4-skills | Thomas' Work Space

Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Oral Proficiency testing with Audacity/Sanako

2012/04/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
1. for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
2. for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen.
Table of contents:
1. Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
2. Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
3. Example of a Sanako Exam
4. Loop induction
5. Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
6. Grading Sanako oral exam student files
  1. Sanako voice insert for
    1. facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
    2. commenting on student responses during grading
7. Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students

How a teacher can use Sanako voice insert to easily add spoken comments to students’ Sanako oral proficiency exams

2012/04/25 plagwitz Leave a comment

All other things equal (given a limited amount of time), teachers can provide more and better corrective feedback on student oral proficiency recordings if, during their grading, they could easily insert their own oral comments into the students’ recordings (delivered as MP3 files to teachers’ desktops after Sanako oral exams).
Both the Sanako Tutor and Student Player have a voice insert mode that is much easier and quicker to use than (albeit not free as) editing the student audio in Audacity (which we still recommend for bare-bone viewing/listening because of Audacity’s capability of loading and displaying multiple tracks simultaneously).
Fortunately, Sanako tutor/student player are available on the teacher/student station PCs in the LRC (the latter’s insert function is available when the PC connected to the running Sanako Tutor on the teacher station).
How easy and fast is it to use this? As you can see in this demo screencast on how to use Sanako voice insert to add spoken comments into your students’ Sanako oral exams, voice insert only requires:

a click on the voice insert button in the center, whenever a user wants to speak during listening,
and, from the top left menu, a “file”/ “save as” at the end.

In a next step – not only during the grading process –, how easy is it to distribute student recordings made with Sanako to students? That is TBA:a different story.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, grading, multimedia-recording, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, service-is-assessing, Speaking, Student-Computers Tags: audacity, sanako-study-1200, student.exe, voice-insert

Protected: Sanako Study 1200 Final oral exam for advanced Business Spanish: A Job interview

2012/04/19 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Protected: Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop I: How to ease your end-of-term oral assessment burden with the help of the LRC Moodle Kaltura and Sanako Study 1200 oral assessments

2012/04/06 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Independent study with free language learning materials from the FSI?

2012/03/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

The Foreign Service Institute language learning materials – consisting of scanned documents and digitized audio of multiple courses per language – were still a heavily-advertised resource when I visited the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 2006.

It is nice to see these resources be made available for free. It is also nice to see the progress that has been made not only in technological adaptation of textbook learning materials since these materials were made available (post WW II?).

This, however, comes at a cost. If you shun it, and do not take a course that works which requires (and entitles you to the use of) a textbook, here are easily accessibleviewable learning materials for a large set of languages, including many LCTL: Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Czech, Finnish, French, Fula, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kirundi, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Lingala, Luganda, Moré, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, Yoruba.

The Forums , however seem to indicate that not too many still use these options. The transformation into a (technologically superficially) more modern format here is limited to very few languages and courses (and crashed my web browser).

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Arabic, Beginner, e-languages, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, learning-materials, Listening, Polish, Portuguese, Reading, Russian, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Spanish, Swahili, Yoruba Tags: fsi

If students have no mp3 audio on LRCRoomCoed433a Listening Stations

2012/03/20 plagwitz Leave a comment

Problem: A Student that took the French Respondus Lockdown browser on PC 43, when playing to listening comprehension files, had no audio on her headset (except for her microphone input was played back for her. The test is single attempt only, and lockdown browser prevents us from troubleshooting.

Cause: Master volume for Wave and SW Synth on lrcroomcoed433b back to 0, like so:

Workaround: plug in one of the black headsets (USB) temporarily (plugging in another brown headset did not resolve the issue).

Solution: None currently: even when the Respondus lockdown browser is not running, Deepfreeze will not allow making changes, and changes in the current user profile will not affect users whose profiels gets created upon login (which is all student users). Longterm: Don’t try to run identical software images on different hardware configurations. Not as longterm: Autoit FTW?

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors, Listening, Listening-Stations, service-is-it-managing, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: FAQs, Respondus-lockdown -browser

Moodle Kaltura teacher and student video uploads combined

2012/03/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

You can combine
1. a Model/Question video, uploaded by the teacher as a video resource
2. with an Imitation/Response video captured by the student.
Cons:

When viewing the teacher upload video models/questions, the student has to alternate between pause/play (which are not even on the same button).
Student does not have to also handle pausing/restarting the video recording, but that may be another con: The student cannot pause her video, so the grader will have to skip over pauses in his recording.