Thomas' Work Space

1. Here is a 2.5 minute screencast showing off the different ways how you can view your students’ screens using the Sanako Study 1200, .
2. from smallest to biggest, all accessible form the button:”screensharing”
   1. first thumbnails
   2. then thumbnails in extra window
   3. finally autoscan 
3. There will always be tradeoff on the teacher computer between size of individual student screen and overview over class.
   1. for as long as the teacher screen resolution is nowhere near the combined sizes of the student screen resolution;
   2. having the same screen resolution is also desirable, for projecting the teacher screen to the students; multi-monitor teacher stations are a nice compromise.
4. However, as you can see in the screencast, there a number of nice options that make switching between large size and overview (drilling in and moving back out) easy.
   1. The newer versions of the Sanako (here 5.2) allow you to choose many different student screen sizes.
   2. The newest version of the Sanako (5.4) also allows to fit many students screens on a teacher screen by implementing by letting the teacher scroll through the classroom layout).

Receded computer screens would save us having to rename the LRC  learning environment from “face-to-face” to “face-hidden-behind-screen-from-face”, and are especially good for communicative language class activities that are not computer-mediated, but only –aided. Receded screens also provide pretty good privacy, and are essential for written exam integrity.

… and sent us a thick envelope chock-full of these very sweet handwritten thank-you notes.

I have twin nieces their age, so I know that it can take a bit to get them to write these notes (I am looking at you, Miss M…! ).

The little man on the screen they mention, that can talk in tongues is the Microsoft-Deskbot, and the headphones they mention were connected to a Sanako Study 1200 digital audio lab.

I hope we can upgrade all this to Windows 7 this summer, and that the Language Academy will be back next spring to admire it all…

		LRC intrigues Language Learners VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

1. Problem: Rear connectors of computers get disconnected or even damaged. Input  (keyboard, mouse, microphone) and output devices (headset) get disconnected connected and therefore fails to work. Damaged equipment needs to be ordered and replaced, at considerable cost of time and money ($TBA per Sanako cable). It is too time-consuming to test equipment functionality (30 headsets and mice and keyboards) before each assessments and exam.
2. Example of student in seat:
3. We have observed these and similar damages regularly: 
   1. 
   2. 
   3. Cause: Our language lab computer desks and rows are too narrow, for individual student sitting in front of the computer, not to mention classes moving in and out of their seats
   4. Other requirements:
      1. We need to have equipment plugged in the rear connectors of the computer and cable-tied to prevent students from trying to adjust or “fix” computers by re-plugging the equipment (often improperly, making them fail to work), and also because there is limited desk surface in front of the computers, given keyboard and mouse need to fit in front.
      2. For the functionality of the Sanako digital audio language lab system, we especially need to make sure,  that the headset is plugged in on the same USB port in all computers.

   5. Solutions that we have

      1. already tried
         1. we have tied down the connectors with cable ties, but this has not worked sufficiently.

      2. yet to try: is there a way

         1. to permanently attach computers in a different, safer position on the existing furniture?
         2. or to buy and install different furniture, computers seated under desks inaccessible for end user and locked?

1. View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
   1. for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
   2. for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen.
2. Table of contents:
   1. Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
   2. Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
   3. Example of a Sanako Exam
   4. Loop induction
   1. creating an exam question recording
   2. by taking a Sanako exam as a student
   5. Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
   6. Grading Sanako oral exam student files
      1. Sanako voice insert for
         1. facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
         2. commenting on student responses during grading
   7. Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students
3. 

Click to view or edit.

A 70-sec screencast:.

1. All other things equal (given a limited amount of time), teachers can provide more and better corrective feedback on student oral proficiency recordings if, during their grading, they could easily insert their own oral comments into the students’ recordings (delivered as MP3 files to teachers’ desktops after Sanako oral exams).
2. Both the Sanako Tutor and Student Player have a voice insert mode that is much easier and quicker to use than (albeit not free as) editing the student audio in Audacity (which we still recommend for bare-bone viewing/listening because of Audacity’s capability of loading and displaying multiple tracks simultaneously).
3. Fortunately, Sanako tutor/student player are available on the teacher/student station PCs in the LRC (the latter’s insert function is available when the PC connected to the running Sanako Tutor on the teacher station).
4. How easy and fast is it to use this? As you can see in this demo screencast on how to use Sanako voice insert to add spoken comments into your students’ Sanako oral exams, voice insert only requires:
1.  a click on the voice insert button in the center, whenever a user wants to speak during listening,
2. and, from the top left menu, a “file”/ “save as” at the end.
5. In a next step – not only during the grading process –, how easy is it to distribute student recordings made with Sanako to students? That is TBA:a different story.

1. View an 80-seconds screencast showing how a teacher can set up a student activity where students are only allowed to access on web site.
2. In this example, the website is a common dictionary: http://www.dict.cc which the student will be allowed to access during an exam (in lieu of a paper dictionary policy).
3. Never mind that the voiceover is partially in German – the video should be self-explanatory. If not, here is a written step-by-step on Sanako controlled webbrowsing.