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Categories: assessments, assignments, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, German, iMacs, lms, multimedia-recording, Practice&Demos, Speaking, Videos Tags: ,

How to duplicate assignments in Moodle course sections by importing

2011/11/30 Leave a comment
  1. Limitation: You cannot use other users’content. Use the backup/restore content procedure instead.
  2. Benefits are:
    1. You can save the time it would take to redo the assignment from scratch.
    2. plus avoid breaking things when you try and copy the assignment over manually: this built –in way does not break links.
  3. But have to jump through these hoops:
    1. Start here:import-1
      1. Choose your source course which has the assignment: import0
      2. Then choose what assignment you want to import: import1
      3. Jumpimport2
      4. throughimport3
      5. theimport4
      6. hoopsimport5
      7. done:  import6-done
Categories: assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-training Tags: , ,

NFLRC "Assessments for Japanese Language Instruction" Summer Institute

2011/11/21 Leave a comment

The National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa is pleased to announce its 2012 Summer Institute:

 

ASSESSMENTS FOR JAPANESE LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION July 10-13, 2012 University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii

 

Website: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/prodev/si12j/

 

This four-day NFLRC summer institute (July 10-13, 2012) is intended for postsecondary Japanese language educators who wish to promote good assessment practices in their home institutions. It consists of lecture as well as hands-on sessions designed to help improve their theoretical knowledge and practical skills about assessments (including testing). To this end, the workshop will provide ample authentic assessment examples in various formats and procedures to assess learning outcomes in Japanese in classroom and program-level settings. The workshop will also cover portfolio assessments for Japanese language teacher training programs. After attending the workshop, participants will be better prepared to engage in effective formative and summative assessments for Japanese language instruction and teacher training in their home institutions.

 

If you are interested in participating in the Assessments for Japanese Language Instruction Summer Institute, please submit your ONLINE APPLICATION FORM BY JANUARY 31, 2012.

 

For more information about the workshop, application, funding possibilities, and logistics, please visit the summer institute website.

 

 

Categories: announcements, assessments, Japanese

How teachers can grade student recordings done with the LRC Sanako Study-1200 in their Office

2011/09/23 Leave a comment
  1. Teacher on their office PC (MAC users talk to http://helpdesk.uncc.edu) can press windows-key+e, and in the window, that opens,
  2. browse to the student mp3 recordings with date and time in the folder name on s:\coas\lcs\labs\lrctest\sanako\student (no S: drive on office PC? talk to http://helpdesk.uncc.edu, but in the meantime, try windows-key+r, paste = \\DATASERV1\DVOL1\coas\lcs\labs\lrctest\sanako\student”, click “OK”),
  3. open the student recording file, either by double-clicking to, presumably, open it in Windows Media Player, or, preferably, by selecting multiple files, right-clicking and choosing “Open with” to open them for comparative grading (read some tips) in Audacity.
Categories: all-languages, assessments, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-languages, faculty-offices, grading, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, multimedia-recording Tags: , ,

Speaking/Listening Assessments and Oral Exams: A comparison what the LRC has to offer

2011/09/22 Leave a comment
  1. Moodle:
    1. I proposed for installing one of the free audio recorder plug-ins into our Moodle, but we are not there yet.
    2. However, we do have a new video recording assignment (which is based on Kaltura).
      1. Format: free form, according to your written instructions in the assignment. Students can review and repeat the recording as often as they wish.
      2. The video overhead is minimal since it is streamed, and video is better for authentic language assessments – unless you specifically prepare your students for phone interviews: then just have students step out of the viewing angle of the webcam).
      3. thanks to Moodle, the familiar interface and the underlying LMS support infrastructure, it is easy
        1. for the teacher
          1. to create and assign a video-assignment
          2. to grade it from the gradebook
        2. for the students to take it and submit it.
      4. LRC Support:
      1. Since our PCs have no built-in or added webcam (proposed), we can currently only use our 5 iMacs for Moodle video assignments. Since the MACs do not have headsets (but built-in microphones), the audio quality is not as good as on the PCs. Since 5 seats are not sufficient for class-size activities/exams, it is best to use this as a homework assignment  
      2. I list all necessary steps for a video assignment
        1. here for teachers
        2. here for students.
        3. all my Kaltura posts
      3. Additional support is available through the campus Moodle support team.
  2. Sanako
    1. Sources

      1. Dual-track comparative recorder:

        1. the teacher can prepare an input track (or provide one live. Preparing is easy, and worth your while, since easily reusable. I can help you)).
        2. the students records on her own track

