Archive
Links Dual-Monitor
The LRC staff Moodle site: An Introduction
- The LRC has now a Moodle site for staff. All permanent and temporary LRC staff members will be enrolled in this site.
- All permanent and temporary LRC staff members will participate in this site. This means logging in at shift start and reviewing the following sections for new items:
- The news forum: here LRC assistants can find announcements and assigned jobs, as well as post notes of their own for all colleagues and responses.
- The most recent LRC assistant training articles appear here. In these tasks, LRC assistants are supposed to assist clients hands-on with more general
- LRC FAQ’s: LRC assistants have to monitor this block to be in the know about what the LRC has in terms of answer guides to FAQs about technology use in learning, and be able to point clients with questions to these answer guides (i.e. identify an applicable answer guide, display it on the reception computer, email the client the link for the client to review the guide).
Film-studies educational community can get free Autodesk Software
Autodesk offers free software licenses to the educational community if you register (free), some of which may be of interest for film studies (see selection of software below). Make sure you check fit into the licensing conditions: “Important Note :The Autodesk Student Version software incorporates all the functionality of our professional licenses, but includes a print banner making the software inappropriate for professional, commercial, or for-profit purposes. Autodesk Student Version software may not be used in the classroom or lab for instructional purposes, or for commercial or for-profit purposes. Annual licenses of Autodesk student software are not eligible for product upgrade or transfer to a commercial license. View print banner sample.”
Autodesk Maya
Autodesk® Maya® 2012 software delivers powerful new toolsets for previsualization and games prototyping; offers extended simulation capabilities; and opens the way for better pipeline integration.
Autodesk MotionBuilder
Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2012 software delivers new tools for virtual movie-making, performance animation, and stereoscopic productions, and enhanced interoperability with other products in the Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012.
Autodesk Mudbox
Autodesk® Mudbox™ 2012 software delivers enhancements to the painting toolset; innovative new UV and topology-independent workflows; practical posing tools; and improved performance and large dataset handling.
Autodesk 3ds Max Design
Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2012 software delivers powerful new rendering toolsets, accelerated iterative workflows, and enhanced interoperability that together help increase overall productivity.
Autodesk Softimage
Autodesk® Softimage® 2012 software delivers innovative new creative toolsets; enhanced interoperability with Autodesk®
Autodesk Smoke for Mac OS X
Autodesk® Smoke® 2012 software offers a timeline-based, all-in-one creative toolset for editorial finishing that spans color correction, keying, tracking, paint, cleanup, titling and 3D visual effects.
LRC website homepage updated to included LRC newsfeeds
We have added newsfeeds to the most recent LRC news for students and teachers to the UNCC-LRC homepage, in the hope that our clients will find it easier to learn about new LRC features for language learning.
How to disable or rather bypass the Popup Blocker in your Web browser
Try pressing the CTRL-key when clicking a link that tries to open a popup window.
This is a known problem with web-based learning applications like Moodle or library ereserves (like UNCCC’s Docutek ERes-based one) .
You can permanently disable popup blockers for certain sites if you study the documentation that comes with your browser (and possibly with the shared computer) you are working on.
How to efficiently find help on this blog
- Searching
- Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results.
- Human-curated search: The author adds metadata to his posts as he sees fit. The metadata vocabulary is somewhat stable from past experience, but may change (”The author is only a human.”
). You effectively execute a humanly-curated search when clicking in the right column on either
- a tag link, e.g.
https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/ - a category link, e.g.
- a tag link, e.g.
- Humanly-curated and Boolean AND search combined: This can be powerful in drilling down to an answer to a specific problem – provided there is one on the blog.
- Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar
, combining tags or categories with the plus-sign, you can execute an AND-search against multiple tags(or categories) on WordPress.com - Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/ finds posts that the author related to both Moodle and eRepository. This can be especially useful for searching the FAQs: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
- Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar
- Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results.
- Notifications: Subscribe to RSS-feeds to receive timely updates on the topics that matter most to you. Both
- WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the
icon, it will link to the RSS feed – Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/feed/) – watch either the webpage or your browser GUI for orange RSS icons you can click on to initiate a subscription -and also for multiple categories/tags (even though this feature is even better hidden, you need to construct a URL in your browser address bar. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/feed/). If you want to go beyond our own metadata, WordPress allows also for subscribing to your own searches via RSS: “To keep up with your favorite search results we offer an RSS feed for all search results. Simply click the Follow this search via RSS link in the side bar of any search results page to subscribe to updates in the search result”, consult the WordPress search documentation. - and MS-Outlook, making RSS-subscriptions look familiar like email (of importance in certain environments), greatly facilitate this.
- WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the
- Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link.
First impressions: NC-LOR, the North Carolina K-20 learning materials repository
This web site collects state-wide learning resources. Contained are also the NC-net (“Network for excellence in teaching”) submissions: “The purpose of the North Carolina Network for Excellence in Teaching is to share professional development resources statewide. This helps avoid duplication and encourages replication of best practices. The Resource Exchange offers your college the opportunity to showcase and share its best professional development resources and teaching tools.”
NC-LOR is based on TheLearningEdge’s equella, one of the erepository software systems that I have managed learning materials in.
NC-LOR training materials are hosted on WordPress. Of special interest to us should be the Moodle integration: “How to Use the NCLOR with Moodle 1.9.x (4.1): This tutorial should be reviewed by faculty of institutions who use Moodle as their course management system. This tutorial includes topics like: defining LMS integration, deciding what type of learning activities to put in a course, understanding how to use Moodle with the NCLOR, understanding how to update item links and information on learning object creation”. However, UNCC has not implemented NC-LOR integration as of yet:
Even without the Moodle integration, while students can access NC-LOR materials only from within Moodle, as member of the UNC system, you can either browse NC-LOR as a Guest, or ask for a Contributor account, my request had a turnaround of only a few minutes. Once you have a contributor profile, you can subscribe to receiving workflow updates from within your profile:
However, what I would like to see, but cannot find is the capability to subscribe to an RSS-feed which notifies me of updates of new submissions in a certain subject-“folder”.
The most important subject folders for LCS and ELTI are here:
There are only about 120 resources (snapshot at bottom) in the root folder, mostly links (reminds me that around 2000, I managed about a 1000 language learning links in a self-adapted PERL-CGI repository…) to freely available internet resources most of which should be in subfolders which, however, are empty.
This may be indicative of a number of typical problems I have encountered with learning materials repositories.
Questions? Read the About. Or just ask me a quick Our Databases: Resources with calendars -- Language learning material Moodle Sites, multimedia files -- films
FAQs for LRC student staff or for students or for teachers. To search our FAQs, in the browser addressbar, add after "https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?tag=faqs+/" "+TAG1" (from tag cloud below) OR "https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/tag=faqs
&category_name=" "CAT1" (from category hierarchy below). OR search both categories and tags, and multiple TAGs/CATs (connect with "," for OR-search, with "+" for AND-search), like so: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?tag=TAG1+TAG2+...TAGn&category_name=CAT1
+CAT2+...CATn"
Other ways to find help
If you cannot find it here, look there: 5,500 Language-Learning Links and Programs for learning or teaching 150 languages
Shortcuts:Our Lists, Our Maps, LRC Staff Moodle Site,LRC Project Moodle Site, 49erexpress, UNCC Moodle, Student Recordings: s:claslcslrcsanakostudent
Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
Test the Sanako Installer, Webbrowser Popup Konfigurator for XP, or Windows7, faster LRC TeacherPC Log-in Let MS facilitate diacritics writing by installing for you US-International keyboard layout
This is my personal blog (Google+). The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer. The information in this weblog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.
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