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Archive for the ‘audience-is-students’ Category
Microsoft Contextual Translator
2011/11/14
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Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”
Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing
links, thesaurus
How students access language learning materials on the Library ereserves system
2011/11/11
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- Note the important update in red below.
- This has been tested at post date with Firefox. ereserves seems to be not compatible with Internet Explorer 8: i
- On the Library home page, from the top menu: “Research & Course Help”, choose menu item: “Course Reserves” (or, if this menu changes again, I have a hunch that deeplinking may be more stable: http://library.uncc.edu/caos/coursereserve, what’s in a URL…),
- sign in with your Ninernet ID,
- enter search term
- select from the dropdown “search by name”, an enter part of your course name in the textbox,
- or click on tab:”Course Reserves Pages by Instructor”, and from the dropdown, select your instructor,
- click search,
- then select your course from the results grid.
- Enter the password, which has been given to your by your instructor.
- In the results grid, click on the desired chapter and tracks. Note: You need to disable your web browser”s “popup blocker”.
- In the popup window, click on link: “More information”,
- when offered, , like in this screenshot:
- you cannot save the file, or rather: only a text file with links to the audio which you cannot play, like rtsp://dlib4.uncc.edu:554/e_reserves/CD1bonneforme12-16.rm). That is by design.
- Instead of trying to save, select to “open” the file. You need have a streaming audio playing software installed, like Real Player or the open source VLC-Player.
- instead of VLC, as offered by default, like so :
- choose “Open with”, “Other”, pick “RealPlayer” from the list, like so:
- Here is a more on what does not work with ereserves. The only combination I could get to work with eReserves streaming audio is – see resulting screencast (requires Windows Media Player) of streaming a long file successfully – is RealPlayer 14, Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP3, and that only after resetting the Winsock catalog which I can do for the entire LRC only nownext time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.
Location of the Language Resource Center (LRC) on the UNCC Campus Map
2011/11/01
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We are across from Student Union, in the COED building with Languages and Culture Studies (LCS), top floor – look for the banners on the wall.
Deutsche Welle ends her live German program streaming today
2011/10/29
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- Too bad:
- And in those last news: “The Chinese government demands reforms in the Euro-zone before providing financial help”.
- I remember a time when Deutsche Welle was available during family vacation only via short wave radio. Now, the on-demand offerings of the Deutsche Welle will be expanded. They are more useful for language learning than live streaming anyway.
Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, German, Media
dwelle, links, radio
Easy adding and viewing GeoTags with your phone camera
2011/10/27
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- “Open your camera app, go to “Settings” (sprocket), menu item: “Geotagging”, “On”:
- Turning the phone’s the GPS on is not absolutely necessary, as this indoor basement shot proves:
- but will likely increase the accuracy of the Geotag in your photo greatly:
- How to view depends on your photo viewer application, above examples are taken from the free Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Categories: assignments, audience-is-students, digital-humanities, GIS, phones
camera, geotags, google-android, gps, windows-live-photo-gallery
Sample of how students use the foreign language TTS (text-to-speech) in the LRC
2011/10/21
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Last week, I noticed this student in the LRC working on a speaking assignment in her SLA class. First, she wrote a draft of her presentation. She then had the Deskbot TTS wizard (in the lower right of her screen) read out the draft to her. She recorded her version, modeling after the Deskbot’s pronunciation. Then she had the Deskbot read out the draft again, to compare with her own recording.
Look for the little guy in the lower right corner of the screen with the cartoon bubble over his head.
I favor the use of the Deskbot TTS (a Windows XP technology) as an easily accessible speaking dictionary, including during face-to-face teaching, when students may otherwise be too shy to make an utterance because they are not sure about the pronunciation of a single word, or even ask the teacher to pronounce it for them. Prosodically, the deskbot TTS leaves many things to be desired. Let’s hope that Windows 7 will enable us to set up more advanced TTS support in the LRC.
How to use the online Portuguese pronunciation help to generate phonetic alphabet transcriptions and text-to-speech
2011/10/20
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- Go to http://www.co.it.pt/~labfala/g2p/
- Write or paste your text into the textbox:“Grafemas”
- Choose your preferred phonetic alphabet (IPA, SAMPA) and other options.
- Press button: “Converter” to see results.
- Press button: “Sintetizar” to hear results.
- Like so:
- Or click here to view a demo (requires Windows Media Player) with audio (download requires Windows Media Player). Our example was:
- Input: Tudo bem? É o jeitinho brasileiro. Oí, árbitro! Cadê o penalty? Não, não posso faze-lo.
- Output: tˈudu bɐ̃ĩ ˈɛ u ʒɐitˈiɲu bɾɐzilˈɐiɾu oˈi ˈaɾbitɾu kɐdˈe u pˈenalti nˈɐ̃ũ nˈɐ̃ũ pˈɔsu fˈazɘlu
How to make a screenshot of your computer screen
2011/10/18
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- You can look it up, or:
- on Windows, press the “PrintScr” key (upper right corner of your keyboard)
- on Mac OS X, Command+Shift+3.
- Then paste the clipboard into an application that can handle images and that you are familiar with (your best bet may be MS-Word).
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