      2. Pair  and group recording:

        1. Sanako makes it easy to pair or form groups of students and to record free-form conversations.
        2. These recordings can be either controlled remotely by the teacher or locally by the user
    2. Control
      1. Remote-controlled recording under exam conditions,
        1. responding to a listening cue within a preset (or live) pause in the teacher track
          1. model&imitation:  for phonetics and pronunciation exercises,
          2. question&response for a wide variety of activities as commonly used in SLA textbooks and classroom, including practicing grammar structures or vocabulary recently
          3. question&response&model response: the teacher can also include after the pause in the teacher track a model answer for the students to compare their own output to.
        2. automatically saved with student names to be accessed from the teacher office desktop
        3. easy comparative grading using Audacity (see below)
    3. User-controlled recording is also possible, using the student recorder in manual operation mode
      1. which has more language learner features (bookmarks, voice graph, dual band recording), and  a simpler  interface than a full blown audio editor like Audacity (see below).
      2. The task how to save and sent the assignment to the teacher is here left to the user.
    4. LRC support:
    1. I can help you
      1. creating an audio recording with your content and speaking cues and pauses – using Audacity (see below)
      2. conducting the remote-controlled exam
    2. Up to 20 seats can take an oral exam simultaneously, until we get more Sanako licenses. However, we  found a way to split classes into 2 halves and have consecutive exams (we can play audio on the other students’ headsets to provide for exam conditions). The LRC main classroom is equipped with 30 seats for 2 consecutive exams with Sanako headsets.
  3. Voicethread is a popular online recorder, especially  for educational institutions that have no onsite support.
    1. Visual and audio cues can be provided by the teacher.
    2. Pairing of students has been attempted via sharing and responding/commenting to the partner’s submission. This is not a realistic conversation.
    3. Recordings are stored in the cloud.
    4. There is no integration with the SIS (accounts – getting students set up with accounts that can communicate back with the teacher is a challenge) and LMS (the Moodle integration is superficial). 
    5. Voicethread is not free. The ELTI, however, has a subscription. LCS does not.
    6. LRC Support:
      1. We support Voicethread exercises with new and improved headsets.
      2. Help is available through the vendor.
  4. Audacity:
    1. for teachers and LRC staff and other language professionals:
      1. best free audio editor, also good for comparative grading. I routinely make my audio exam recordings with Audacity.
      2. LRC support: I have tips and tricks how you can use it in your teaching preparation and grading.
    2. for language learners: not the recommended option, since Audacity has not a feature set geared towards language learning nor support for language assessment workflows:  
      1. Language learners do no need an audio editor for speaking exercises, they need a recorder. If you are a language learner, it is not pedagogical to be able to technically edit and refine your audio recording. Rather rehearse, reflect on and repeat your audio recording, until you are happy with your language output.
      2. Audacity is too technical: It involves too many steps, options and settings for the students to record, save, export and name the audio and to get it to the teacher, and (if it is not uploaded into a Moodle assignment, which could then be a Kaltura  assignment anyway, see above), too tedious for the teacher to manage and grade files.

      3. LRC Support:

        1. If your students are technically inclined, we do have Audacity installed in the LRC.
        2. Your students should not find it difficult to read the documentation. Here are my posts on Audacity.
Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Listening, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking Tags: , , , ,

How a Student takes a Moodle Video Assignment in the LRC

2011/09/22 2 comments
  1. On one of the LRC iMacs, in the Safari web browser (open new window with COMMAND-key+n),
  2. go to your Moodle course, (1) find the video Assignment, read the assignment instructions (what your teacher wants  you to record). Then click underneath the  (2) button: “Add video Assignment”, to open the (3) submission window:  moodle-add-video-submission
  3. Note that she will also have to allow the flash player to interact with her webcam first.
  4. kaltura_thumb1 If you see no web cam video window, only a black frame, read in.
  5. In the submission window, choose the tab “Webcam” (1), use the dropdown to select the camera hardware (2). moodle-kaltura-webcam-tab-camera-dropdown
  6. Check the headset microphone audio: The external headset microphone on the iMacs did not work., but now it does, provided you do this: control-click on Flash’s a video preview window (= the window where you see yourself like in a mirror) for the  web camera, and click on “settings”.
    •  
    • Click on the microphone icon :
    • CIMG0021
    • Make sure the USB PnP  device is selected.
    • CIMG0022
    • 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, by tabbing (don’t speak yet) on the headset microphone, test the volume levels with the built-in volume meter (should  show lots of green bars when you tab). Unlike in the picture, do not choose “reduce echo ”.

