December | 2012 | Thomas' Work Space

SkyDrive Embedding

2012/12/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Excel: tab:File/

Categories: e-infrastructure Tags: MS-OneDrive, wordpress

How teachers prepare files for oral exam with Sanako Study 1200

2012/12/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

For an oral exam with visual cues (example), make a PowerPoint slideshow by
1. finding images, e.g. online
  1. (e.g using Google image search,
    1. and optionally advanced search,
      1. and optionally filtering by clip art.
2. saving found images to a local folder (e.g. “my documents”),
3. using them with PowerPoint’s PhotoAlbum feature
4. saving the result as [your username]_[your class####]_oral-exam##.pptx.
For an oral exam with aural cues,
1. if you do not have the Sanako student recorder installed on your PC yet,
  1. Follow the instructions here to install it for use in your office (or even at home – make sure you have access to the network share with the recordings if you want give aural feedback with insert recording)
  2. or come to the LRC to record where the Sanako is set up be default;
2. fill out our oral exam MS-Word template (sample question included) from here (use the lower right menu download button).
3. Start the Sanako student recorder (in the LRC or on your own computer – if in need, you can borrow one of headsets in this this list),
  1. press the red record-button in the center right, as shown here and
  2. read out the MS-word template, row by row, that you just filled out.
  3. Once done, press the blue stop button.
  4. Go to Menu: file / save as/ [your username]_[your class####]_oral-exam##.mp3.
Normally (it is still being worked on),
1. you could save all files in a special Sanako folder visible on the desktop of your office PC,
2. from which I, as soon as you let me know about the files, can pick them up in my office to finalize them for delivery in the LRC and
3. from which you can pick up the final version in the classroom to when administering the exam in the Sanako lab.
Questions remain? Come to the LRC reception desk during regular business hours with this blog post to be walked through this step-by-step.

Categories: e-languages, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, service-is-assessing, service-is-learning-materials-creation, step-by-step-guides Tags: ms-powerpoint, MS-Word, sanako-study-1200

How to create a visual cue exam file using Insert Photo album in PowerPoint

2012/12/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Once you have found (e.g. with a Google advanced image search) your desired images and saved them in a folder, open PowerPoint (e.g. by clicking “start”/ “run”/ typing “powerpnt”, click “OK”) and do this:

Result: an easy displayable list of images (you may want to drag&drop the slide thumbnails on the left in to a different sequence if you did not get the sequence right in the above “PhotoAlbum” dialogue:

Categories: assessments, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: ms-powerpoint

How to find clip art for learning material creation with Google’s Advanced Image Search

2012/12/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Once you made it to http://images.google.com, click on the “options” button in the upper right and choose “Advanced search”:

One of the useful options for learning material creation is restricting search to “clip art”, like in the screenshot below:

The results in many cases are more different – and useful – than in this example:

So give it a try, and also let us know in the comments what other advanced image search options you like to use in your learning material creation.

Categories: Pictures, service-is-documenting, service-is-learning-materials-creation, websites Tags: google, pictures

Overview of MS natural language support on Windows Vista+7/Office 2007, 2010

2012/12/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

Snapshot summer 2012 in conjunction with our language center upgrade to Windows7 and Office 2010. Click here for larger version.

Categories: all-languages, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, e-languages, Listening, office-software, Operating-system, Reading, software, Speaking, Spreadsheets, Writing Tags: 2010, foreign-language-character-input, language-interface-packs, ms-office, ms-windows-7, MS-Windows-Vista, screentips

Software to be installed in LRC image

2012/12/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

Click bottom right menu for large version:

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, Spreadsheets

The LRC writing input methods (“keyboards”) are not configured right

2012/12/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

In intl.cpl, we do not want keyboards installed for western and central-European (= characters a-z, merely altered by diacritics) languages, including US. We type these languages, including US-English, with the us-international keyboard extended 2.1, which has to be set as default, and that US-English extended 2.1gets checked as the keyboard for all western languages ("show more"). The regular US keyboard gets removed/made invisible to the user, and with any reasonably recent version of MS Sysprep tools, that is no problem anymore.
For non-Western languages, the built-in windows keyboards should be "checked", and also the alternate input that we had to download and install methods need to be "checked" under their languages: MS Maren, Google input methods nee to be enabled (checked): e.g. Farsi is not enabled (checked).