step-by-step-guides | Thomas' Work Space

Refine your pronunciation by operating the LRC Windows 7 PCs using voice commands

2012/08/20 plagwitz Leave a comment

No speech recognition assignment, and only a bit of spare time to practice the language you study in the LRC? Try the Command mode with these Try the Command mode with these voice commands that Windows 7 speech recognition recognizes
Note there are some hoops to jump through, including some one-time setup: We have them/you covered in this step-by-step guide on using speech-recognition in the LRC

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Speaking, step-by-step-guides Tags: 7, speech-recognition, windows

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 to do successful Moodle-Kaltura webcam recording assignments

2012/06/29 plagwitz Leave a comment

Kaltura turned out to have a number of limitations, and we have some of our own in the LRC. Both required some debugging and finding of workarounds, which you can benefit of if you follow carefully our step-by-step guides for teachers or for students.

Categories: e-languages, lms, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, step-by-step-guides Tags: kaltura, moodle

Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Oral Proficiency testing with Audacity/Sanako

2012/04/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
1. for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
2. for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen.
Table of contents:
1. Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
2. Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
3. Example of a Sanako Exam
4. Loop induction
5. Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
6. Grading Sanako oral exam student files
  1. Sanako voice insert for
    1. facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
    2. commenting on student responses during grading
7. Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students

Protected: Sanako Study 1200 Final oral exam for advanced Business Spanish: A Job interview

2012/04/19 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

How a student uses the Sanako Recorder Voice Insert mode for Moodle comparative recording exercises

2012/01/25 plagwitz 2 comments

to load a file
1. from Moodle:
  1. Find your assignment with the model audio file, presumably in your Moodle course.
  2. download the model audio file
  3. open the Sanako Student Recorder (introduction).
  4. go to menu: file / open, and open the file you downloaded
2. from student recorder playlist: double-click the file.
enable voice insert:
1. To activate voice insert (which is a toggle that changes the behavior of the other buttons)
  1. either go to tools/ voice insert mode
  2. or click the voice insert button (darker shade of brown = OFF; tooltip should say “Toggle Voice Insert OFF”, meaning: it is ON now)
press the green play button to listen until you reach the point (your teacher may have inserted a pause or aural cue) where you can repeat or respond.
Then click the red speak-button to repeat after/respond to the source/teacher
When you are done repeating/responding, press the green play-button.
At the end, press the blue stop-button.
Rewind and review your recording (e.g. compare your pronunciation with the teacher’s model).
When done, click file / save as and save only your, the student track, as mp3 or wma.
Additional notes:
1. TBA: you can overwrite your pronunciation where you deem necessary.
2. Fixed in Sanako 7: ~~you cannot show the voice graph when in Voice insert mode – both are incompatible~~.
3. To see in action how to record with voice insert and save the student track, view
  1. this step-by-step screencast
  2. this demo screen cast
4. The previous is just a step-by-step for our environment based on the Sanako Study 1200 documentation which follows here: