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How you can reuse your speech profile even on deepfrozen Language resource center computers

2012/08/15 Leave a comment
  1. “A [Windows Speech] profile is basically the collection of all settings and information about how to recognize your voice when using Windows Speech Recognition. Before changing the language used or letting other persons use Windows Speech Recognition it is best to create a new profile so that your current one will remain unaltered”.
  2. To be able reuse your effort training the computer to recognize your voice speaking in your study language – even though the LRC Windows 7 computers get reset when restarted -, you can backup, and later reload, your Speech Profile, preferably to your H:-drive.
    1. The Microsoft tool that allows you to do that has been put on WSRProfile.exe  desktop of the LRC Windows 7 PCs. I can copy these instructions directly from the Microsoft blog page:
  3. Double-click WSRProfile.exe to start the WSR Profile tool wizard. image
  4. To back up a speech profile using the WSR Profile tool, select Backup my speech profile.
    1. In the Select your Speech Profile dialog box, choose the speech profile you wish to back up and then click Next. image
    2. The wizard will prompt you for a filename and location to save the file. When you have entered this information, click Next. The WSR Profile tool wizard will start the backup process of the selected speech profile. image
    3. After the backup operation successfully finishes, click Close . image
  5. To restore a speech profile using the WSR Profile tool, select Restore my Speech Profile.
    1. On the File to Restore wizard page, click Browse and locate the backed up speech profile, and then click Next.
    2. Choose the speech profile you want to restore to.
      1. Select Use the current speech profile if you want to overwrite the current default speech profile.
      2. Select Create a new speech profile if you want to restore to a new speech profile. If you choose to restore to a new speech profile you will be prompted to provide a name for the new profile.
    3. After the restore operation successfully finishes, click Close.
Categories: audience-is-students, documentation, e-languages, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Operating-system, Spanish, Speaking Tags: ,

How students upload a video file to Moodle using Kaltura

2012/08/11 Leave a comment
  1. My closest related instruction so far has been for teachers, and the CTL also seems to have only instructions for how teachers upload videos for students. However, instructions for students are very similar, follow these steps:
  2. Open the kaltura assignment and click “Add video submission”:clip_image001
  3. Under left tab “Upload”, Click “Browse”:  clip_image002
  4. Browse to your video file (note the “files of type”allow only the upload of certain extensions) and  click “Open”: clip_image004
  5.   Click “Upload”clip_image005
  6. Wait for the upload to complete: clip_image006
  7.   Click “Next” :clip_image007
  8.   Add at least a “title”, and fix any errors you might get:  clip_image009
  9. Click “Next”: clip_image011
  10.   Click “Submit”: clip_image012
  11. Look for the success message: clip_image013
  12. You will have to wait for the video preview to become available:clip_image014
  13. If you refresh the page, the wait time gets updated, take the amount with a grain of salt.  Here I could already view… image
  14. Be aware that your video resolution will likely be downscaled (my 1280*1024 screencast in this example ended up pretty grainy).
Categories: audience-is-students, lms, multimedia-recording Tags: ,

SOLVED: How to record, in Adobe-Flash, video from my built-in iSight web camera on an 2010 iMac, combined with sound from an external cs100 PnP USB audio device

2012/07/13 Leave a comment
  1. Problem : Our new campus-wide Moodle Kaltura installation enables authentic oral proficiency examinations (we have no other Moodle Plugin for audio recordings). However, we still have no webcams on our mainstay PCs. We do have a few iMacs with built-in iSight webcams, but for providing students more privacy during their assignments in the language resource center, we need headphones. We have for spare some old headphones which we would like to use up, but they are analogue. These iMacs do not have an analog headset connector, only a line-in which would require a preamp. We have good sturdy USB headsets from Sanako, but these are too expensive to purchase for the iMacs that have no ways to secure them and little other specialized language learning use which we do not already get from the PCs (and more…).
  2. Workaround :
    1. Try an inexpensive USB audio device that has 3.5mm analog headset inputs.
    2. On my iMac 2010
    3. If in system preferences / sound/ I direct input and output to the USB PnP device
      1. test passes playing system sounds
    4. in audacity (if you CRANK the microphone sensitivity to the max!)
      1. recording test passes: The headset loudspeakers and micro work (not well, but they work, as a tab on the microphone indicate: there is static, and the recording volume is still softish, but better than the built in webcam microphone)
    5. in Kaltura,
      1. Flash only brings up the security dialogue (in Safari 5  and current Firefox ESR and Chrome) for allowing the  web application accessing to the built-in iSight web camera, but no options to choose a separate audio device
      2. However, if you control-click on Flash’s a video preview window for the  web camera, and click on “settings” (not “global settings”, although that is useful for always allowing access from certain URLs like your LMS) .
      3. CIMG0020
      4. Click on the microphone icon :
      5. CIMG0021
      6. Make sure the USB PnP  device is selected.
      7. CIMG0022
      8. You can bring up the settings dialogue, make sure the USB PnP device is chosen for audio and CRANK up the microphone input sensitivity! Then test the volume levels with the built-in volume meter (should  show lots of green bars when you speak. You may have to adjust the Califone headset microphone arm so that the microphone is very close in front of your mouth. ) Unlike in the picture, do not choose “reduce echo ”.
      9. CIMG0024
    6. Remaining
      1. Questions :
        1. Can this sensitivity setting be permanently stored for all users in the iMac software image, or do our students always have to adjust the microphone sensitivity?
        2. It remains to be seen whether this inexpensive and unsecurable device survives long when being used by our student population.
      2. Problem : The review video function of the Moodle Kaltura Flash video remains very temperamental on the Mac OS X (In my testing, one of the numerous problems we had with Moodle Kaltura on the iMacs popped up again: when starting to review the recording, the time counter goes, but the video stalls for  a few seconds – afterwards everything seems to play  fine, but this is enough to confuse the heck out of my users) . While we made another small step of progress towards  enabling Moodle Kaltura webcam recordings in the language resource center, it seems easier to just get web cameras for the PCs.
Categories: audience-is-students, documentation, e-languages, headphones, iMacs, lms, multimedia-recording, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, Speaking, web-browsers Tags: ,

