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 or Netscape Navigator. 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 are viewing the page in Internet Explorer, hold the cursor over a corrected answer and 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. If the developer has indicated that the exercise is in a language other than English, a button bar with special characters for that language appears in the bottom center of the screen. You can insert one of these characters into the blank you are currently filling in by clicking on the button that displays that character. You must then click again in the blank to continue entering your answer. 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 for WebPractest©, (For languages which use a non-Latin alphabet writing system, follow these instructions.) Write an HTML document, using whatever program you normally use for this purpose. You can incorporate text, images (including animated images), background colors or images, links to sound and video files and most formatting and layout capabilities provided by the HTML specification. Within the text, mark answers to be converted into blanks by surrounding each one with vertical bar characters as shown |here|. You can include alternate answers by placing a "^" character 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 page as filename.htm, with filename being any name you choose (no blanks, however). Now things become a bit more complicated. In order for WebPractest© to display your exercise, you need to convert this document. To do this, View the page source of your HTML document (e.g., in Microsoft Frontpage by clicking on the HTML tab at the bottom of the editing window). Select all of the text and HTML markers. (Ctrl-A) Copy the selection to the clipboard. (Ctrl-C) Click here (or here for Unicode conversion) 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 (http://www.wm.edu/CAS/modlang/gasmit/webpractest/convertunicode.html for Unicode conversion) 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 6. (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) Paste this text (Ctrl-V) into a program, (e.g., Wordpad or Notepad in Windows) which can save text as a plain text file with no formatting codes. (In Microsoft Frontpage, you can simply replace the HTML code you copied in step 6 by pasting the converted code into the selected HTML display.) Save this new code as filename.html, with filename being the same name you gave the filename.htm document in step 3. If you are using Wordpad or another wordprocessing program that normally saves files in its own format, be sure to direct the program to save the file as a plain text document. 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. If they are viewing the exercise in Netscape Navigator, in order to send an email report of the results from the exercise, students must also have filled in the information required by Netscape in the Edit > Preferences> Mail & Newsgroups > Identity (and Mail Servers) blanks. 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.