Archive

Archive for the ‘websites’ Category

How to start the term with making your Moodle courses available to your students

2011/11/30 Leave a comment
  1. Three simple steps:
  2. moodle-unhide
  3.  moodle-unhide2
  4. moodle-unhide3
  5. Beats making courses available by default, when you might still refine them.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, service-is-training Tags: , , ,

How to duplicate assignments in Moodle course sections by importing

2011/11/30 Leave a comment
  1. Limitation: You cannot use other users’content. Use the backup/restore content procedure instead.
  2. Benefits are:
    1. You can save the time it would take to redo the assignment from scratch.
    2. plus avoid breaking things when you try and copy the assignment over manually: this built –in way does not break links.
  3. But have to jump through these hoops:
    1. Start here:import-1
      1. Choose your source course which has the assignment: import0
      2. Then choose what assignment you want to import: import1
      3. Jumpimport2
      4. throughimport3
      5. theimport4
      6. hoopsimport5
      7. done:  import6-done
Categories: assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-training Tags: , ,

Memrise: Another flashcard site for vocabulary learning

2011/11/21 Leave a comment
  1. Yet another attempt to tackle foreign language vocabulary learning with a crowd-sourced flashcard site: What is different this time, other than the layout?
  2. The site works with a seed/greenhouse/garden metaphor for spaced repetition (how intelligent is the underlying algorithm for that?) and processing/short/long term memorymemrise-seed
  3. You can have the word pronounced (is this Text-to-speech? does not sound like it. So will it scale?) The focus on non-target language “ponies” seems not fruitful. Actual target language context should be under “Samples”, but seems widely missing. Communicative motivation also. Multiple meanings and grammatical information seem to be missing from the lemmata. .single-word
  5.  memrise-emmnotic
  6. Looks like a long list of flashcard lists, but note that the number of included words is descending quickly, hardly one of the many textbooks
  7. German flashcards list - Memrise
  8. The site allows you to download the word lists as Excel files: download-wordlist-xls
Categories: all-languages, e-languages, Vocabulary, websites Tags:

Calendaring: How to view all your Moodle course assignments in Ninermail, OWA or MS-Outlook – Short version

2011/11/21 2 comments
  1. In Moodle:
    1. With Firefox (3.6 here), go to Moodle Calendar: https://moodle.uncc.edu/calendar/view.php?view=upcoming&course=1 
    2. Right-Click on iCal and choose “Copy Shortcut”: moodle-calendar-firefox
  2. In Ninermail/OWA: click “Calendar”, right-click “My calendars” , click “Add calendar’, click radio-button “From internet”, paste URL you put in clipboard into textbox, click button “OK”, right-click calendar added, click “rename” and call it “Moodle” moodle-calendar-OWA-subscribing renaming
  3. Alternatively, in Outlook Desktop: go to “calendars”, right-click “shared calendars” , click “add calendar’, click “from internet”, paste URL you put in clipboard into textbox, click button “OK”, right-click calendar added, click “rename” and call it “Moodle”moodle-calendar-outlook-2010-subscribing1
  4. Want a longer explanation?
Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, lms Tags: , , ,

How to use the online Spanish pronunciation help to generate phonetic alphabet transcriptions and text-to-speech

2011/11/18 Leave a comment
  1. Go to http://showroom.daedalus.es/es/tecnologias-de-la-lengua/phonetictrans/phonetictrans.php, enter your text, select your phonetic symbol set:
  2. spanish-text2phonetic-alphabet-daedalus
  3. Unlike with the Portuguese help, there is no text-to-speech option here.
Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, learning-materials, Spanish, Speaking, websites Tags: , ,

Web-based romanized letters to Cyrillic transliteration tool.

2011/11/16 Leave a comment
  1. Our Russian tutor uses this transliteration tool HTTP://TRANSLIT.RU which allows for phonetic input on a keyboard that does not have Cyrillic letters and seems popular with native speakers of languages written in Cyrillic.
  2. As so often, that implies: not designed for language learners. The explanation attests to that: translit_info
Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Intermediate, Russian, websites, Writing Tags: ,

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

contextual-thesaurus

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: ,

How students access language learning materials on the Library ereserves system

2011/11/11 Leave a comment
  1. Note the important update in red below.
  2. This has been tested at post date with Firefox. ereserves seems to be not compatible with Internet Explorer 8: irealplayer-cannot-open-ram-from-ereserves-in-ie8
  3. On the Library home page, from the top menu: “Research & Course Help”, choose menu item: “Course Reserves” (or, if this menu changes again, I have a hunch that deeplinking may be more stable: http://library.uncc.edu/caos/coursereserve,  what’s in a URL…),
  4. sign in with your Ninernet ID,
  5. enter search term
    1. select from the dropdown “search by name”, an enter part of your course name in the textbox,
    2. or click on tab:”Course Reserves Pages by Instructor”, and from the dropdown, select your instructor,
  6. click search,
  7. then select your course from the results grid.
  8. ereserve-search-result-page-example-name=french
  9. Enter the password, which has been given to your by your instructor.
  10. ereserve-password-page
  11. In the results grid, click on the desired chapter and tracks. Note: You need to disable your web browser”s “popup blocker”.
  12. In the popup window, click on link: “More information”,
  13. when offered, , like in this screenshot:
  15. you cannot save the file,  or rather: only a text file with links to the audio which you cannot play, like rtsp://dlib4.uncc.edu:554/e_reserves/CD1bonneforme12-16.rm). That is by design.
  16. Instead of trying to save, select to “open” the file. You need have a streaming audio playing software installed, like Real Player or the open source VLC-Player.
  17. instead of VLC, as offered by default, like so : ram-download-fail
  18.  choose “Open with”, “Other”, pick “RealPlayer” from the list, like so:realplayer-cannot-open-ram-from-ereserves-but-from-firefox
  19. Here is a more on what does not work with ereserves. The only combination I could get to work with eReserves streaming audio is  – see resulting screencast (requires Windows Media Player) of streaming a long file successfully  – is RealPlayer 14, Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP3, and that only after resetting the Winsock catalog which I can do for the entire LRC only nownext time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.
Categories: audience-is-students, e-languages, learning-materials, library-unit, Screencasts, service-is-library, websites Tags: