Archive
Archive for the ‘Classroom-technology’ Category
Our Clickers: Software and Hardware
2013/09/10
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- The clickers come with software (PPT Add-In) that allows teachers to integrate simple interactivity (multiple choice questions etc.) into their slide decks.
- The following teacher-hardware allows the teacher to present their interactive slide deck in the classroom and aggregate and display (for discussion and adaptive teaching) the student responses
How to work around a possible bug of Sanako Study 1200 collecting student files opening multiple explorer windows?
2013/09/09
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- Problem: To great confusion of my teachers, Sanako version 7 often seems to open multiple collection windows (1 per student recorded?) when collecting files, like so:
- Possible Cause: From the screenshot above,
- where only 1 collection event out of 3 shows this undesirable behavior,
- and the 2 that did not, collected all file either under student computer name or all under student login name:
- is it possible that Sanako has a bug which causes it to open one Windows explorer window per student file collected, if
- some students are displayed under their computer name,
- while other are displayed under their login name?
- This is aggravated by another limitation (or bug): Students that come online after I chose show student computer names, are not affected by this setting, but display with their login name (the default).
- Possible Workaround:
- Make sure all students display under the same naming scheme.
- This is best achieved by waiting until every student icon shows up in the classroom map before changing the classroom map student display option.
Categories: digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Glitches&Errors
naming, sanako-study-1200
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).
Sanako Study Tutor may crash if teacher lacks file share permissions
2013/08/20
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- Problem: On start of the Sanako tutor 7 (have not seen this in earlier versions, although I have seen many teachers w/o Sanako share permissions), you may immediately be confronted with this NULLREFERENCEEXCEPTION:
- presumably f you have this (a teacher w/o permissions to the Sanako share):
- Workaround: Somebody with file share permissions log in instead.
- Solution: Get permissions set up automatically for all classes, including short term.
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