    student-recording-CIMG0015_thumb1

  7. Start (3) the video recording.
  8. Afterwards, the student can review (4) her submission.
  9. If you don’t like your first recording, (3) “record” over it and review again with (4) “Play”. If you do this and the video appears frozen, drag the timeline cursor forward to get the re-recorded video to play. If this does not seem to work, you are likely still able to submit your 2nd attempt, just not review it again.  kaltura-timeline-drag-me1
  10. Click through all the “Next”etc. buttons:
    1.  pauline-moodle-kaltura-next3 pauline-moodle-kaltura-next4CIMG0070CIMG0071
    2. until you get to the feedback page for the student (caveat: in IE9, the video does not fit into the frame provided on the page). student-assignment-result
    3. Note, it warns you to be patient now: kaltura-teacher-upload-student-upload-combineda
  11. LRC support:
    1. Depending on your hardware (webcam), software and network support, you can record your language speaking video assignments on any device that has a webcam and a browser that supports flash – and even more devices, if you are willing to post process and upload the video clip.
    2. If you run into problems or want to use a tested setup, we recommend using the LRC. Since our PCs have no built-in or added webcam (proposed), we can currently only use our 5 8 iMacs (see LRC Layout, see Classroom Calendar and iMacs Calendar for availability). Our (limited) tests worked better in Safari than Firefox.
Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-students, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, step-by-step-guides Tags: , , , ,

Sanako Study-1200 Oral Exams: More result examples

2011/09/07 1 comment
  1. Study 1200 will automatically save the exam recordings of each of your students under a distinct name (you can choose student email name or seat number) in a location which you can access from your office desktop:
  2. elti-lynn-question-response-results-explorer
  3. You can load this recordings in Audacity to grade them, including skipping past the questions and increasing the play speed, but not the pitch, and easy comparison of students like in the picture below:
  4.  elti-lynn-question-response-result-audacity-names
Categories: all-languages, assessments, audience-is-teachers, learning-usage-samples, Presenter-Computer, Speaking, Student-Computers Tags: , ,

How to do Sanako Oral Exams with large classes, but few licenses: A workaround using partial classroom layouts

2011/09/07 Leave a comment

When you open the Study1200 tutor, a dialogue comes  up which lets you select you the “classroom layout’. What this actually means – since the physical classroom (LRC layout) is obviously immutable –, is: which computers do you want the Study1200 to connect.

The “template classroom” (this happens to be just  the default name within Sanako) tries to connect all students logged in on computer in COED434  to the teacher from the “corridor” (= where Study1200 leaves all computers that it knows of, but that you do “into” want to let into the classroom; the corridor has link in the bottom center of the Study1200 teacher window, and it flashes if there is a change “in “ the corridor Stuy1200 wants to make you aware of) that the Study1200.

However, beyond the 20th client (first come, first serve), this will fail because of licensing restrictions, and a grey exclamation mark will appear in the classroom layout in the Study1200 window for these student icons.

The “left-half”and “right-half” layouts that I created load only the computers in either the left or right half of the COED434 classroom (each without the wall/window-facing computers at the very edges) into the classroom layout (other logged-in students will remain in the “corridor”, linked in the bottom center of the tutor interface, if you want to add select students – note that the student icon will not appear on screen in their approximate physical position in the classroom.

You can also bring up the dialogue from which you can choose classroom layout after the initial startup of the  tutor: Go to top menu: file / classroom layout. A 45-second screencast of this switching  our classroom layouts in Sanako Study 1200 is available for download (requires Windows Media player).

In the screencast, you can see how the visual layout on screen reflects the physical layout in the classroom (the number labels on top of our computer monitors appear (optionally) in seat numbers): rotate by 90% clock- or counterclockwise (I wish we would have not only more licenses, but also a higher screen resolution. Stay tuned).

This technique of splitting the classroom, unloading and loading half of it at a time, you can exploit for administering oral exams consecutively with class sizes (current maximum is 25/30, depending on level) that exceed the number of licenses we have (currently 20 + teacher).

This technique of excluding computers from connecting to the teacher we could also use to merge the listening station computers, even though they have a different audio hardware configuration (analog headsets only, no Sanako headsets with built-in sound card and disabled on board sound) into the main software image without consuming valuable licenses – not without other problems.

Categories: all-languages, assessments, e-languages, Screencasts, service-is-it-managing, Speaking Tags: , , ,