Hi Melissa,
Sorry to be so slow getting back to you, but I've been scrambling to fix all the "new" warnings and errors that are now being reported by the latest version of the Codechecker plugin I have just updated too. My plugins all work fine without the new fixes, but I don't like putting off things that will have to be fixed, sooner or later.
"feature to copy from Diary to Glossary "- Currently I do not have a feature to copy from Diary to Glossary. Might add it to my TODO list, especially if I can figure out how to select and transfer text that I want to go into another entry in a "Glossary of Common Errors." Students are always coming up with more and more shortcuts instead of spelling words correctly. e.g. The letter "u" for you. If you have a, Glossary of Common Errors in your course, linked to a Diary activity, the Diary can be set to automatically deduct points for any error in a students writing, that matches an entry in the Glossary.
"Or even as simple as "Write an animal report." Right now it would most
likely be just simple sentences, but then in 6 months, I might have them
go back to that entry and revise it. Then I could see, this is what
they wrote in September, and this is what they wrote in March." - I would recommend setting up automatic, time released, writing prompts for this. For instance, you could have, "Write an animal report", for this week, and, "Tell me about your favorite pet", next week, and so on each week. Each of these would be separate entries in the Diary and can even be rated separately with the overall rating for the Diary activity set to be the average rating for all the entries, the maximum rating, the minimum rating, etc. You can have prompts that tell them to revise a previous entry, as a new entry and thus keep all the versions separate. With each prompt, you can even change the automatic rating requirements. In other words, starting out you could require say five sentences,with just one paragraph. In a later prompt setup, you could change that to ten, or even more sentences, with more paragraphs, and require more words and characters, too.
With MooTyper, yes you can create new lessons, with as many exercises in each lesson, as you want. In fact, I will make the same offer I have made in the past, with users who want to make lessons in any language MooTyper supports. Send me what you have, and I will put them in lesson/exercise format ready for you to install on your server. My email address is in my profile which can be accessed by clicking on my name.
(wishful thinking) ... is there any way to turn off the typing test
part and have it just be a regular text editor? I want to display the
essay in English and then have the student translate it into Hebrew. - This will take some new programming in the MooTyper plugin. At one time, I had MooTyper almost ready for a release that would allow students to type dictated lessons. I never released it due to family health problems that that took all my time and stopped me from fixing the last few bugs, but I plan to get back to those changes soon, and the code for this could be worked out at the same time.