Archive
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
- Some videos require special codecs to display properly/ at all.
- Here is info on the H.264 codec.
- 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),
- 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
An overview, mostly narrated:
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
- programmatic
creation of courses and accounts - programmatic extraction and digital repository management for over 30.000 learning units.

- programmatic creation of 10,000s of learning paths,

Results
were presented (screencast) at EUROCALL 2008: “Automating Auralog (pdf)”:
creates 100s of courses
, creates
and enrols
up to 2,000 student accounts every term,
- content extraction
produces files
for adding search
and spreadsheet for sort/filter functionality: 
- learning path creation.
More detailed background information here: plagwitz_auralog_accounts_project_pub.pdf, plagwitz_auralog_project_pub.pdf

