Archive
How to Join one of our Windows Live Groups at London Metropolitan
Go the group’s web address (not from your londonmet email client’s browser) and click “Sign in”. 
If you have a windows live account (hotmail or msn qualify), click “sign in”, otherwise click “sign up”.
Go through an account creation process (you only have to do this once): 
Afterwards, you will be automatically signed in (you may have to answer an email first at the address you have given during sign-up) and redirected to the invitation page for the group, click on “Ask to join”. 
Now you are done: 
Don’t forget to write down your user name and password.
Vendors at BETT 2009
For the interpreting suite upgrade, here is my report from BETT 2009:
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booth |
Artec = Televic |
Q36 |
ConnectED, SANS Virtuoso/Soloist |
N54 |
NETSUPPORT SOFTWARE LTD |
E100 |
SANAKO |
P69 |
Synchroneyes |
b50 |
Two types of vendors:
- Full-blown interpreting lab vendors
- Generic classroom management software vendors
Follow the links, talk to me if you want to know more and/or post questions/comments below.
Interpreting Lab Vendors at BETT 2009
artec_main_bett2009.AVI (big, and you can find help here on How to play videos) is a quick-and-dirty video I shot during my visit to the ARTEC/TELEVIC booth at the British Educational Technology Tradeshow (BETT) 2009 in London 16/01/2009.
ARTEC demonstrated certain lab features (they had a live setup of a teacher and a number of student computers) for face-to-face teaching.
They also tried to show off a web-based add-on for self-access interpreting practice which you better try out yourself here, then browse to Demo edumatic online / demo online / audio/video comparative / comparative recording : an online dual band recorder.
If I have time, I will post an outline of this video here. In the meantime, you can add points you find notable to the comments below.
I also visited the booth of CONNECTED (SONY VIRTUOSO – they have their own WMV Demo Video ) and SANAKO (I put the CD-Rom in a SkyDrive folder sanako for the Interpreting-Group).
Classroom management software Vendors at BETT 2009
I visited a number of more generic classroom management systems (NETSUPPORT, Synchroneyes).
These have limited audio (no recording) support, but provide all the essentials for computer use in class at a much lower cost. Could be a temporary solution, if we add some customizing through in-house programming.
Print to PDF with PDF Creator
For creating PDFs, we now have PDFCreator installed in Moorgate. It appears as a printer driver, so print whatever document you want converted, and choose “PdfCreator” as the printer.
Test
A dialogue will come up which will allow you to change some settings for the pdf file you are going to create.
The next dialogue will ask you where you want to save your pdf file.
Here is the result file:
And here it is opened with Acrobat Reader:
PdfCreator has limitations, like it does not create hot links. Once Office 2007 is installed in Moorgate, I would recommend using its built-in “Save as PDF” feature instead.
Cheap Microsoft Software: At work licensing
University staff can purchase the following Microsoft software for a nominal fee (<£20, including s&h) under the Microsoft at Work agreement:
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Office Enterprise 2007 Work at Home Media
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Office Mac 2008 Work at Home Media
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Windows XP Professional w/SP3 Work at Home Student Media
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Windows Vista Business w/SP1 Upgrade Work at Home Media
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Project Pro 2007 Win32 English Disk Kit Student Media EMEA Only CD
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Visual Studio Pro 2008 English Disk Kit Student Media EMEA Only DVD
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Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Win32 English Disk Kit Student Media EMEA
I put the Order form for staff on: “J:\Humanities arts and languages (HAL)\Language_services\software\Microsoft\Work at Home order form from Civica – London Met U.pdf”.
Adobe-PDF support
Students often need to convert PDF files to Word, beyond having to select and copy/paste page by page in Acrobat Reader, text (preserve formatting, images, tables), including deleting carriage returns.
Re the latter, AFAIK even Acrobat Full cannot retain paragraphs without breaking it up line by line with carriage returns. This seems to be inherent to the nature of pdf as a page drawing language concerned with representation, not content.
Most students also need to convert from Word to PDF, e.g. for their CVs.
The Moorgate software image does not only seem to include “Acrobat Reader 9, but also an unspecified “PDF conversion utility” which seems to be PdfCreator 0.9 (see http://www.pdfcreator.de.vu). I explain using it here.
There are a number of other free pdf-creators around, with varying abilities, like primopdf, winpdf, bullzip… If you find something better, add a comment here.
There is also a free “Create PDF” service at http://www.acrobat.com/, limited to 5 pdfs (per email address?), and a conversion from pdf to html at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html.
KDE office on Linux is said to be able to convert PDF to editable formats.
Gmail and Google docs can view PDF documents as HTML in the browser.
Note that Office 2007 can convert Word to PDF (and much more) and that HE Students can buy all of Office 2007 Ultimate at a hardly more than nominal fee (< £40) through http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-uk/default.aspx.
University staff can get Microsoft Software for a nominal fee under the Work “at home” license agreement, see here.
For further study, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software#Converters_5
Instant language services support on office and classroom IT lab computers. Part I: Initial Setup
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If you have Windows XP on your office computer, we can use MS-Messenger (ver 4.7) “Application Sharing” to provide immediate live assistance with computer problems in remote parts (also useful for collaboration with colleagues on documents, including web pages, when a phone call is too little and a meeting is too much).
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click “Start”, “Run”, type (or copy/paste): “C:\Program Files\Messenger\msmsgs.exe“, click “OK”
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Initial setup (you have to do this only once)
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“Add a .net passport to your windows xp user account”:
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Email account
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Users of http://hale-translation.groups.live.com/, http://hale-interpreting.groups.live.com/, or the Interpreting online calendar (http://calendar.live.com) can re-use their windows live account
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Other users can use existing hotmail/windows live accounts or create a new hotmail/windows live account (you may want to create a separate account for work related messaging)
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On your office computer, also check the checkbox to “Associate your account with your windows user account”, like here:
, when asking for help on a student computer, uncheck this -
Add “Thomas_plagwitz” at “hotmail.com” as a contact (initially, I will have to accept this before you can contact me):
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Click on “I Want To … Add A Contact” (green plus sign)
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Once set up with Messenger like described here, go to PART II.
Questions? Read the About. Or just ask me a quick
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Other ways to find help
If you cannot find it here, look there: 5,500 Language-Learning Links and Programs for learning or teaching 150 languages
Shortcuts:Our Lists, Our Maps, LRC Staff Moodle Site,LRC Project Moodle Site, 49erexpress, UNCC Moodle, Student Recordings: s:claslcslrcsanakostudent
Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
Test the Sanako Installer, Webbrowser Popup Konfigurator for XP, or Windows7, faster LRC TeacherPC Log-in Let MS facilitate diacritics writing by installing for you US-International keyboard layout
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