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Archive for the ‘Classroom-technology’ Category

Oral assessments with Sanako model imitation – The ultimate training summary…

…using animated GIFs. Load the speed of your choosing (or several, use CTRL-Click to open links in a new tab) into the left screen of the teacher station before administering an oral exam, with the window active, press F5 in your web browser to restart the animation from the beginning. Slower? Expanded:050cs, 075cs, 100cs, 150cs, 200cs, 300cs, 400cs, 500cs, 1000cs.Or compact for recapitulation: 025cs, 050cs, 075cs, 100cs, 150cs, 200cs, 300cs, 400cs, 500cs, 600cs, 700cs, 800cs, 900cs, 1000cs.

Protected: How to convert Friendly Russian web pages for better use with the Sanako Study 1200

2012/09/16 Enter your password to view comments.

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LRC Sanako Study 1200 for Pronunciation

How to take roll in class using Sanako Study 1200

  1. Today:
    1. I had to work on getting my Sanako classroom layouts back up after a network cutover on the first day of the academic year.
    2. I could observe a teacher new to the Sanako lab taking roll on paper, reading out each student’s name and finding the student in the classroom . This is a known good way to learn to put a face to a students’ name. Once that is done (and maybe could be done also faster using student thumbnails in university computer systems like the LMS), one can save teaching time taking roll doing the following :
  2. At the beginning of each of your class meetings:
    1. You cannot start a sanako class before your students have logged in and their sanako student clients have started up – that is the first I always ask my students to do.
    2. In the initial Sanako tutor startup dialogue, open an empty class.
    3. Wait for the “corridor” to be fully populated, then select all.
    4. Have the sanako tutor populate the classroom layout.
    5. Choose menu file / save classroom layout as, and save in your tutor folder with the date as the filename.
    6. (Load your familiar class layout to actually begin your class – this will take little extra time, for Sanako tutor does not need to wait again for the Sanako student clients to start up).
  3. After the last day of classes:
    1. load each saved file into MS-Excel (as an XML table),
    2. first column will be class date, hide all columns in between that and your student login name,
    3. select and copy these 2 columns into an attendance spreadsheet (if you find a way to strip the xml wrapper, you can merge the files on the command line – after all, the classroom layout files are just plain text),
    4. in the attendance spreadsheet, calculate attendance
      1. either sort first by date, then by login name, and count attendance manually using the dates;
      2. or have Excel count for you with an array formula pasted into a third column that checks for and counts identical dates.
  4. Final thoughts: Your mileage may vary if you don’t teach all your classes in a Sanako lab – I used to and have come to appreciate an institutionally provided and maintained lab infrastructure which is stable – compared with complaints I have heard about having to rely on your students not forgetting their clickers if you want to use technology rather than class time for taking roll outside of a stable infrastructure.

Protected: How to get an email and username list of your class out of Report Express

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Making audio cues for model imitation/question-response oral exams with Sanako Study 1200

We can easily record and post-process audio files in the LRC for use with the Sanako Study 1200 oral exam activities.

This can work not only  for outcome exams (course- or chapter-wise), but also or formative assessment:

Think converting your textbook-based “drills” into Sanako, like repetitively recapitulating the newly acquired vocabulary item “donut” with different cues:

Example: “What can you do with [student can enter her favorite new vocabulary item for the current class] on [teacher can ask for one social web service after the other that her students likely are familiar with]?”. In response, student has to practice vocabularry item by forming sentences that fit the vocabulary item that fit like in the whiteboard example.

We can add to these recordings the features explained in the slide below.

image

I’d be happy to play you examples from this slide – and more – in the LRC (not to be published here so that the exam files can be reused).

How the LRC supports Second Language Acquisition (all 4 skills) and testing using computers, and provides requisite documentation and training

Table of contents for 2 screencasts of a presentation, left screen slides/no audio, right screen/speaker audio – best viewed side-by-side.

Time in LRC-report-speaker

Time in LRC-report-slides

Topic

Subtopic

0:00

Overview of LRC activities

0:00

0:40

SLA reading

0:02

1:10

SLA writing

1:00

high-stakes quiz screencast: http://goo.gl/AaGrK

3:40

Movie caption exercise generation using NLP

5:45

2:35

SLA listening

Text-to-speech Deskbot

7:15

4:00

example of time-stretched audio

10:00

10:10

SLA speaking

Moodle Kaltura for webcam recordings homework assignments

12:30

Sanako oral exams

15:00

Example of oral exam material

16:40

15:45

Classroom management systems

27:15

Outlook: LRC as proficiency assessment/testing center, outreach/service to high schools

16:40

Example of oral proficiency exam

28:30

Needed additions: video streaming to students, video recordings from students

30:10

Question period

30:10

LRC media repositories

33:30

Infrastructure work:

Year1:Ghost+imaging

33:35

Year2:LRC calendars (room reservation, equipment circulation, staff timetabling)

34:25

Outlook: things that need to be fixed in LRC calendars

39:25

39:45

19:45

LRC Blog

39:45

Querying tags and categories

45:00

tags, categories, RSS feeds displayed in internet explorer tag display,

55:20

Using tags/categories searches of the LRC blog in training teachers and students

57:25

Q:TOEFL, AP exams and other oral proficiency assessment –

58:45

Webcape placement exams and other written exam in the LRC

59:30

Q:Concurrent exam scheduling

Sanako has no scheduling system to allow a limited number of users to take an exam simultaneously (but it prevents users beyond the licensing seats to use the Sanako, including for exams), Scheduling plug-ins seem to be available for Moodle.

61:40

Outlook: Need more licenses for the Sanako to match the UNCC class size

NetOp School 6 not upgrading

  1. Here is what we have:
  2. image
  3. Here is what get:
  4. image
  5. And for the indexing servers: “ Web Update failed with error: Index file could not be located at update-server.”