Archive

Archive for November, 2013

Faculty Workshop Fall 2013: Creating Mahara language learner portfolio pieces in the digital audio lab

2013/11/18 Leave a comment
    1. Thanks to all who came out to this workshop.
      1. You have already been emailed your portfolio pieces, like your students will be, by the LangLabEmailer.
      2. Converting your recordings to a file for Question/Response exams will take a little longer, let me know if/when you would like to use it.
    2. In addition, here are the workshop files:
      1. my slide handout as PDF with clickable links (includes “Can do”- Statements aligned with the Common European Reference Framework for language proficiency levels, which can help operationalizing your ePortfolio strategy)
      2. my slide deck embedded:
      3. my slide deck as a downloadable PowerPoint show: you can click through the animations at your own speed, view the animated GIFs, and listen (or jump over!) to my full presentation narration (both as of yet not supported in PowerPoint Web App)
      4. a screencast of the back stage view (Sanako tutor mostly), full HD resolution (big, but streaming), with complete uninterrupted (and unedited! please fast forward manually through the hands-on parts) audio . To facilitate your navigation, here is a table of contents :
        1. 0:00: Table of contents
        2. 2:30: Portfolio Pedagogy
        3. 13:47: Technical infrastructure: Moodle Mahara portfolio, Sanako, LangLabEmailer
          1. 17:47: Q&A
        4. 19:45: Option 1: presentation as screencast, examples from 1st-year Russian
        5. 34:50: Option 2: Free-form conversation audio, Examples from 2nd-year English  and 2nd-year Japanese
          1. 52:00: Q&A: Why a LangLabEmailer?
        6. 53:00: Option 3: question-response audio, examples from 4th-year Spanish.
Categories: announcements, audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, eportfolio, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, learning-usage-samples, multimedia-recording, Slideshows, Speaking, workshops Tags: , ,

How to control students’ access to internet and local apps with Sanako Study 1200

2013/11/18 Leave a comment

imageimage

Straight from the documentation, straight under your fingertips in the tutor interface, and most useful during assessments, but also for individual students that won’t stay on task.

Categories: assessments, audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-learning Tags: , ,

Exam integrity considerations during mock and proctored written exams in the LRC

2013/11/17 Leave a comment

The easiest way to hold a mock or proctor a written exam in the LRC is provide the students a printout of the exam. For larger classes preparing, and under some circumstances (writing impediment due to injury), providing the MS-Word file on a computer to the student would seem a more convenient solution.

However, the LRC prides itself in the large collection of MS-Office proofing tools it has installed and preconfigured – accessing which from within MS-Word could be construed as cheating during a writing exam. As a matter of fact, since MS-Word auto-detects language, under-waving of misspelled words and incorrect Grammar provides unsolicited and unavoidable extra help.

MS-Office proofing tools could be turned off by using a special MS-word template as the basis for the exam. Easier and quicker is using the SANAKO which can not only block internet access of the examined students, but also block use of entire applications like MS-Word.

Instead of in MS-Word, your students could write their responses in an application that is not part of the proofing tools infrastructure, like Notepad. Western language diacritics can easily be written  in any application on LRC PCs thanks to US-International keyboard layout, and non-Western characters even easier than on paper.

For full security, the best environment for exams we can offer remains Respondus lockdown browser, integrated with Moodle, but this requires converting the exam to into a Moodle quiz (which Respondus has tools to facilitate).  In certain cases, it might be easiest to create a “dummy” quiz with one long text input field, which your students could type everything in, without having access to any other resources (internet, proofing tools, chat, what not…). However, this quiz still would have to be  in your Moodle course so that your students can access access, and their results get put into your gradebook.

Outside of Moodle – if you do not want to go down the Respondus-path – , you can rely on the SANAKO homework collection feature and my langlabemailer to receive the results.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, English, French, lms, office-software, Writing Tags: , , , , , ,

UYork.ca phonetics website for learners of English

2013/11/17 Leave a comment

image

A very usable  Flash application on the IPA, covering the vowels, diacritics, diphthongs and triphthongs (displaying in linear animations – pictured above – how these more complex have to be altered over time during their production), and suprasegmentals.

 

