4-skills | Thomas' Work Space

Overview of MS natural language support on Windows Vista+7/Office 2007, 2010

2012/12/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

Snapshot summer 2012 in conjunction with our language center upgrade to Windows7 and Office 2010. Click here for larger version.

2012/12/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

In intl.cpl, we do not want keyboards installed for western and central-European (= characters a-z, merely altered by diacritics) languages, including US. We type these languages, including US-English, with the us-international keyboard extended 2.1, which has to be set as default, and that US-English extended 2.1gets checked as the keyboard for all western languages ("show more"). The regular US keyboard gets removed/made invisible to the user, and with any reasonably recent version of MS Sysprep tools, that is no problem anymore.
For non-Western languages, the built-in windows keyboards should be "checked", and also the alternate input that we had to download and install methods need to be "checked" under their languages: MS Maren, Google input methods nee to be enabled (checked): e.g. Farsi is not enabled (checked).

2012/12/13 plagwitz Leave a comment

2012/12/05 plagwitz Leave a comment

(Work in progress).

2012/11/28 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

2012/11/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

(Being planned and scheduled, therefore this post is a work in progress, please stay tuned: ).
As a continuation (and practical application ) of our previous Intermediate Sanako Teaching Techniques Workshop (and a repetition of our Learning material creation Clinic from the summer), we will create learning materials.
Bring some ideas and materials. The Sanako and entire LRC infrastructure aims to lower the technical authoring requirements.
1. We can record remotely, all authoring teachers at the same time, your source (model/question material) which you will be able to distribute as easily (“ loop induction”) from the Sanako teacher station. Bring some questions your students should be able to respond to in L2, and be prepared to read some text that you want them to repeat, for pronunciation practive
2. We can author hand-outs for so-called “homework” (actually reading and writing, with supervision and collection by the teacher as easy as the handout): It just takes opening one of our customized LRC MS-Word templates. I will hand out (more loop induction) “homework” files to aid your work. Bring some texts and essay writing tasks
3. PowerPoint exam files with visual cues: bring some ideas for vocabulary quizzes.

2012/11/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

(Being planned and scheduled, therefore this post is a work in progress, please stay tuned: ).
Using the Sanako classroom management system for training (“loop induction”),
we will present learning usage models, based on the work done by our language teachers in the LRC Sanako this term.
We will then provide you with hands-on practice how you can do the same with the Sanako system.
This will hopefully give you some ideas for for writing LRC visits into your face-to-face teaching syllabus next term.
To facilitate this, we will continue with a follow-up Workshop II: Clinic, where we will help you prepare your Sanako-based learning materials for next term.
You can review our past Sanako Workshops (online screencast).

2012/11/09 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.