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I was in love with liveworksheets

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Juan José

Spain
07/28/2022
I fell in love with this site the same afternoon I discovered it. The menu options were so intuitive, everything was at hand, the help sections were unusually brief, clear and to the point, and I had never seen such simple and useful tutorials (and I have seen my share of websites). I learned 90% of what I know now, two years later, that first afternoon. I also created my first worksheet that day, and I have invested more time and effort on this site than on any other, except my own web page. My students also loved it from the first day: I have seen lazy students repeating exercises just in order to get full homework marks (they need to get 50% answers right), and I mean students who never used to do paper homework or care about their homework marks; I have seen good students deciding to repeat previous worksheets in order to practise before an exam; I have seen excellent students who got great results on the first try repeating worksheets just for the satisfaction of getting 100% or making sure they had understood a grammar point completely. Some of my students have even been doing worksheets during the summer, after the lessons and exams are over, just for the fun of it. And they weren't even games, most were just grammar exercises. Since around the 15th of March a new team has been managing liveworksheets. The first thing they did was mess it up in several ways, and despite repeated complaints in the forum and, for my own part, by email, they have neither fixed them not offered any explanations or reassurance to users. They include these: #1 Increased publicity cover some buttons. #2 Menu option: My workbooks / Assign to students. When assigning a workbook to a group of students, the groups appear in white over a grey background, slightly misaligned with the boxes to tick, and the boxes are too far from the groups' and students' names, which makes it really hard to be sure you are selecting the right one. #3 Menu option: My students / Assign workbooks. When assigning several workbooks to students, the workbook names and their boxes to tick are completely misaligned, it is nearly impossible to know what you are doing (see image 1). #4 The editor shows a different alignment of the background document and the boxes which you can see in both the previsualization screen and the finished worksheet. This misalignment is not very noticeable in the first page, but it increases with every new page, so that on long documents the last page can show a very noticeable difference. The only workarounds I have been able to find for some of these problems are: #1 Using CTRL - to change the screen resolution, making elements a bit smaller. #2 Using CTRL + to change the screen resolution, making elements much bigger, which makes the process more time-consuming. #3 Using the menu option My students, showing the whole list of students in one group, selecting each student individually and assigning them their workbook(s) one by one (see image 2). This is obviously terribly slow, but at least you can be sure that you are doing what you need to do. #4 Avoiding long worksheets, which is of course no solution for the ones you have already created or added to your workbooks. I no longer feel the love I used to for liveworksheets or for its management team, but the same as in human love relationships, once the period of "feeling" in love fades away, one can decide to continue loving out of sheer will. That's what I've decided to do, if only because I have invested so much on this site, but also because I think it can still become the best of its kind on the Internet, especially if the management team showed some will to improve things by leaving things as they were when they took over the site's management. If that's not technically possible, then here are a few suggestions: #1 Make sure publicity items do not cover any buttons. #2 Menu option: My workbooks / Assign to students. Change the font color of the groups from white to black, and align the list of groups and students as close as possible to the boxes that must be ticked. One easy solution is to place the boxes to the left of the group and students' names instead of to the right. #3 Menu option: My students / Assign workbooks. Fix the visualisation problem. Alternatively, when assigning workbooks to a whole group, use the same list of workbooks that is used when assigning one to an individual student (see image 2). #4 Fix the misalignment problem. This is a serious issue, as it affects thousands of worksheets that are more several pages long, and there is no way we can find an alternative procedure. One final request: please, show some consideration for the users that are asking for help with these technical problems in the forum and getting no official feedback. After over four months, we are still waiting for explanations about the reasons for these technical issues and reassurances about how, when, or at least whether they will be solved.
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kohai

Latvia
08/2/2022
The same experience, the same nostalgia, the same disappointment, the same concerns...
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Juan José

Spain
08/5/2022
Great to see you back, Kohai. You are so good at saying such a lot in just a few words!
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TeacherARG

Argentina
08/5/2022
And a week has gone by and we're still waiting. :( I couldn't agree more with you, kohai and JuanJose.
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kohai

Latvia
08/19/2022
One more suggestion to add: Please do sth about YouTube videos. None of those in my worksheets nor my Favourites works anymore. Thousands of worksheets have become useless. P.S. JuanJoseCC, I'm not back. I've always been here. I visit this site every day hoping to see good news, but unfortunately, in vain.
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Juan José

Spain
08/20/2022
YouTube videos seem to work OK again. Here's an example: https://www.liveworksheets.com/ti3082531xa
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kohai

Latvia
08/20/2022
OK, so it's just my computer. Possibly, because I use AdBlockers (even though I've had them for years and have changed nothing lately). I can play your and my videos in Incognito window (only, but at least!). Thank you for your reply, Juan Jose. It was helpful.
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Sonia Carroll

United Kingdom
10/8/2023

Hi, the worst change for me is adding students to groups, instead of sending invitations. We used to be able to add them by using a table we created the username and password. That's invaluable for low level students or students with literacy needs. That facility is gone. If you know how to do it, please share.

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