Thomas' Work Space

1. Tired of burning, lugging around, inserting, ejecting, or forgetting, losing, scratching and replacing CD- and DVD- media, or hard- and thumb drives to handle your large multimedia files? Do you have internet and web browser where you need to access and play your files? Then you can use UNCC Google Apps  instead.
2. Go to your UNCC Google Apps (you have to log into UNC)
3. Click on the Hard-drive-icon in the upper left and on “files”, select a video file:
   1. (many formats and underlying codecs supported, including Flash, MOV, AVI, WMV, MPG. File size limits: currently “every user is given 1GB of free storage space for files” (not enough for much HD footage, but difficult to upload, and didn’t Google Drive just increase this limit to 5GB, or does this not carry over to Google Apps? Stay tuned for updates), click “Start upload”..
4. Wait until upload is finished, and then, depending:
   1. if you want to share the file with colleagues, click on “share” (appears after “cancel”) and fill out the dialogue. You can share your file both
      1. inside the university community and
   2. outside of the university community:
   3. if you want to share the files with students in your course, there is a better way using Moodle Kaltura video upload;
   4. if you just want to play the file yourself (including to your students in the classroom), you are already done.
   5. Go to your files and click on the file in the list to play the video:
   6. Also, you can always “get your file back” by “Download”: (and note you can also prevent users from downloading the files. This is useful if you only want to temporarily share it, but later revoke permissions).
5. More help is available from the  from the  source
   1. How save files to your Google Docs
   2. How to play back video files in Google Docs

1. This 100-second authoring tool screencast shows how to
1. preview the audio in the authoring tool,
2. add an image and
3. set its display time on the timeline,
1. If you make an error by assigning non-sensible times, the authoring tool helps you by flagging it red:



4. save (save frequently, on my Windows-XP SP3 machine, the image display within the authoring tool caused frequent BSODs, seemed video-driver-related).
2. View results (application during a class) here.

1. This exam file has been authored with the Sanako Study 1200 TBA:authoring tool. It is displayed from  the Sanako tutor application:
   1. images on a projection screen connected to the teacher computer,
   2. aural portion through the tutor-controlled Sanako student player and headsets. 
2. To protect the integrity and allow for reuse of the exam, only the initial instruction, example and collection of the results of an exam with visual cues are shown in this screencast.

The Foreign Service Institute language learning materials  – consisting of scanned documents and digitized audio of multiple courses per language – were still a heavily-advertised resource when I visited the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 2006.

It is nice to see these resources be made available for free. It is also nice to see the progress that has been made not only in technological adaptation of textbook learning materials since these materials were made available (post WW II?).

This, however, comes at a cost. If you shun it, and do not take a course that works which requires (and entitles you to the use of) a textbook, here are easily accessibleviewable learning materials for a large set of languages, including many LCTL: Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Czech, Finnish, French, Fula, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kirundi, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Lingala, Luganda, Moré, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, Yoruba.

The Forums , however seem to indicate that not too many still use these options. The transformation into a (technologically superficially) more modern format here is limited to very few languages and courses (and crashed my web browser).

1. Wish my Latin teacher at home would have had such a nice tool when he analyzed the “Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum / unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe / quem dixere chaos”, he had only me:
2. 
3. Now how could such exercise creation made more automated by having it accept the output of NLP tools like Treetagger?

1. This first-year German textbook comes with a Companion Website with free online exercises, organized by chapter, on the publisher’s website (different from the Quia.com –based workbook and lab manual exercises).
2. From the instructor guide: “The Companion Website is a robust online resource designed to give students a chance to practice and further explore the vocabulary, structures, and cultural themes introduced in the text. For each chapter, students will find self-grading practice exercises on vocabulary and grammar topics as well as Web-based reading and writing activities. Web links to carefully selected sites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, and South Tyrol (Italy), accompanied by interesting activities, provide additional interaction with the cultures of these German-speaking areas of Europe. Also available on the Website are the audio components of the Student Text and the SAM, as well as an interactive vocabulary flashcards tool. ”
3. These exercises include vocabulary practice, even flash cards.
4. The auto-correction feature provides:
1. some useful feedback for further study,  
2. summary grades
3. and an email to teacher function that should facilitate Syllabus integration of this useful resource:  

1. Enables easy exercise creation:
2. Resides on S:\coas\lcs\labs\lrctest\templates\Teacher.pot;
3. Requires MS-PowerPoint 2010, as installed on the teacher computer in LRCRoomCoed434.
4. Training videos are available for download here (requires Windows Media Player on Windows, as installed in the LRCRoomCoed434).
1. powerpoint_template_overview_default_slide.wmv
2. powerpoint_template_sequential_slides.wmv
3. powerpoint_template_interactive_slides.wmv
5. Usage samples available on request from
1. German Beginners,
2. Intermediate 
3. and Advanced Classes.

1. Go to http://showroom.daedalus.es/es/tecnologias-de-la-lengua/phonetictrans/phonetictrans.php, enter your text, select your phonetic symbol set:
2. 
3. Unlike with the Portuguese help, there is no text-to-speech option here.

1. Note the important update in red below.
2. This has been tested at post date with Firefox. ereserves seems to be not compatible with Internet Explorer 8: i
3. On the Library home page, from the top menu: "Research & Course Help", choose menu item: “Course Reserves” (or, if this menu changes again, I have a hunch that deeplinking may be more stable: http://library.uncc.edu/caos/coursereserve,  what’s in a URL…),
4. sign in with your Ninernet ID, 
5. enter search term
   1. select from the dropdown “search by name”, an enter part of your course name in the textbox,
   2. or click on tab:”Course Reserves Pages by Instructor”, and from the dropdown, select your instructor,
6. click search,
7. then select your course from the results grid.
8.  
9. Enter the password, which has been given to your by your instructor.
10. 
11. In the results grid, click on the desired chapter and tracks. Note: You need to disable your web browser”s “popup blocker”.  
12. In the popup window, click on link: “More information”,
13. when offered, , like in this screenshot:
15. you cannot save the file,  or rather: only a text file with links to the audio which you cannot play, like rtsp://dlib4.uncc.edu:554/e_reserves/CD1bonneforme12-16.rm). That is by design. 
16. Instead of trying to save, select to “open” the file. You need have a streaming audio playing software installed, like Real Player or the open source VLC-Player.
17. instead of VLC, as offered by default, like so :
18.  choose “Open with”, “Other”, pick “RealPlayer” from the list, like so:
19. Here is a more on what does not work with ereserves. The only combination I could get to work with eReserves streaming audio is  – see resulting screencast (requires Windows Media Player) of streaming a long file successfully  – is RealPlayer 14, Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP3, and that only after resetting the Winsock catalog which I can do for the entire LRC only nownext time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.

1. Need to get up to speed with SDL technologies like Trados or MultiTerm in our translation programs, or recapitulate what you learnt for a job interview? We have recommended SDL’s online training archive before.
2. Here are some highlights form their archive for our purposes:
   1. Translators’ Introduction to SDL Trados Studio 2009: Discover the key features and benefits of SDL Trados Studio 2009 for translators.
   2. A sneak peek at SDL Trados Studio 2011: Take a sneak peek at some of the new features in SDL Trados Studio 2011 before it is released this Autumn.
   3. Discover SDL Trados Studio 2009: Learn more about translation memory technology to help your translation projects get completed faster than ever before!
   4. SDL MultiTerm 2009 for Beginners: Join us for an overview of SDL MultiTerm 2009, the latest terminology management version.
   5. Introducing SDL Passolo 2011: Discover the exciting new features within this latest release of SDL Passolo.
3. To view these webcasts, you will need their player.