documentation | Thomas' Work Space

How to download Centro Spanish Textbook audio

2012/09/07 plagwitz Leave a comment

The audio is in (compressed) mp3 format. Just right-click on any audio link and choose save target/link as (or similar, depending on browser), like so:

Example from Centro – Puntos de partida: Online Laboratory Manual, 8th Edition (you need access privileges to follow this link, but you can send links around, users can open them, provided their webbrowser is already logged into the centro site – getting access and finding you way around the website is the real issue. Webspiders are prohibited, though – and even Downthemall saves only files without extensions: rename them to .mp3 or save them manually as .mp3 in the first place, as shown above. Does not work as above? Try a different web browser.

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-languages, learning-materials, Listening, Media, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Spanish, Speaking, textbooks Tags: centro

Character Input Methods for SLA (Western)

2012/09/04 plagwitz 1 comment

For studying (typing) Western Languages (= need for diacritics only; whether you have a US keyboard hardware or UK which is pretty similar), we recommend the MS Windows US International Keyboard layout which is based on “dead keys”.

Currently installed in the LLC are the Language Bar (floating on top of screen or accessible from the taskbar) with these keyboard layouts:

Keyboard layout settings are application/window specific, and “US” (non-international) is still the default for new applications/windows, so prepare to switch after you start a new application;

There are keyboard shortcuts for switching, however, “Key settings”: “switch between input languages” , using LEFT ALT + SHIFT, does not work. Workaround: use the language bar for switching:

Windows keyboard layout settings can be temperamental – if you find you cannot switch to a certain layout anymore, you may have to restart the computer.

Use the following keyboard shortcuts to enter diacritics more easily:

Press (together, then release)	then press	Example Result
` (accent grave)	any letter that can have this accent, e.g. "a”, also cedilla ç	à
‘ (apostrophe)		á
^ (caret)-		â
~ (tilde)		ã
” (double quotation marks)		ä
CTRL+&	Z or z	æ
rightALT+	X or x	œ

rightAlt+n		ñ
ALT+CTRL+?		¿
rightAlt+?		¿
ALT+CTRL+!		¡
rightAlt+1		¡
rightAlt+s	S	ß

To access the original, now dead keys, press space bar after pressing the dead key.

Modifiers(blue)/Layout	Note the new modifier = “dead” keys, indicated by light blue color (click to enlarge)
Normal

Shift
	US International

Screencast of US International in action here: deadkeys.wmv

Interactive Demo of installation procedure (personal computers outside of the LLC) here: keyboard_usinternational.swf

Planned improvements:

Use LEFT ALT+Shift to switch to (Software) “Keyboard Layout” “United-States International”.
Use other keyboard short cuts to access a desired keyboard layout directly
Dock the “Language Bar” in the Taskbar, then hover over it to make sure you selected the proper “Keyboard Layout”.

Another nice visualization of US-international keyboard layout is available thanks to http://charsetplus.tripod.com/Keyboard/Latin/EN-USX.htm (click picture for full size):

Categories: 4-skills, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-languages, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, second-language-acquisition, Spanish, Writing Tags: diacritics, FAQs, foreign-language-character-input, keyboard-layout, ms-windows, us-international

How to get started with Moodle here

2012/08/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

Moodle is the UNCC LMS – it is central to teaching with technology.
The LRC provides Moodle-information specific to language learning, incuding FAQ’s.
The CTL (= Center for Teaching and Learning) has oodles of general Moodle help.
Search the CTL site for Moodle by clicking here, and you will find:
1. Moodle specific:
  1. view Moodle on-demand screencast video tutorials,
  2. read Moodle FAQ’s (updated).
  3. sign up for instructor-led (face-to-face or webinars, some of which are archived and available on-demand) training:
    1. Updated Webinar list, which includes for Moodle (I highlighted the more general ones)
      1. Avoiding the Moodle Scroll of Death (30 min. Webinar)
      2. Copying a Moodle Course (30 min. Webinar)
      3. Find & Embed Videos in Moodle (30-min. Webinar)
      4. How Do I: Peer Review in Moodle (30 min. Webinar)
      5. Incorporating Streaming Media into Moodle (30 min. Webinar)
      6. Making Moodle Beautiful (30 min. Webinar)
      7. Moodle 2 FAQ (30 min. Webinar)
      8. Moodle Grade Book and Mail Merge (30-min. Webinar)
      9. Moodle Under the Hood (30 min. Webinar)
      10. Using Moodle’s Team Assignment (30 min. Webinar)
    2. Previous (Moodle 1.9)
2. There is more Moodle-information here, just no way for me to provide a direct, filtered link so just browse the pages:
  1. the CTL podcasts
    1. Episode 106 Getting Students to Read Your Syllabus: Quizzing in Moodle

Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, instructional-technology-unit, lms Tags: FAQs, moodle

How LRC assistants get paid: paper time sheet if no web time entry

2012/08/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

If there is a delay at the beginning of the term getting you into the web time entry system we normally use,
print a paper timesheet for Work Study Student,
get it signed from the LRC coordinator or director,
on or before the 31st, turn it in to Payroll which is on Reese 3rd Floor (consult the Campus Map).

