Archive

Archive for the ‘audience-is-any’ Category

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

2013/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. The usefulness of the Sanako Study 1200 new (from ver 6) vocabulary test activity hinges on the availability of site-specific vocabulary lists.
  2. 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.
  3. 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: ,

“I can haz all my online appointment and schedule information in one merged calendar in NINERMAIL?”

2013/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. Yes, you can! Overlay calendars, a much needed feature from Outlook Desktop (as we mentioned earlier) has finally made it into the web version of Outlook (in Office365 the migration of which from live@edu will be finished by the end off the month), as was announced today: “Users can have multiple calendars in a merged view.”
  2. Example: In Outlook Desktop (not available to students), you can not only add a calendar like, icsexport.ics to the right, but, if you click on the (1) little black arrow, add/merge icsexport.ics to the (2) already overlaid calendars on the left, which is much more usable if you need to aggregate content from different sources: moodle2outlook-calendar
  3. And now also in OFFICE365 NINERMAIL:
  4. This should make the sharing of calendar information much easier,  not only for the about 100 LRC resource calendars, but also for other useful calendars that are published on campus:
    1. the new LCS calendar
    2. the registrar’s academic calendar
    3. the campus-wide faculty  calendar
    4. last not least: your Moodle calendar (view all your moodle assignment deadlines in one place, the same place you check your email)
    5. And more… ? Do you know of other calendars, and/or a way to discover them?
  5. The details
    1. yet need to be panned out. We assume the feature will “just work” like above in Outlook Desktop when you
      1. share a calendar or
      2. subscribe to a calendar.
    2. We’ll provide more information and examples once we see this feature… TBA
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, office-software Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

First steps with the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary test activity

2013/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. 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 –
  2. 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).
  3. 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).
Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Learning-logs, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Student-Computers, Vocabulary Tags: ,

Protected: LRC Clinic designs a remedial package for Germ1202 using MyLanguageLab

2013/09/04 Enter your password to view comments.

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, clinics, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-tutoring Tags: , , , ,

LRC Clinic on Video: In PowerPoint, embed from file or web

2013/09/04 Leave a comment
Categories: audience-is-teachers, clinics, Glitches&Errors, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, workshops Tags: , , , ,

Check today’s date if you’re the only one in your Saba centra class

2013/09/04 Leave a comment
  1. And if your neighbors do not have problems connect to Saba centra.
  2. Your teacher may have put one Saba centra link for every class session, like in the list of links you can see in the center column here:
  3. saba centra links per day
  4. You have to click on today’s one to participate.
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, Distance-education-format-is-Synchronous, e-learning, Glitches&Errors, lms Tags: , ,

Wacom Bamboo Tablet enables Teacher to draw characters for class

2013/09/03 Leave a comment
  1. We set up one of the Wacom Tablets which we have used for Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja  practice in our student group rooms, at the LRC teacher station. Benefit:
    1. drawing characters where typing (including with IMEs) is not a satisfactory option. This includes
      1. IPA
        1. I noticed phonetics teachers making heavy use of the whiteboard and document camera/projector to transcribe.
        2. We tested a Phonetics keyboard, but remembering your keyboard shortcuts has a learning curve;
        3. Besides, the keyboard is currently not user-switchable.
      2. stroke-order demonstration for East-Asian languages.
    2. Unlike the document camera, the Wacom could be set up at the teacher station – no need to move to the other end of the room, and works without need for the video switch we consider replacing.
    3. To use, you can 
      1. e.g. start MS-paint (click start-button, “Run”, type “mspaint”, click “OK”)),
      2. select the “pencil” menu icon to the right of the center here: image ,
      3. remove the pen from pouch on the side of the wacom tablet next to the keyboard,
      4. draw digitally with the pen tip (soft),
      5. select the “eraser”menu icon to the right of the center here: image
      6. turn the pen and rub to digitally erase (or “select all”and press the “del” key), 
      7. finally save the drawing, if you want to reuse it or share it with students (e.g. using the Sanako playlist ).
    4. To change settings, go to the control panel (click start-button, “Run”, type “control”, click “OK”and start the Wacom Bamboo Control Panel Applet,
      1. if you do not like the Wacom tablet input panel being set to represent the entire left screen that is visible to students on the projector.
      2. if you are not right-handed,
      3. etc.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Speaking, Writing Tags: , ,

Wacom Bamboo Settings for Teacher

2013/09/03 Leave a comment

clip_image003

clip_image004clip_image001

For the dual screen teacher station, it should be the student viewable monitor

clip_image002

 

Are we complicating things with touch ? We still have a mouse connected.

clip_image005

clip_image006

In tablet, no button allows setting to "popup menu"

clip_image007

Categories: audience-is-teachers, Presenter-Computer, software, Writing Tags: , ,