4-skills | Thomas' Work Space

JAVA warning dialogues to bypass during NanoGong activities

2013/10/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

You may be prompted to update JAVA – likely a not a bad idea:
Click “RUN”:
Check (1) “Accept”and Click (2) “Run”:
Click “Don’t Block”:
Even more annoying when warning dialogues do not come to the foreground, and your computer/web browser simply seems to be stuck. Check your task bar/dock for blinking/jumping JAVA notifications, like here: .
You have to bypass these dialogues only once – per session (lab) or possibly per computer. Choose the right answer, for university assignments, it is safe to “Allow! Allow! Allow! (“run”, “don’t block:”, update”, what ever – use common sense).
Remember, thinks could be worse, – like if you try to use NanoGong in a Firefox that has not been explicitly configured to allow JAVA applets – read more on our troubleshooting NanoGong page.

Categories: assignments, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Glitches&Errors, lms, multimedia-recording, recording-software, service-is-documenting, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, Speaking Tags: java, moodle, nanogong

How a student can easily complete an audio recording assignment in Moodle, using the new NanoGong plugin

2013/10/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

Open your assignment (note the loudspeaker/dummy icon for NanoGong assignments/) from the Moodle landing page.
Unfortunately, there are a considerable number JAVA warning dialogues to bypass during NanoGong activities before you can even see the recorder plugin on the page, and may be more when you try to submit.
Once you are on the NanoGong assignment page: click red button to record,
Make sure the volume meter shows input when speaking (loud enough) or playing back:
After recording, submit:
After submitting,
1. You can still edit your submission, by
  1. (1) deleting your recording or
  2. re-adding – or (provided your teacher’s assignment allows for (3) multiple recordings) just adding – (2) your recordings
  3. or adding a (4) message to the teacher
2. you can also revisit this page to read (5) feedback the teacher gives you about your recording:
Experiencing issues? Check troubleshooting page here.

Categories: Arabic, assignments, audience-is-students, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, lms, Mandarin, multimedia-recording, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, Swahili, Yoruba Tags: moodle, nanogong

How a teacher can easily assign an audio recording in Moodle, using the new NanoGong plugin

2013/10/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

We are back in business with easy audio recording assignments in the LMS, thanks to NanoGong – the free recorder I recommended when first starting here – now being available in MOODLE (presumably with the Upgrade to Moodle 2, I almost missed that….)
To assign, click “turn editing on”, “Add activity or resource”, select “NanoGong voice activity”, as pictured below:
There are a few interesting options:
1. you can limit the duration
2. you can limit the number of recordings (attempts?) allowed (0 is unlimited)
3. You can let students listen to each other recordings. (Is there a rating feature that can be combined with this?)
4. And this is what
  1. you will see (TBA:read on for how to listen to student submissions, give feedback and grade.)
5. your students will see…

Categories: Arabic, assignments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, lms, Mandarin, multimedia-recording, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, Swahili, Yoruba Tags: moodle, nanogong

Search Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic Treebank of spoken French

2013/10/01 plagwitz Leave a comment

The Rhapsodie Treebank is made up of “57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and a 33 000 word corpus)” endowed with an orthographical phoneme-aligned transcription”.
Rhapsodie can be searched at http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/queryql.html:
View list, read (1) text or (2”phonetic transcription, click (3) and (4) to listen to found segment
You can also search for text and download:
The best is obviously the markup and query language – and hence has a learning curve.

Categories: corpora, French, Listening, Speaking, websites Tags: audio

Japanese Language Tools (Proofing, dictionary, furigana) in the LRC MS-Office 2010 installation

2013/09/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

Even if not showing in MS-Word’s Language selector),

Even though there is no Japanese Thesaurus:
There are these tools:

In the Research pane, "English Assistance: Japanese" (in the ribbon / "Review" tab, Proofing section, press the , then ALT-Click a character to start a lookup:
a Japanese Consistency Checker:
Furigana:

To enable:
Result (in view / Web layout):
Incidentally, my blog has not quite made it into the TOP 5 of MSW-Office help content:

In addition, for Office, but also beyond, there are the tools of the MS-Office Input method editor (which include dictionary help when you write):

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Dictionaries, e-languages, Japanese, Listening-Stations, LRCRoomCoed434, office-software, Presenter-Computer, Reading, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, small-group-work-spaces, Student-Computers, Writing Tags: dictionaries, furigana, proofing-tools

PC31 still has only limited foreign languages writing support

2013/09/25 plagwitz Leave a comment

Has the intl. Cpl , tab:administration workaround not been applied

Categories: Glitches&Errors, Writing

Wacom Bamboo Tablet enables Teacher to draw characters for class

2013/09/03 plagwitz Leave a comment

We set up one of the Wacom Tablets which we have used for Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja practice in our student group rooms, at the LRC teacher station. Benefit:
1. drawing characters where typing (including with IMEs) is not a satisfactory option. This includes
  1. IPA
    1. I noticed phonetics teachers making heavy use of the whiteboard and document camera/projector to transcribe.
    2. We tested a Phonetics keyboard, but remembering your keyboard shortcuts has a learning curve;
    3. Besides, the keyboard is currently not user-switchable.
  2. stroke-order demonstration for East-Asian languages.
2. Unlike the document camera, the Wacom could be set up at the teacher station – no need to move to the other end of the room, and works without need for the video switch we consider replacing.
3. To use, you can
  1. e.g. start MS-paint (click start-button, “Run”, type “mspaint”, click “OK”)),
  2. select the “pencil” menu icon to the right of the center here: ,
  3. remove the pen from pouch on the side of the wacom tablet next to the keyboard,
  4. draw digitally with the pen tip (soft),
  5. select the “eraser”menu icon to the right of the center here:
  6. turn the pen and rub to digitally erase (or “select all”and press the “del” key),
  7. finally save the drawing, if you want to reuse it or share it with students (e.g. using the Sanako playlist ).
4. To change settings, go to the control panel (click start-button, “Run”, type “control”, click “OK”and start the Wacom Bamboo Control Panel Applet,
  1. if you do not like the Wacom tablet input panel being set to represent the entire left screen that is visible to students on the projector.
  2. if you are not right-handed,
  3. etc.