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Archive for the ‘digital-audio-lab’ Category
Creating site-specifically useful learning content for the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary testing
2013/09/06
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- The usefulness of the Sanako Study 1200 new (from ver 6) vocabulary test activity hinges on the availability of site-specific vocabulary lists.
- Sanako UK
- seems aware of this and publishes vocabulary collections for textbooks and assessments commonly used in UK secondary education.
- Sanako favors using the built-in format and saving it on the network share that is required for the Sanako study 1200.
- Vocabulary tests are organized and can be discovered and browsed by file name only.
- TBA: How could something similar be done in a US HE context? One would need:
- establish which textbooks are (and will remain) in use?
- are they e-books or would the material need digitization?
- is the chapter vocabulary easily accessible as a list? Appendix glossaries encompass usually much more than the vocabulary required to study, so testing on these would quickly become frustrating
- how best to reformat the materials (from turning into a table to handling linguistic metadata) for easy use with the Sanako vocabulary test?
- how best to publish the material?
- to make it manageable for the updaters: crowdsourcing? copyright issuew?
- to make it easily selectable for the teacher: filter by integrated linguistic and course metadata?
- Last not least: How to do all this economically? Taking into consideration teacher preference, enrollment, preexisting materials…?
- cost lowered if tabular lists of vocabulary already exists
- benefit is lowered if online flash card applications already exist.
First steps with the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary test activity
2013/09/06
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- Click to watch an example below of the new (in version 6, we are now on 7) activity:”Vocabulary Test”
which allows you to administer during a face-top-face-class just exactly what its name says – - with these benefits:
- needing no paper,
- digital contents
- “can” and reuse past tests with ease
- TBA: can you swap target and source language?
- blending automated and teacher feedback:
- the example I give below is based on what the teacher gave me: single words and very short idiomatic expression.
- You can use longer phrases (I prefer teaching and studying vocabulary in context), but then it become increasingly unlikely that the automated feedback is accurate (The automated feedback is limited to exact, up to case-insensitive string matching – now distance metrics).
- You can override the automated feedback before sending the results back to the student. This is somewhat practical, since the submitting is fast and not all students will finish at the same time, and if you provided students with the follow up activity after submission, The teacher overriding the feedback gets unpractical in large classes, so it is recommended restricting the test to short source/target language pairs. Also be clear about or minimize punctuation and, if required, the format of other metalinguistic information (gender, plural forms etc).
- Issues:
- not communicative, how can this be used or fitted in with other activities to make best use of a fully computerized face-to-face teaching environment?
- simplistic autocorrecting algorithm (case-insensitive, otherwise exact, right or wrong, my way or the highway” string matching)
- no tracking, no memory, personalization only via the other built-in Sanako personalization features (groups – to be left to the teacher to handle)
- no learning content – at least no vocabulary learning materials usable out of the box for us (TBA).
Protected: Sanako “Student audio is not available”…
2013/08/26
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Sanako recording during pairing won’t work
2013/08/26
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- Now: Records one party only – bad if you have to find this out only after an exam… You can see this in the graph here – low audio is partner speaking, and not audible:
and hear it yourself on campus here: "S:\coas\lcs\lrc\sanako\student\8-7-2013_2-35-18_PM ELTI level 2 final pair\Group A5 (falothma, maldubai)_sent.MP3" - Then (example of how it is supposed to sound): "S:\COAS\LCS\LRC\sanako\student\2013-02-27 14_13-pair-no-names\Group B4 (LXCOED434-PC36, LXCOED434-PC17)_sent.MP3":
- workaround: Instead of being able to default to mp3 format, as we used to, the teacher now has to save the audio of pairing activites in a Sanako proprietary format (MIFF) and, including the students, play it back with the Sanako prpoprietary player. If the teacher does not remember to change the format from the default MP3 to MIFF for pairing exercise recordings, the teacher (and students) will lose the assessment materials of half the class (and likely not find this out until when the files get opened for grading).
Protected: Why requiring manual configuration of the Sanako by students does not work for us
2013/08/20
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Categories: audience-is-administration, audience-is-IT-staff, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Glitches&Errors, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Presenter-Computer, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, Student-Computers
image2013, sanako-study-1200
Sanako Study 1200 version 7 datetime format of file saves has changed
2013/08/09
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- The top items are samples from “before” (ver 5.2, XP), the bottom of “after”(ver 7, Windows 7):
. Somewhere in between (not sure when, we skipped Sanako Study 1200 version 6 and MS-Windows-Vista), the default file naming of Sanako has changed. - I found out that Sanako version 7 now uses settings from the Windows Regional settings. This seems to make sense, but likely should have been always the case (it breaks or rather forces me to extend my langlabemailer), and has some disadvantage.
- So if you want a different datetime format in the file names that Sanako creates when collecting student assessments and assignments, you need to change it in Windows Regional settings now.
Categories: digital-audio-lab
datetime, langlabemailer
Request to download the Sanako Study 1200 licensing server, student and classroom name reset, program and source
2013/06/11
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Back to description for reset of server reset program.

