Archive
Archive for the ‘technology-domains-is-any’ Category
- 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.
- Go to your UNCC Google Apps (you have to log into UNC)
- Click on the Hard-drive-icon in the upper left
and on “files”, select a video file:
(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”..
- Wait until upload is finished,
and then, depending:
- 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
- inside the university community and
- outside of the university community:
- if you want to share the files with students in your course, there is a better way using Moodle Kaltura video upload;
- if you just want to play the file yourself (including to your students in the classroom), you are already done.
- Go to your files
and click on the file in the list to play the video: 
- 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).
- More help is available from the from the source
- How save files to your Google Docs
- How to play back video files in Google Docs
- There are many ways, including many that are easier than doing it manually in Audacity.
- MergeMP3 is a free and easy one that worked here:
- Although not well-publicized, Microsoft has uninstall tools available for VS.net 2008 and 2010 (English).
- This one did the job of stringing together the individual uninstallers nicely here:
- which beats doing it semi-manually as was explained here.
- I am trying to back up my system partition to external media. The 3rd party utility I boot into refuses to get to work since it sees inconsistencies on the partition.
- I schedule a chkdsk /f /r from Windows 7 which on restart runs without errors.
- Upon completion, however, Windows 7 fails to boot.
I go in the Startup Repair, but System Repair tells me it cannot fix my problem, but offers System Restore, which I try twice, to no avail.
Cryptic Error IDs 21200664, googling of which leads to nothing but MS System Engineers advising reimaging the system partition to the factory copy which would lose my 16 months worth of system customizations. - I feel I have other things to do to research the innards of Windows 7. Faintly I remember that fixmbr used to get me out of fixes with non-starting XP installations. It has been replaced by bootsect /nt60 <driveletter>, and on top of that, it responds with an apparent failure “since the volume could not be locked during the update” (actually deemed likely harmless, or use /force).
- Windows 7 starts up. (WTH?! Check disk versus the master boot record?!)
- Now, am I supposed to use a 3rd party or a Microsoft tool for my system partition backup?
- The capability of increasing the size of the student thumbnails, to be able to easily read the MS-Word writing student exercises template that I had programmed for Sanako Lab 300 was sorely missed in version 1 and 2 of the Sanako Study 1200 software.
-
In version 5, the capability to adjust the size has been added. In Tutor.exe, Go to Menu:
tools / preferences / thumbnail-size.
- Now, however, the 20 licensed student seats we have, already fill up the entire Teacher software’s screen estate since the software window cannot be spanned across our multi-monitor setup (The Sanako software seems to have this single-screen limitation built-in. Our unusual asymmetric (1280 and 1024) dual-monitor system may have something to do with it).
- Fortunately, in the newest version 5.42 for of Sanako Study, scrollbars appear and allow for panning the classroom layout window if there are more student icons/thumbnails than will fit on the screen.
- Upgrading to a screen with a larger screen resolution on the teacher computer would be even better.
- We hope to teach up to 30 students (class sizes seem to be constantly increasing, but the LRC also caters to visits of merged class sections which may be even larger than 30 students) in this large classroom setup:
- 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.
- Example of student in seat:
- We have observed these and similar damages regularly:
- 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
- Other requirements:
- 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.
- 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.
-
Solutions that we have
- already tried
- we have tied down the connectors with cable ties, but this has not worked sufficiently.
-
yet to try: is there a way
- to permanently attach computers in a different, safer position on the existing furniture?
- or to buy and install different furniture, computers seated under desks inaccessible for end user and locked?
- View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
- for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
- for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen
.
- Table of contents:
- Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
- Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
- Example of a Sanako Exam
- Loop induction
- creating an exam question recording
- by taking a Sanako exam as a student
- Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
- Grading Sanako oral exam student files
- Sanako voice insert for
- facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
- commenting on student responses during grading
- Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students
Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Arabic, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Intermediate, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Listening, Mandarin, multimedia-recording, Polish, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Russian, Screencasts, service-is-assessing, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Slideshows, Spanish, Speaking, Student-Computers, Swahili, training, Yoruba
Tags: audacity, authoring-tool, sanako-study-1200, student.exe
- Symptom: Audacity installation seems to complete without error, but attempting to start Audacity at the end of the installation process results in an error about bad environment with the above error code.
- For your reference: It is has been the missing Visual C++ redistributable installation here in the past on staff computers.
- Solution: Download and install the redistributable, then try restarting Audacity: It should start now.
- 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).
- 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).
- 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).
- 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:
- a click on the voice insert button in the center, whenever a user wants to speak during listening,
- and, from the top left menu, a “file”/ “save as” at the end.
- 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.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, multimedia-recording, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, service-is-assessing, Speaking, Student-Computers
Tags: audacity, grading, sanako-study-1200, student.exe, voice-insert
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
