software-old | Thomas' Work Space

How to add control of student sound/recording volume, sidetone, restart, and more to a Sanako Study 1200 environment, using the Launch Program feature and AutoIt

2014/08/22 plagwitz 1 comment

UPDATE: A Windows7 (and Vista) version – which also uses a simplified deployment mechanism – is in the works, check back for a new post here.
In refining our Sanako classroom setup, we improved the control, that the Sanako Study 1200 affords the teacher over the student clients in the computerized classroom,
by extending the built-in Launch Program feature
with custom-made executables (realized in AutoIt V3) that can control the volume (here on Windows XP SP3).
This it how it works: Launch any of the programs (what each does is in its name) to any individual/group of students or the entire class in order to do any of these things on the student computers that the Sanako out of the box does not allow you to control, and that I often wish I could do when teaching language classes in a Sanako (or other computerized classroom management system) environment, like
1. controlling the volume of what the students
  1. hears
  2. records
2. turning the student sidetone (= echoing back the student microphone into the student headset) on and off
3. starting/pausing Windows Media Player
4. launching/closing quiz files in MS-Word
5. restarting an entire (misbehaving) student applications
Here is what we have:
Here is how using what we have looks like:
You can now request the download of these language lab enhancing programs, including source code, here.

2013/12/12 plagwitz Leave a comment

Start a meeting, by double-clicking on somebody who shows as available in your contact list:
If you then hover over the monitor item at the bottom, you get the option to “present”, i.e. show your screen to the other person your are meeting with. (Multi-monitor support seems good, if you have multiple monitors like we do):
If you accept the sharing:
Voilà, there is your colleague’s screen in a window on your desktop, watch her mouse actions:
The presenter
1. receives a visual reminder:
2. can also give you control to remote control her mouse: , the result of which looks like that:
3. can stop the presentation at any time.
Finally, the presentations can be recorded which could be extremely useful in a support call for later reuse/review either by the presenter or audience. Click on the 3 dots in the lower right of the “stage”window.
It looks like a basic, easy workplace-wide screen sharing software that integrates with the local accounts could be extremely productive during daily collaboration. To make such a solution a system-wide service for calling support, one would probably need a queue and pool of supporters and call forwarding.

2013/10/31 plagwitz Leave a comment

This warning and forced downgrade appeared on the teacher after starting using MS-Community Clips (which is just a GUI wrapper for Windows Media Encoder internally, which we used on the same machine successfully while it was still on XP).
The error seems slightly more informative than what we received earlier, but I did not manage to investigate since this was in the middle of supporting a teaching use .

2013/09/11 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Categories: software-old Tags: gamification

2013/08/27 plagwitz Leave a comment

YouTubeCenter comes for a variety of browsers, but note that Firefox seems the only practically supportable browser in our campus computing environment.
To download and install, go to : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/youtube-center/ and click on:
There is not shortage of settings (e.g. preselected is the Dash Playback, useful to speed up jumping around a video, by disabling streaming):