instructions all is well, but sometimes you may not want a picture in the button. If you try using only the button name, then you will see that the phrase for that button is inserted twice! This is not a bug, and makes sense once you understand what is happening.

First, you need to be aware that the button name, the words you see on the button, are completely independent of the words typed by the action Type text. To prove this to yourself, go ahead and put a picture into the big blue beginning button. Note the button name. Then when you edit Type text, use different wording, and see what gets typed when you click the button.

For example, start the activity, choose Begin Sentence from the first toolbar, and then Control+click the big blue Begin sentence button that appears. Leave the button name as Begin sentence. Put in any picture. Edit Type text to say "these are the words that get typed by Type Text." Click Okay, and then click your button. You will see that the words are coming from what you put into Type Text, not the button name.

Now Control+click the Begin Sentence button again. Clear the picture out. Click Okay. Click the Begin sentence button again. This time you see the button name inserted (Begin sentence) followed by the words you put into the Type Text action (these are the words that get typed by Type Text) What's going on? A magic trick?

To solve the mystery, Control+click the button one more time. Look at the first action: Insert picture or name. Aha! When we had a picture in the button, it inserted the picture, since that is its first option. Then it typed what was in Type text, and all was correct. But with no picture in the button, it goes to its second option, insert name. It inserts the button name and follows with what is in Type text. If those phrases are the same, it appears to be typing the phrase twice. Otherwise, you can see it's getting the words from two different places.

Bottom line: Using pictures in the buttons saves a hassle. But if you do want words only in the buttons for the activity, be sure you put the exact phrase as the button name, and then REMOVE the Type Text action from the list.

When you click Finish Activity, it is supposed to hide the authoring instructions so that they do not show up in the finished activity. This works for Spring is, Winter is, and I Like. It appears to work for the custom Begin sentence option, too-when the activity opens, the toolbar is properly hidden. However, in some shipping versions, you may find that when you click the big blue sentence beginning button, the authoring instructions reappear.

The culprit is one action in that button that ought not to be there. If the authoring instructions magically reappear, it means there is a Show Toolbar action in there that should not be. One option is to Control+click the button, look under Actions, and REMOVE the action that says Show Toolbar "Authoring instructions for blank". This is the remedy for activities you have already built with the template. Remove the offending action, and click Okay. Go up to edit and SAVE AS ACTIVITY. This is an important distinction: Save or Save as only puts the file into your workspace (My Work). Save as Activity puts it into the Activites section, so that it may be assigned to students.

To avoid having to do this with every activity you build, download the modified template by clicking the button at the bottom of the page. The erroneous action has already been removed.

This is a subtle quirk indeed, and only occurs in the Begin sentence button, not the sentence ending buttons. To see why this happens, Control+click the Begin sentence button, and look under Actions. If you look very closely at the default text in the Type text action, you will see that there is a SPACE at the end of the phrase, before the quotation marks. If that space is not typed, for some very technical reasons, the phrase is read only until it reaches the preceding space.

Why doesn't this happen in the sentence ending buttons? Again, for technical reasons, the following action, Type Return, somehow makes a space unnecessary. Notice that in the Begin Sentence button, the following action was not a Type action. This level of tech magic is far beyond the explanatory powers of the Learning Magic wizards!

However, while we cannot really tell you why it works this way, we can modify the template so that it does not happen anymore! We changed the actions in the Begin sentence button so that the next action was a Type action, in fact, we put in a Type Space action. With that arrangement, the sentence beginning always reads out completely. Download this modified template by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.