Students WebPractest© was designed by Gary A. Smith to help developers of instructional materials create self-correcting exercises or tests for distribution on the Internet. Written in Javascript, the program processes HTML documents and displays the text and images contained in them, but substitutes fill-in forms for words that the developer has marked as items to be practiced or tested. The program works only with version 4.0 or higher of Internet Explorer. You enter your answers by clicking on the blanks in any order you wish and filling them in. At any time you can check the answers you have entered thus far by clicking on the "Check answers" button at the bottom of the screen. The program indicates correct answers by coloring them green , and incorrect answers by coloring them red . If you then click on an incorrect answer, the program shows the correct answer in yellow . You can easily see from this color coding which items you answered incorrectly and what the correct answer is, and therefore you can focus on learning them specifically. If you hold the cursor over a corrected answer, your incorrect answer will pop up next to it. The program shows the percentage of items answered correctly in the bottom left corner of the screen. By clicking on the "Send results" button at the bottom right of the screen, you can send a report on your exercise either to a default email address provided by the developer or to any address you type into a pop-up box that will appear after you click this button. This report will show the items you answered correctly, those you answered incorrectly with the answer you gave, and the sequence in which you filled in and checked your answers.

Developers To create exercises in Unicode for WebPractest©, Using a Unicode-compatible wordprocessor (e.g., Microsoft Word 2000), write a document as you normally would for other purposes. You can insert text, images (including animated images), background colors or images, links to sound and video files and all formatting and layout capabilities provided by the HTML specification for webpages. Within the text, mark answers to be converted into blanks by surrounding each one with vertical bar characters (entered by holding down the Shift key and pressing the key above the Enter key) as shown |here|. You can include alternate answers by placing a "^" character (entered by holding down the Shift key and pressing the 6 key on the top row) between them, as shown here: |Answer 1^Answer 2^Answer 3|. If the student responds with none of these answers, the program will show the first answer as the correct answer. You can create a text area for an open answer by inserting two vertical bars with nothing between them, as shown here ||. WebPractest will not check this answer for correctness, but will include it in a report sent by email. Save your document in HTML format as filename.htm, with filename being any name you choose (no blanks, however). (In Microsoft Word, you do this by choosing "Web Page" under "Save as type" in the "Save" dialog box. Now things become a bit more complicated. In order for WebPractest© to display your exercise, you need to convert this document. To do this, Open the document in Internet Explorer. View the source code of the HTML document by choosing View > Source on the menubar at the top of the window. This will display the source code in a Notepad window. Select all of the text and HTML markers. (Edit > Select All) Copy the selection to the clipboard. (Ctrl-C) Click here to open a page designed for converting the source code. If you are not viewing these instructions online, you will have to type the following address: http://www.wm.edu/CAS/modlang/gasmit/webpractest/convert.html into the Location field of your web browser. In the drop-down box at the top of the page, select the language of your exercise. If you want to provide a default email address to which students can send the results of their work, type that address into the blank provided. Click in the upper text area and then paste into it the text you copied in step 7. (Ctrl-V) Click on the "Convert" button between the text areas. This will initiate the conversion process. When the process is finished, the converted text will appear in the lower text area. If it is not already highlighted, drag through the text from the lower right to the upper left corner to highlight all of it. Copy it to the clipboard. (Ctrl-C) Return to the Notepad window and replace the entire text there with the converted code you copied in step 13. You can do this by selecting all of the text (if it is not already selected) and pasting (Ctrl-V) the converted code. Save this new code as filename.html, with filename being the same name you gave the filename.htm document in step 3. Be sure to save it in the same location where you saved the filename.htm document, so that you can easily find it. You now have two files associated with this exercise: filename.htm is the original file containing the source text for your exercise. filename.html is the document which contains Javascript and HTML code to activate your exercise. When you open it in your web browser, your exercise should appear with blanks inserted where you surrounded words with |vertical bars|. This is the file that students must access to do the exercise. The computer on which they are working must have an active connection to the Internet, to enable access to the WebPractest© program files. You may use WebPractest© free for any non-profit activity. Publishers who wish to include WebPractest© exercises as a supplement to their textbooks must contact me for development and royalty arrangements. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who creates exercises using WebPractest©, and I will post a link to those exercises on my "Examples" page linked at the top of this page. I hope thereby to provide a service to language learners around the world. If you need further assistance or have questions about the WebPractest© program, you may contact me by email at gasmit@wm.edu.