UIowa.edu phonetics website for learners of English, German and Spanish

2012/07/10 Leave a comment

Hone your foreign language pronunciation skills by learning about phonetics: This oft-recommended University of Iowa phonetics website “contains animated libraries of the phonetic sounds (….)  for each consonant and vowel”, including “an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step description, and video-audio of the sound spoken in context”.

image

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, German, Intermediate, Spanish, Speaking, websites Tags:

How to transcribe English into phonetic alphabet using Phonetizer.com

2012/07/05 2 comments

image

Phonetizer transcribes into IPA. The vocabulary seems somewhat limited (45000 claimed) – English spelling variants do not help, although Phonetizer offers BE as an input option. I have not found a length limit for the transcription with an article from the current Economist of over 1000 words – should be plenty for most reading/recording assignments in the LRC. Easy as (web2)py. Smile  The web version is advertisement-based. The downloadable version is not free, so we cannot install it in the LRC, unfortunately.

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Dictionaries, Speaking, websites Tags: , ,

Google-Translate for phonetization?

2012/07/03 Leave a comment
        1. Google-Translate also offers some phonetic transliterations. You may have noticed this when attempting (remember, though, that it is for a reason that they link to “professional translation” services, and also invite anybody to amend the machine translation offered) to translate from English into other languages, image
        2. However, if you type or paste non-Romanized text into the source textbox, you also get the option button “read phonetically” (meaning transliterate to phonetic symbols or phonetize). image
        3. Limited use in the LRC: Few languages are supported.
          1. Only languages written in non-roman letters are offered. E.g. French or German are not deemed difficult enough (I know a few that would beg to differ Smile).image
          2. Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew are also not supported (root cause: right-to-left? Strangely these right-to-left-languages work in the TBA:Google transliterate IME which attempts to do roughly the opposite of phonetization): image
          3. Leaves: Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Russian. However, note finally that not a standard phonetic alphabet is being used either for these transcriptions.
Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Farsi, Greek (modern), Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Speaking, websites Tags: , , ,

Phonetic transcription websites

2012/07/03 Leave a comment

Computerized Language resource centers are supposed to work wonders improving SLA students’ pronunciation: Can’t computers analyze and visualize sound for us?

However, it turned out there seems to be a considerable “impedance mismatch” not only between computers analyzing and understanding the signal, but also between a computer voice graph and the capability of a language learner to process and improve pronunciation on the basis of it.

Voice graphs may have some use for tonal languages. But can you even tell from a voice graph of a letter  which sound is being produced?

Enter the traditional phonetic transcription that pre-computerized language learners remember from their paper dictionaries (provided you can teach your language learners phonetic symbol sets like the IPA). Not only are good online dictionaries perfectible capable of displaying phonetic symbol sets on the web (it’s all in Unicode nowadays). 

There are now experimental  programs that can automate the transcription of text into phonetic symbol sets for e.g. English, Portuguese or Spanish. The more advanced ones also come with text-to-speech.

You can provide your students with audio (or, text-to-speech capability provided) or text models and have them study the phonetic transcription, listen to the audio, and record their model imitation in the LRC. Maybe you will find that practice with recording and a phonetic transcription of the recorded text is more useful for your students’ pronunciation practice than a fancy voice graph.

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Dictionaries, Speaking Tags: ,

How to use the MS-Office Labs Community Clips Screen Capture Tool

2012/05/31 7 comments
  1. I seem to remember this initiative of having MS-Office users sharing tips and tricks using screencasts has been faded out – but the screen capture tool is still available, and it is not restricted to recording MS-Office applications.
  2. After download and install (here on Windows 7), image
  3. click the community clips system tray icon to easily start a screen capture: image
  4. Or access the context menu with advanced options: image
  5. including restricting recording to specific windows:
  6. image
  7. It does not start up very fast: image
  8. It flashes a frame around the recorded area.
  9. This is a test…
  10. clip_image001
  11. image
  12. image
  13. The preview starts automatically: image
  14.   About the file quality: image
  15. Both the save and the email option imagework, only the built-in upload fails, likely due to the demise of MS-Soapbox: image, but can be easily uploaded to other services, e.g. MS-SkyDrive
  16. Unfortunately, like the Windows Media Encoder clips, it won’t preview without download on SkyDrive – unlike the (newer) MS-PowerPoint 2010-recorded screencasts: image
  17. Still, the MS-Office Labs Community Clips Screen Capture Tool seems to have a friendlier interface than Windows Media Encoder, and is as free.
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, multimedia-recording, service-is-documenting, service-is-learning-materials-creation, software, Student-Computers Tags: