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Archive for the ‘software’ Category

Saville Interpreting Suite layout diagram

visio_interpreting

Which I had to derive from photos:

image

Live a little: Get standard software

You make not only your own, but everybody’s life easier if you upgrade to standardized software. The University is now on Win XP Service-Pack 2, with Office 2003 and Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3. At work, call x4444 to get upgraded. At home, you can download Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3 (also available for MAC OS-X)  for free. Plus, as University employee, you can get other Microsoft software “for cheap”, as I explained here.

Help with playing videos

  1. Some videos require special codecs to display properly/ at all.
  2. Here is info on the H.264 codec.
  3. Often, it is best to try, instead of Windows Media Player (which may be the default player that opens when you (double)click on a video, but not be able to display it without manual configuration),
  4. the free VLC player which you can download here, if you must, and install, if you are permitted. Then right-click video, “open with”, “VLC media player”, like here:

Classroom management software Vendors at BETT 2009

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.

Auralog Tell-me-more Demo Screencasts

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

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