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Paper @ IALLT 2013: Driving Tutorial Call Into The Face-To-Face Classroom, and What It Took…

2013/06/01 Leave a comment

…has been accepted for inclusion in the program for IALLT 2013, June 11-15 at the Pinecrest School (Fort Lauderdale, FL)/Florida International University (Boca Raton, FL) and was presented on June 14: Here are abstract and slide deck:

[office src=”https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=4FA3329905D7E1CE&resid=4fa3329905d7e1ce%2185931&authkey=AFswJ0h4LVABrYc&em=2″ width=”650″ height=”528″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”]
Categories: animated-GIFs, audience-is-administration, classroom-management-system, conferences, digital-audio-lab, Institution-is-Aston-University, Institution-is-Loyola-University-Maryland, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Institution-is-University-of-Tampa, office-software, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-assessing, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-documenting, service-is-it-managing, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: , , , , , , ,

Face-to-face-teaching exam using Sanako Study 1200

2012/03/01 Leave a comment
  1. Sanako Exam is an add-on at additional cost and not currently available in our setup.
    1. Sanako Exam teacher-created content is stored locally, file management beyond that is up to the user. This makes such polls less portable, but potentially sharing within a department might be easier.
    2. Student Results can be identified by student, and saved.
  2. View here a screencast demo of how a Sanako Exam can be
    1. authored and
    2. deployed.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, documentation, e-learning, Institution-is-Aston-University, Presenter-Computer, proposals, Screencasts, Student-Computers, Study-program-is-any Tags: ,

Sanako Study 1200: Student Basics II: The Screencast

2011/06/10 Leave a comment

This screencast covers the basics of Study 1200 for students

For a quick guide to the Student interface, see Student Basics I: The Screenshots

Categories: all-languages, audience-is-students, e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Screencasts, software, workshops Tags: ,

Protected: How to conduct an easy oral exam with Sanako1200 (Model imitation/Question Response) – Part II: Implementation/instruction of examined students

2011/05/04 Enter your password to view comments.

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Categories: all-languages, Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Institution-is-Aston-University, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, learning-materials, learning-usage-samples, Mandarin, multimedia-recording, Polish, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, Student-Computers, Swahili, Videos, Yoruba Tags: , , ,

Learning materials management: Online_resources.xls II: E-repository (2006-7)

2009/02/17 Leave a comment

I participated in the implementation of a “ learning object” repository – is there such a thing as a learning “object”  in a progression-oriented field like SLA? Anyhow, the software of choice was Equella which, as I read on the listservs, is favored by Blackboard Admins for its Blackboard module and is supposed to provide the primary interface to the equella for instructors in their Blackboard course websites.

Since this did not get implemented during my time, we used what seems primarily the admin-interface and, since equella does not come with one, attempted to implement a metadata schema, based on the prior work of an LLAS-sponsored group. We also soon found that despite complexity, the metadata schema was still lacking (E.g. you won’t get through French 101 without several sections on “Negation”. nor German, nor Spanish etc.).

Excel to the rescue once more: Here is a spreadsheet in action that not only allows adding, tagging, searching and filtering links to, once more – easier than to make your own – web-based exercises, but now also allows the collaborative building of a metadata schema. But alas, the number of fields is growing again.

Categories: e-learning, erepository, Institution-is-Aston-University, learning-materials, service-is-library, Spreadsheets Tags: , ,

Learning materials management: Textbook exercises (2000-2008)

2009/02/17 Leave a comment

Textbook exercise management is a rapidly evolving field, with more textbook becoming digital and online resources and more metadata getting added and AI getting implemented to enable personalized (data-driven, feedback-based) learning paths.

German.xls was an attempt to be able to sort, search, filter the exercises of some bigger textbooks in the American college market, each containing thousands of exercises (how many? why does it take a sumif() to find out?):

Subtitles.xls converted text files with movie subtitles which can be extracted from DVDs or found into spreadsheet for post-processing (search, filter, sort – and assign different show times, for DVD editions differ). online,
Auralog Tell me more 7 is a language program that allegedly comes with “more than five times the amount of content than other language programs” – but strangely not with a table of contents of its exercises. Automation extracted the exercises first into the file system for full text search with Windows Desktop Search, then converted the extracted files into links in the Auralog Content XLS.

Categories: e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, Institution-is-University-of-Tampa, learning-materials, service-is-library, Spreadsheets Tags: , , , ,

Blackboard VLE Training Videos Overview

2009/02/15 Leave a comment
Categories: documentation, e-learning, Institution-is-Aston-University, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University, Institution-is-Loyola-University-Maryland, lms, Screencasts Tags:

Pedagogical rationale of timestretching audio for differentiating instruction

2008/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. Context: Higher Education in the UK has made considerable investments in digital lab infrastructure to improve second language instruction in times of deteriorating language take-up in the secondary sector, including widening participation. Digital language labs, apart from generic digital media, suffer from a lack of custom-made teaching materials that take advantage of the pedagogic features of the lab: grouping for personalization of teaching and learning. Pedagogical integration and development is needed to achieve the original intentions. A project to timestretch audio language learning materials for the digital audio lab promises integration software, pedagogical materials and, above all, a model of effective digital language lab use in teaching.
  2. Problem: In times of uneven language provision at the secondary school level and of shrinking language program sizes in HE, increasingly language teachers find themselves confronted with uneven language proficiency in their courses. Digital lab technology can help them to overcome the  “one size fits all” approach and personalize the students learning experience, for a greater inclusiveness in language programs and an increased proficiency boost for both the below and above average proficiency student groups.
  3. During my work with the language programmes at an English university, I could witness – and had to record – that the least proficient students, seeing themselves confronted with what was nowhere near “comprehensible input” (Krashen) for them, not only let the communication break down, but appeared so distressed that, despite being fully aware that their language output was being recorded as an assessment for the teacher to evaluate, started to curse and swear (in their native tongue) – while at the same time the upper portion of the class breezed through the exercise without any apparent difficulty.
  4. Proposed Solution:
    1. Technology to the rescue: The slowing down of digital audio – without pitch alteration –has been, while not a perfectly accurate representation of natural slow speech output, a popular benefit of digital technology in the language learning field for several years now (cf. e.g. Calico 2004), and I myself have experimented with it in the digital audio lab (Model imitation and Question – response exercises) and in publications (cf. Plagwitz, Karaoke in the Digital Audio Lab (2006)).
    2. What seems lacking are
      1. both an application that automates (by monitoring one of the network share directories that are part of the digital lab system) the slowing down (and speeding up) of audio for instructors (e.g. in 5% increments from 70% to 120% of original input) that are too time-pressed for producing materials, or even seeking out recordable on-air sources, and
      2. a model implementation in the digital audio lab (using dynamic grouping of students through the digital lab software) that creates exercises that would create exercises that can benefit from this approach (and can be shared), that applies them in a number of suitable (interpreting, ab initio language learning) modules and that assesses the proficiency improvement with this approach (using the outcome exam and a control group).
  5. Benefits: Greater fluency of both the least and most proficient students is to be expect after they were exposed to – as deemed fit by their instructors – slowed down/sped up exercises – ca. 20 exercises in the ab initio language learning module, practicing a small set of suitable new structures and vocabulary compared, with 2 control groups, and five interpreting rounds of 20-30 minutes. We will operationalize this by reusing regular assignment grading and use a control group, also of module-size, which must also use the digital audio lab, but with “one size fits all” audio.
Categories: all-languages, audience-is-teachers, classroom-activities, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, Interpreting, Listening, projects, proposals, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-programming Tags: , ,