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Archive for the ‘Learning-Tool-is-any’ Category

How to Join one of our Windows Live Groups at London Metropolitan

2009/02/12 Leave a comment

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.

Categories: e-infrastructure, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University, websites Tags: , , ,

Classroom management software Vendors at BETT 2009

2009/02/11 Leave a comment

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.

Categories: e-learning, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University, projects, software, tradeshows Tags: , ,

Auralog Tell-me-more Demo Screencasts

2008/09/17 Leave a comment
Categories: 4-skills, audience-is-any, documentation, e-languages, learning-materials, Screencasts, service-is-learning-materials-creation, software Tags:

Pedagogical rationale of timestretching audio for differentiating instruction

2008/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. Context: Higher Education in the UK has made considerable investments in digital lab infrastructure to improve second language instruction in times of deteriorating language take-up in the secondary sector, including widening participation. Digital language labs, apart from generic digital media, suffer from a lack of custom-made teaching materials that take advantage of the pedagogic features of the lab: grouping for personalization of teaching and learning. Pedagogical integration and development is needed to achieve the original intentions. A project to timestretch audio language learning materials for the digital audio lab promises integration software, pedagogical materials and, above all, a model of effective digital language lab use in teaching.
  2. Problem: In times of uneven language provision at the secondary school level and of shrinking language program sizes in HE, increasingly language teachers find themselves confronted with uneven language proficiency in their courses. Digital lab technology can help them to overcome the  “one size fits all” approach and personalize the students learning experience, for a greater inclusiveness in language programs and an increased proficiency boost for both the below and above average proficiency student groups.
  3. During my work with the language programmes at an English university, I could witness – and had to record – that the least proficient students, seeing themselves confronted with what was nowhere near “comprehensible input” (Krashen) for them, not only let the communication break down, but appeared so distressed that, despite being fully aware that their language output was being recorded as an assessment for the teacher to evaluate, started to curse and swear (in their native tongue) – while at the same time the upper portion of the class breezed through the exercise without any apparent difficulty.
  4. Proposed Solution:
    1. Technology to the rescue: The slowing down of digital audio – without pitch alteration –has been, while not a perfectly accurate representation of natural slow speech output, a popular benefit of digital technology in the language learning field for several years now (cf. e.g. Calico 2004), and I myself have experimented with it in the digital audio lab (Model imitation and Question – response exercises) and in publications (cf. Plagwitz, Karaoke in the Digital Audio Lab (2006)).
    2. What seems lacking are
      1. both an application that automates (by monitoring one of the network share directories that are part of the digital lab system) the slowing down (and speeding up) of audio for instructors (e.g. in 5% increments from 70% to 120% of original input) that are too time-pressed for producing materials, or even seeking out recordable on-air sources, and
      2. a model implementation in the digital audio lab (using dynamic grouping of students through the digital lab software) that creates exercises that would create exercises that can benefit from this approach (and can be shared), that applies them in a number of suitable (interpreting, ab initio language learning) modules and that assesses the proficiency improvement with this approach (using the outcome exam and a control group).
  5. Benefits: Greater fluency of both the least and most proficient students is to be expect after they were exposed to – as deemed fit by their instructors – slowed down/sped up exercises – ca. 20 exercises in the ab initio language learning module, practicing a small set of suitable new structures and vocabulary compared, with 2 control groups, and five interpreting rounds of 20-30 minutes. We will operationalize this by reusing regular assignment grading and use a control group, also of module-size, which must also use the digital audio lab, but with “one size fits all” audio.
Categories: all-languages, audience-is-teachers, classroom-activities, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, Interpreting, Listening, projects, proposals, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-programming Tags: , ,

Automating Auralog Tell-Me-More with AutoIt. Presentation at EUROCALL 2008

2008/08/14 Leave a comment

Auralog Tell-Me-More is a leading language learning software system which provides a vast amount of content in an advanced technical infrastructure that we found lacking in usability within an higher education language learning environment.

AutoIt is a programming language for GUI automation which I used to better integrate the Auralog software into the higher education language learning process, including

  1. programmatic creation of courses and accounts
  2. programmatic extraction and digital repository management for over 30.000 learning units.Click to view a work sample from my portfolio
  3. programmatic creation of 10,000s of learning paths,

Results were presented (screencast) at EUROCALL 2008: “Automating Auralog (pdf)”:

    1. cpurse and account creation

creates 100s of courses , creates and enrols up to 2,000 student accounts every term,

  1. content extraction produces files for adding search and spreadsheet for sort/filter functionality:
  2. learning path creation.

More detailed background information here: plagwitz_auralog_accounts_project_pub.pdf, plagwitz_auralog_project_pub.pdf

Categories: 4-skills, audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-teachers, conferences, documentation, e-languages, learning-materials, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-library, service-is-programming, software Tags: , , , ,

Blended Learning Templates for the e-Learning Center. Download

2008/07/30 Leave a comment
  1. Download the Blended Learning Templates for the e-Learning Center, as presented here:
    1.  MS-Word VBA-based quiz template for Students
    2. MS-PowerPoint Template for Teacher
    3. VBA-Lookup-Add-In for teacher computer’s MS-PowerPoint installation. (included with student quiz template).
  2. Find more instructions here.
Categories: assessments, classroom-activities, e-languages, Projectors, service-is-programming, Student-response-systems-AKA-clickers Tags: , , , , ,

Do more with LLAS. Aston e-Learning Centre Year 1.

2008/03/31 Leave a comment

Presentation given at the CETL Symposium – Digital Language Labs: exploring good practice, March 15, 2007. SOAS, London, UK.

Categories: conferences, digital-audio-lab, Institution-is-Aston-University, learning-usage-samples, marketing, Screencasts Tags:

How to enable your SMEs to collaboratively define and add metadata to learning materials

2008/03/28 Leave a comment
  1. We have been asked to manage digital assets (including web links) and enabling incorporating them as learning materials within a series of study programs.
  2. We researched a number of metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies that have been applied to language and social sciences learning materials before,
  3. and incorporated those into the below MS-Excel application, to allow for easy marking up of existing assets by SMEs – using collaborative tagging instead of the more familiar, but more easily conflicting, since mutually exclusive folder hierarchy (unidirectional-tree structure).
  4. In addition, SMEs can expand and develop the controlled vocabulary, by adding tags of their own, as you can see at the end of this demo:
Categories: e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, office-software, Screencasts, service-is-library, training, workshops Tags: , , , , , ,