Presenter-Computer | Thomas' Work Space

How a teacher can start up the Sanako Study 1200 for her class

2013/09/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

The Sanako Tutor software starts automatically, when you log in on the teacher station in the LRC:
Choose from “saved classes” what best you fits your class-size:
1. “Both halfs” (still not the full classroom, due to lack of licenses),
2. or, for small class sizes up to 16 computers, left or, preferably, right-half
Students also need to log in, and class is not ready for the Sanako until all students show up as Student icons like the right me:
1. We can get there faster once we
  1. upgrade to faster computers
  2. fix that they manually have to choose their client
  3. have at least the teacher already log in from her office
2. Hint: Log in yourself on a couple of student computers, to have them ready for latecomers (easier to deal with them being logged in as you than if the class has to wait for 5-10 minutes).
Then, choose how to display the students on your classroom map:
Finally,
1. during your class’ first visit can play them this screencast introduction into Sanako digital audio lab procedures
2. during later visits, you can refresh their knowledge of the basics in the digital audio lab with this slideshow.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, Presenter-Computer Tags: FAQs, sanako-study-1200

Japanese Language Tools (Proofing, dictionary, furigana) in the LRC MS-Office 2010 installation

2013/09/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

Even if not showing in MS-Word’s Language selector),

Even though there is no Japanese Thesaurus:
There are these tools:

In the Research pane, "English Assistance: Japanese" (in the ribbon / "Review" tab, Proofing section, press the , then ALT-Click a character to start a lookup:
a Japanese Consistency Checker:
Furigana:

To enable:
Result (in view / Web layout):
Incidentally, my blog has not quite made it into the TOP 5 of MSW-Office help content:

In addition, for Office, but also beyond, there are the tools of the MS-Office Input method editor (which include dictionary help when you write):

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Dictionaries, e-languages, Japanese, Listening-Stations, LRCRoomCoed434, office-software, Presenter-Computer, Reading, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, small-group-work-spaces, Student-Computers, Writing Tags: dictionaries, furigana, proofing-tools

Creating site-specifically useful learning content for the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary testing

2013/09/06 plagwitz Leave a comment

The usefulness of the Sanako Study 1200 new (from ver 6) vocabulary test activity hinges on the availability of site-specific vocabulary lists.
Sanako UK
1. seems aware of this and publishes vocabulary collections for textbooks and assessments commonly used in UK secondary education.
2. Sanako favors using the built-in format and saving it on the network share that is required for the Sanako study 1200.
3. Vocabulary tests are organized and can be discovered and browsed by file name only.
TBA: How could something similar be done in a US HE context? One would need:
1. establish which textbooks are (and will remain) in use?
2. are they e-books or would the material need digitization?
3. is the chapter vocabulary easily accessible as a list? Appendix glossaries encompass usually much more than the vocabulary required to study, so testing on these would quickly become frustrating
4. how best to reformat the materials (from turning into a table to handling linguistic metadata) for easy use with the Sanako vocabulary test?
5. how best to publish the material?
  1. to make it manageable for the updaters: crowdsourcing? copyright issuew?
  2. to make it easily selectable for the teacher: filter by integrated linguistic and course metadata?
6. Last not least: How to do all this economically? Taking into consideration teacher preference, enrollment, preexisting materials…?
  1. cost lowered if tabular lists of vocabulary already exists
  2. benefit is lowered if online flash card applications already exist.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, Presenter-Computer, projects, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Student-Computers, Vocabulary Tags: sanako-study-1200, vocabulary-test

First steps with the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary test activity

2013/09/06 plagwitz Leave a comment

Click to watch an example below of the new (in version 6, we are now on 7) activity:”Vocabulary Test” which allows you to administer during a face-top-face-class just exactly what its name says –
with these benefits:
1. needing no paper,
2. digital contents
  1. “can” and reuse past tests with ease
  2. TBA: can you swap target and source language?
3. blending automated and teacher feedback:
  1. the example I give below is based on what the teacher gave me: single words and very short idiomatic expression.
  2. You can use longer phrases (I prefer teaching and studying vocabulary in context), but then it become increasingly unlikely that the automated feedback is accurate (The automated feedback is limited to exact, up to case-insensitive string matching – now distance metrics).
  3. You can override the automated feedback before sending the results back to the student. This is somewhat practical, since the submitting is fast and not all students will finish at the same time, and if you provided students with the follow up activity after submission, The teacher overriding the feedback gets unpractical in large classes, so it is recommended restricting the test to short source/target language pairs. Also be clear about or minimize punctuation and, if required, the format of other metalinguistic information (gender, plural forms etc).
Issues:
1. not communicative, how can this be used or fitted in with other activities to make best use of a fully computerized face-to-face teaching environment?
2. simplistic autocorrecting algorithm (case-insensitive, otherwise exact, right or wrong, my way or the highway” string matching)
3. no tracking, no memory, personalization only via the other built-in Sanako personalization features (groups – to be left to the teacher to handle)
4. no learning content – at least no vocabulary learning materials usable out of the box for us (TBA).