CloZure is an exceptional new online web application developed by Peter Shanks. Using this tool, you can create a cloze (fill-in-the-gap) online activity from a gazillion Wikipedia articles.
You can adjust the difficulty level of the clozes that are created, too. Students can complete the exercise online, or you can print it out and have students do it with pen and paper.
I think it’s amazing when a developer can come up with stuff like this — it almost seems like magic to me.
I’ve emailed Peter asking him if it’s even in the realm of possibility to incorporate the Simple English Wikipedia in CloZure. That would certainly make it more usable for Beginning and Early Intermediate English Language Learners, and younger native-English speakers. Wikipedia language is probably accessible to Intermediate speakers. But it might very well not be doable. I’ll let people know his response.
I’ve place the link on my website on Create Tests and Exercises.
Hi Larry,
thanks for the kind words, and for the excellent suggestion. I just downloaded a dump of the simple English version of wikipedia and I’ll be trying to put the information into cloZure over the next few days (if I can figure out how to import it and clean it up 🙂