Tonight's post looks at just one of many free online tools you can use to work with texts. Specifcally, this one highlights "Text Compare." It's pretty simple and somewhat easy to use. I know many teachers use tools like these, and they may have their favorite. If you know me outside of this blog, you might know that my favorite is Voyant Tools, which is worthy of its own full-length post. I'm sharing Text Compare because my students have found it to be useful and mostly hassle-free.
To start, it doesn't require a login. That's a plus when working with students. Sure, they can't save their work to the site. But for their purposes, a simple screen capture usually does the trick.
Speaking of screen captures, here's an example of what Text Compare can do:
As you can see, I entered two versions of a text. In this instance, I chose an embedded reading I created based on the 'Dies Natalis' story found on Keith Toda's blog. Maximas gratias, magister! The blue text highlights differences in both the words and punctuation, even getting into the spelling of the words! This is awesome for those of us teaching Latin because of the amount of inflection it has. It can help you catch little typos and can be especially instructive for students to 'see' those inflections when comparing two texts. Perhaps two students are comparing their timed writes with each other, or perhaps you've given them texts from two differing perspectives (first person v. third person). In my class recently, students were being asked to change a certain percentage of words in a story and comparing the original with their adapted text through this tool worked very well for them.
It also happens that putting this text in there showed me a mistake on my part - if you read closely in the first paragraph, you can see that the items on his wish list are different colors in the different versions! Yikes! If you adapt or customize texts with student-contributed details each year or for differing class periods, a quick pop into Text Compare can save you quite a bit.
The final thing I want to point out is the last paragraph in each version. Why are they completely highlighted in blue? Well, as best as I can tell the code thinks they are completely different even though in fact they are not. I'm guessing it has to do with the spacing I typed between the paragraphs? I quickly tried to troubleshoot it, but even when I entered just the last paragraph, it thought they were 100% different:
That just goes to show that this technology isn't perfect, and that anything you use is just a tool rather than a talisman. Perhaps a wise reader (you?) knows what is going on and can explain it to me. In any case, that's all I've got for this week. Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment