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. There are many ways, including many that are easier than doing it manually in Audacity.
2. MergeMP3 is a free and easy one that worked here:

1. DVDs are getting a bit long in the tooth, not to mention VHS, and can form a real obstacle or time-consuming distraction in an educational setting, from handling the media to finding compatible software and/or hardware players for the media.
2. Fortunately, there is a now a better way to make video clips available to students than uploading them to YouTube.com:
   1. university-supported,
   2. more compliant with copyright and fair use restrictions (which still apply)
   3. also requiring only a web browser (available on all campus computers, including teacher computers in classrooms, including those that have no (region-free) DVD-player installed)
   4. and a course enrolment. But access to a Moodle course can  now be considered a given, both for teachers and students.
3. Moodle Kaltura allows for easy
   1. uploading of a video file by the teacher
   2. viewing by the student (streamed – Flash required, not different from YouTube.com).
4. View a screencast example how easy it is with Moodle Kaltura to upload and playback a video clip from a movie DVD.
   1. Not different from YouTube.com, you still need to edit out the segment from the DVD that you want to show in your class,  uploading a full DVD I do not intend to test.
   2. From this example, you can also get an idea how long the server-side encode takes before the video an be streamed back to students: the short clip of a few minutes here starts playing back at 12:40. Naturally, a teacher would prepare their course, including all video uploads, before the term starts or possibly before the week starts, or, in extremis, before the class starts – in practice, only the – extremely unlikely – scenario where the teacher would try and upload the video during the class is not supported.

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. 

A 70-sec screencast:.

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.  Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. A librarian’s write-up that can also be very useful for Learning Centers that handle learning material media (but would it be possible to run this through MS-Word to “down-design” and add a table of contents instead?).
2. Notable:
1. “It is fair use to make digital copies of collection items that are likely to deteriorate, or that exist only in difficult-to-access formats, for purposes of preservation, and to make those copies available as surrogates for fragile or otherwise inaccessible materials. LIMITATIONS: Preservation copies should not be made when a fully equivalent digital copy is commercially available at a reasonable cost.  Libraries should not provide access to or circulate original and preservation copies simultaneously”.

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. objective:
   1. To facilitate lesson delivery and student interaction in our Language Resource Center I have programmed a VBA- and MS-Word- based cloze quiz template with batch creation based on a simple markup language and rich autocorrecting functions that use string metric algorithms (Damerau-Levenshtein). The template supports typical activities in the digital language lab: digital audio- and video-based  listening comprehensions, e.g. Quiz Template with Chanson Lyrics, and speaking and dialoguing activities for language learning or other examples): 
   2. Teachers can use them as exercise-generating engines: the templates allow copy/paste of their own exercises into this template. To also automatically create language teaching materials with the required markup in French, German, Italian and Spanish (mostly based on movie subtitles) for this template, I wrote a C#-program that applies an expanding library of regular expressions which can match typical language learner tasks:
      1. function words, e.g for Spanish Movie Subtitling Exercise Creation,
      2. affixes/infixes
         1. and lexical subsets taken from corpus linguistic research on word-frequency (SUBTLEX, Opensubtitles)).
   3. This template support the learner by strengthening learner autonomy and providing immediate corrective feedback and – in conjunction with the grouping facilities of the Center’s classroom management system infrastructure – allow for custom-tailored instruction based on the immediately available outcome of formative assessments, and also automated summative feedback:  
   4. A Spanish TA can provide meaningful vocabulary and grammar questions as input for cloze listening comprehension exercises that  I will create on the basis of subtitles  I have for Spanish movies being used in (= put on reserve for viewing in the LRC by) the Spanish program  consistent exercises that students can take while watching the movie in class adapted meaningfully to technical possibilities of template
   5. Screencasts Demos:
      1. making of template exercises
         1. manually marked up: Part II to minute 4, Part III
         2. alternatively, markup can be generated by regular expressions which we will try to develop:
      2. use of template exercises : Part II, from minute 4
         1. overview of sample exercises (German)
         2. sample application (exam setting)
      3. materials
         1. source texts:subtitle files for proof reading
         1. Amores Perros
         2. Pedro Almodovar – Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios
         3. Pedro Almodovar – Hable Con Ella

         2. ideas for exercise needs that fit into this cloze format

            1. grammar
               1. function words
               2. affixes
            2. vocabulary
               1. frequency-based wordlists from corpus linguistics
               2. word lists from current textbook

      4. Deliverables: combos of

         1. materials
         2. exercise ideas