Categories: audience-is-students, English, Speaking Tags: ,

How to type phonetic symbols on a computer

2013/11/16 2 comments
  1. Web-based On-screen-keyboards (point-and-click; low learning curve, but no fast typing speed; typing into a textbox from where you can copy/paste the result into other programs):
    1. http://westonruter.github.com/ipa-chart/keyboard/: Sounds are systematically organized. Suitable for learners, but also good for teacher demonstrations. image
    2. Partially based on keyboard shortcuts: http://www.ipatrainer.com/user/site/index.php?pageID=ipawriter: image
      1. http://ipa.typeit.org/full/: Other than the English version, the full version includes non-English sounds. The interface is optimized for fast typing (sorted by keyboard key). Presumably better for teachers using a screen projector as a whiteboard. image
      2. i2speak.com (reviewed here earlier): imageimage
      3. Update: Richard Ishida’s seems also impressive,
        1. image
        2. and you can use phonetics terminology to get characters selected, like so: image
  2. Windows-based:
    1. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/phonetics/: MS-Windows keyboard layout. May be good for even faster typing, if you can memorize the keyboard layout or add keyboard stickers (we unfortunately have too many languages vying for our hardware keyboard space already). Requires download & installation (may be added to the LRC keyboards during next imaging if we receive enough requests).
    2. http://staff.washington.edu/dmontero/IPACharmap/.
    3. http://sourceforge.net/projects/allchars/: If you are use to the ALT+### method of entering characters and are still on XP, this may be for you: You can generate your own keyboard shortcuts for phonetic characters.
    4. MS-Word:
      1. http://email.eva.mpg.de/~bibiko/downloads/uniqoder/uniqoder.html: Allows to select IPA-Symbols from a toolbar. Untested.
  3. There are also always X-Sampa and CXS and ASCII-IPA: ways of writing IPA in plain ASCII messages  – but yet another thing to teach novices in phonetics may be a bridge too far.
Categories: Arabic, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, learning-materials, Mandarin, Operating-system, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Spanish, Speaking, Swahili, websites, Yoruba Tags: ,

Use CTRL+TAB to switch between tabs in Chrome kiosk fullscreen mode

2013/11/15 Leave a comment
  1. On the reception desk, when you open the NINERMAIL after logging into 49erexpress, Chrome opens NINERMAIL in another full screen tab (which hides the 49erexpress tab) – unlike full screen Internet  Explorer, which opened NINERMAIL in a new window, but which we had to abandon with the introduction of offfice365. 
  2. The 49erepxress tab is hidden, but still there, and you can switch between full screen tabs wit hthe keyboard shortcut CTRL+TAB (hold CTRL and pressing TAB repeatedly will cycle through all open Chrome tabs).
  3. So when a client is finished with NINEMAIL (meeting request), have them not only log out of NINERMAIL, but also CTRL+TAB back to the 49erexpress tab to log them out of 49express (and browse from the result window to the Sign-in link to be ready for the next client).
  4. No need to close the NINERMAIL tab. Next time somebody logs in to 49erexpress tab, Chrome will recycle the previous NINERMAIL tab.
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, e-infrastructure, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Reception-desk, service-is-library, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, web-browsers Tags: , ,

How to compare two MS-Word documents for plagiarism detection

2013/11/14 2 comments
  1. You could start with the document properties
    1. some  students leave even the author and editing time in. However, author does not prove any wrong doing, a student may have borrowed a laptop, including its MS-word installation, to author a document and submit it
    2. It may  actually be more of an indicator of something illicit if document properties are empty.
    3. Students have likely used the “Document inspector”:
      1. (1): File / (2) Info, (3) view the properties (this document looks like it had its privacy information removed), you can use (4) to view even more. image
      2. to remove all privacy relevant information, like so: (5) unfold “check for issues”, (6) “inspect document””,
      3. in the window: “document inspector”, click image, you will be given the option to “remove all”personal information: image
    4. However, removing personal information can be perfectly legitimate, unless something else was assigned. And it does not help plagiarizers cover their tracks anyway, for…
  2. …there is the more substantial “compare” documents feature which (even though it was developed for the legal profession, as blackline) tracks what really counts: content changes.
    1. Access it form the ribbon’s “review” tab: image
    2. point the tool to your 2 documents: image
    3. make your life easier by selecting on the “review” tab to view only content changes  (formatting comparisons is noise for plagiarism detection): image
    4. You get a handy (here blurred, but still demonstrating the amount of similarity (=black), compared with changes (= blue),  between the 2 documents ) overview of (from the left)
      1. list of changes
      2. view of changes in a merged document (which you can save)
      3. original document
      4. secondary (likely plagiarized) document: compare documents-blurred
      5. The feature is nice, but only moderately intelligent (see the first match, I would obviously not count that as substantially different) and best used with discretion, to make it easier for a teacher to decide how likely it is that these similarities are accidental.
      6. In this instance, even if the teacher questions are not counted, it seems obvious that only minor alterations were made to the original document and many responses, including quite lengthy sentences, are entirely the same.
      7. While this *is* an instructional use, you can find happier instructional uses of MS-Word’s reviewing/tracking changes feature here.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, office-software, service-is-assessing, Writing Tags: , , , , ,

How to work around “Audio init failed” when recording in MyLanguageLab

2013/11/12 Leave a comment
  1. If you see this (or similar errors): image
  2. Try running the browser tune-up, image
    1. check for any new software versions (you can update Java, unfortunately only for your current session on this computer)
    2. finally run the voice recording setup wizard to check for results. image
  3. Suggest you do this before entering a homework assignment, since a timer may be keeping running while you troubleshoot
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, Glitches&Errors, multimedia-recording, textbooks Tags: , , ,