Thomas' Work Space

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. 

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).

Problem: A Student that took the French Respondus Lockdown browser on PC 43, when playing to listening comprehension files,  had no audio on her headset (except for her microphone input was played back for her. The test is single attempt only, and lockdown browser prevents us from troubleshooting.

Cause: Master volume for Wave and SW Synth on lrcroomcoed433b back to 0, like so:

Workaround: plug in one of the black headsets (USB) temporarily (plugging in another brown headset did not resolve the issue).

Solution: None currently: even when the Respondus lockdown browser is not running, Deepfreeze will not allow making changes, and changes in the current user profile will not affect users whose profiels gets created upon login (which is all student users). Longterm: Don’t try to run identical software images on different hardware configurations. Not as longterm: Autoit FTW?

1. You can combine
   1. a Model/Question video, uploaded by the teacher as a video resource
   2. with an Imitation/Response video captured by the student.
   3. 
2. Cons:
1. When viewing the teacher upload video models/questions, the student has to alternate between pause/play (which are not even on the same button).
2. Student does not have to also handle pausing/restarting the video recording, but that may be another con: The student cannot pause her video, so the grader will have to skip over pauses in his recording.
3. Pros: Looks like a video recording can peacefully coexist with a  simultaneous video playback (XP, IE8): 

1. On the listening stations, if you have the headsets plugged into the connectors on the rear of the computer, and hear no sound, you may have the volume set to too low. 
2. Go to (1) control panel, (2) icon:sound, (3) tab:audio, (4)button:volume
3. in the mixer dialogue, (6) menu:options, make sure that all the (6) volume slider controls are checked, i.e. shown, click “OK”.
4. Move the volume sliders up for WAVE and SW SYNTH

Go to  Google translate and do like so. Useful for learning, as well as typing when teaching.

1. The first screencast example uses insert tones and a gut amount of pause, for an interpreting exercise, into an authentic German political speech
   1. 1:00 search for a break (button: play/stop  - pause prevents edits)
   2. 1:05 move the cursor to the break (mouse left-click on timeline)
   3. 1:20 insert a pause (menu:Generate / Silence )
   4. 1:25 zoom in (button:magnifying glass, CTRL + mouse scroll wheel)
   5. 1:45 generate a tone (menu:Generate / Noise), change the duration
   6. 2:10 do not replace the selection
   7. 2:20 use undo, just like in MS-word and other programs
   8. 2:30 move the cursor to the start of the selection (mouse left-click on timeline)
   9. 2:40 generate a tone (menu:Generate / Noise)
   10. don’t forget to review results before distributing to students
2. the second screencast example, of post-editing a questions/response exercise in ESL, takes the amount of pause inserted from the recorded teacher instruction for the student, and uses copy/paste to speed things up even more.
3. You can also only insert tones and not pauses, as in the 3rd screencast, and allow the students flexible pause lengths, if you can rely on the Sanako Student recorder Voice insert. Or if you must, let students use audacity for recording also, and have them learn how to move the recording cursor around manually, and throw away the source track.

1. One of the Sanako Student player’s useful features  geared toward language learning activities, is that it can save the teacher the time and effort for inserting pauses into their audio recordings,  so that students can record responses into them.
   1. Meaning the teacher can just press the red speak button and record through the entire file in one sitting.
   2. The teacher can still help students finding their way around the file, especially where to insert their own audio recording responses, by adding aural cues.
      1. This can be done in minimal time: I once saw a teacher use a bicycle bell – and why not, if it saves time.
      2. A spoken instruction “Respond”/”Answer in 10 seconds” is not more difficult to spot (unless only the voice graph is being browsed) and might be even better.
      3. If you have spare time: 
         1. You can post-edit the file with audacity, generating and inserting sinus tones.
         2. You can use the Sanako player to insert bookmarks instead of cues.
2. As long as students have been instructed to how to use voice insert recording mode with the Sanako student recorder.
   1. This is for self access of students to teacher recorded files – be it during class or homework.
   2. If you want to record students under exam conditions, a similar insert recording feature is available within the activity: Model imitation, but not with a pre-recorded file, only when the live teacher is the program source students listen to for cues.