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, documentation, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, service-is-hr-managing

Foreign Language Character Input on Windows 7 in the LRC

2012/08/16 plagwitz 1 comment

The LRC, now on Windows 7, is testing Carly J. Born’s U.S. International Extended 2.0 Keyboard, an improvement on the previously used US International Keyboard (still recommended for personal use, as it comes standard with all but ancient versions of Windows) for typing accented characters in Western languages, Pinyin-tone-marks for Mandarin (replacing the also useful, but more evolved Pinyinput), and other SLA tone- and length-marks e.g. for Latin.
Not limited to specific application, you can use anywhere in Windows the following shortcut’s – taken from the original developer documentation (with some minor modifications).
We hope you find the benefit for SLA far outweighs the need to getting used to typing a space between the 2 red characters and a vowel, in order to produce their regular form, without creating a foreign language character.

acute accent, pinyin 2nd tone	apostrophe (= ‘), vowel	(e.g. á é í ó ú)
grave accent, pinyin 4th tone	grave (= `), vowel	(e.g. à è ì ò ù)
c cedilla	comma apostrophe, c	(e.g. ç)
macron accent, pinyin 1st tone	hyphen, vowel	(e.g. ā ē ī ō ū )
vowel with umlaut	double-quote (= “), vowel	(e.g. ä ë ï ö ü ÿ)
vowel with circumflex	shift+6 (= ^), vowel	(e.g. â ê î ô û)
pinyin 3rd tone	Shift+5, vowel	(e.g. ǎ ě ǐǒǔ)
ü with pinyin tones	Accent, double-quote	(e.g. ǖǘǚǜ)
letter with tilde	tilde (= ~), letter	(e.g. õ ñ ã)
letter with dot below	shift+period, letter	(e.g. ạ ẹ Ẹ ị ọ ụ)
letter with double acute	shift+; , o or u	(e.g. ő, ű, Ő, Ű)
«	ctrl + alt + [
»	ctrl + alt + ]
€	ctrl + alt + 5
ß	ctrl + alt + s/right-ALT + s
ø	ctrl + alt + l	[won’t work in word, onenote, but works in excel]
¿	ctrl + alt + /
¡	ctrl + alt + 1	[To type ¡, disable the command called ApplyHeading1 in the Format category, in word or onenote, but not needed in excel]
œ	Right alt + k

Categories: documentation, French, German, Italian, Latin, Mandarin, Operating-system, Polish, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Spanish, Student-Computers, Swahili, Yoruba Tags: extended, FAQs, foreign-language-character-input, keyboard, pinyin, us-international

How to change the display language and speech recognition language on LRC Windows 7 computers (and which languages are available)

2012/08/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

UPDATE: Since this page seems to be getting a lot of hits, I want to clarify: The step-by-step guide below only applies after you installed (free) language (or language interface) packs (see list here) on Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate SKU (others SKUs cannot add multiple language interfaces). UPDATE2: Things got much easier with Windows 8.
In order to
1. view the GUI of Windows and Internet Explorer in a foreign language,
2. use the speech recognition in (a subset of the below) foreign languages,
3. and also switch the default language of MS-Office
Double-click the desktop shortcut “Region and language – Keyboards and languages”.
Select the desired language from the dropdown box, click “OK”.
Click: “Log off now”:
“Log back in” (without restarting).
And if you want the available display languages in English,

here are the fully supported (MS Language packs):

Language	Native name
Arabic	العربية
Chinese (Simplified)	中文(简体)
Chinese (Traditional)	中文 (繁體)
English	English
French	français
German	Deutsch
Greek	Ελληνικά
Hebrew	עברית
Italian	italiano
Japanese	日本語‫
Korean	한국어‫
Polish	polski
Portuguese (Brazil)	Português
Portuguese (Portugal)	português
Russian	Русский
Spanish	español

and here the partially supported (MS-Language Interface packs):

Hindi हिंदी

KiSwahili Kiswahili

Persian (Farsi) فارسی

Yoruba ede Yorùbá
And here are the languages that support speech recognition:

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

2012/08/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

“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”.
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:
Double-click WSRProfile.exe to start the WSR Profile tool wizard.
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.
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.
3. After the backup operation successfully finishes, click Close .
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: ms-windows-7, speech-recognition

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 plagwitz Leave a comment

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…).
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) .
  4. Click on the microphone icon :
  6. Make sure the USB PnP device is selected.
  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 ”.
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.