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

2013/10/17 Leave a comment
  1. 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….)
  2. To assign, click “turn editing on”, “Add activity or resource”, select “NanoGong voice activity”, as pictured below: image
  3. 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?) image
    4. And this is what
      1. you will see (TBA:read on for how to listen to student submissions, give feedback and grade.)image
    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: ,

Search Rhapsodie, a syntactic and prosodic Treebank of spoken French

2013/10/01 Leave a comment
  1. 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”.
  2. Rhapsodie can be searched at http://www.projet-rhapsodie.fr/queryql.html:rhapsodie-speech-corpus-treebank-search
  3. View list,  read (1) text or (2”phonetic transcription, click (3) and (4) to listen  to found segmentrhapsodie-speech-corpus-treebank
  4. You can also search for text and download: image
  5. The best is obviously the markup and query language – and hence has a learning curve.
Categories: corpora, French, Listening, Speaking, websites Tags:

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

2013/09/30 Leave a comment
  1. Even if not showing in MS-Word’s Language selector),
    1. image
    2. clip_image002
  2. Even though there is no Japanese Thesaurus: clip_image003
  3. There are these tools:
    1. In the Research pane, "English Assistance: Japanese"  (in the ribbon / "Review" tab, Proofing section, press the clip_image004 , then  ALT-Click a character to start a lookup: 
    2. clip_image005
    3. a Japanese  Consistency Checker:clip_image006
    4. Furigana:
      1. To enable: clip_image007
      2. Result (in view / Web layout):  clip_image008
      3. Incidentally, my blog has not quite made it into the TOP 5 of MSW-Office help content: clip_image009
  4. 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): clip_image010
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: , ,

PC31 still has only limited foreign languages writing support

2013/09/25 Leave a comment

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

Categories: Glitches&Errors, Writing

Making computerized vocabulary quizzes for use in the LRC from Prof. Koralova’s Friendly Russian textbook

2013/09/11 Leave a comment

You can browse on the Group room PC to this folder with the

source files (read acces), you just need to look at the Word versions:  S:\COAS\LCS\LRC\sanako\student\friendly-russian-docx-student-copy

 

In the source files, new  vocabulary that the students have to learn, appears  in 2 forms

1.       Either under the heading “new words”, mostly with English meaning in a sparate column

2.       Or in the running text, colored in red (and with no entirely obvious English translation  for me who I do not speak Russian, but likely for you).

 

The target file is here  (in most browsers other than Internet Explorer 64-bit, you should be able to open this in EXCEL for easier editing).

 

We need Russian and English in 2 columns. The computer program we are going to feed these flash cards into is quite simple in its automatic evaluation. That’s why we need to enable students to guess exactly the Russian from the English flash card side (and vice versa). Hence we may need to simplify the entries in both.

 

To give a few examples: 

–          Complicated lists of variants (inflected forms, similar phrases etc.) need to be broken up into separate rows

–          linguistic metadata (like gender “fem.”– but maybe not articles: “la maison – das Haus” -, irregular verb) in a separate column, per language.

 

I included an example (from chapter 4, section 6) what I think the end result is supposed to look like:

 

Source example:

ти́хо (adv.) – quiet(ly); тишина́ (n.) – stillness; quiet
никогда́ – never;  ти́хо, как никогда́ – quiet as never (before); когда́ – when
В чём де́ло? – idiom: What’s the matter?
ах да – oh yes
матч – match; game
почти́ – almost
ка́ждый – each; every
ме́сяц – month
всё в поря́дке  (idiom)– everything is OK (lit.: everything is in order)
что ещё на́до? – what else (does one) need?

Target example:

russian

metadata

english

metadata2

Ти́хо

quiet

тишина́

stillness

тишина́

quiet

никогда́

never

ти́хо, как никогда́

quiet as never before

когда́

when

В чём де́ло?

What’s the matter?

ах да

oh yes

матч

match

матч

game

почти́

almost

ка́ждый

each

ка́ждый

every

ме́сяц

month

всё в поря́дке

everything is OK

что ещё на́до?

what else does one need?

 

Hint: the easiest way to get the vocabulary charts Russian – English from Word into 2 columns in Excel:  CTRL+H, “find:” space-space, “Replace”:^t (for tab), then copy/pasting the result makes 2 columns for Russian/English.

 

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, e-languages, projects, Russian, service-is-learning-materials-creation, textbooks, Vocabulary Tags: , ,

Creating site-specifically useful learning content for the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary testing

2013/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. The usefulness of the Sanako Study 1200 new (from ver 6) vocabulary test activity hinges on the availability of site-specific vocabulary lists.
  2. Sanako UK
    1. seems aware of this and publishes vocabulary collections for textbooks and assessments commonly used in UK secondary education.
    2. Sanako favors using the built-in format and saving it on the network share that is required  for the Sanako study 1200.
    3. Vocabulary tests are organized and can be discovered and browsed by file name only.
  3. TBA: How could something similar be done in a US HE context? One would need:
    1. establish which textbooks are (and will remain) in use?
    2. are they e-books or would the material need digitization?
    3. is the chapter vocabulary easily accessible as a list? Appendix glossaries encompass usually much more than the vocabulary required to study, so testing on these would quickly become frustrating
    4. how best to reformat the materials (from turning into a table to handling linguistic metadata) for easy use with the Sanako vocabulary test?
    5. how best to publish the  material?
      1. to make it manageable for the updaters: crowdsourcing? copyright issuew?
      2. to make it easily selectable for the teacher: filter by integrated linguistic and course metadata?
    6. Last not least: How to do all this economically? Taking into consideration teacher preference, enrollment, preexisting materials…?
      1. cost lowered if tabular lists of vocabulary already exists
      2. benefit is lowered if online flash card applications already exist.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, Presenter-Computer, projects, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Student-Computers, Vocabulary Tags: ,

First steps with the Sanako Study 1200 vocabulary test activity

2013/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. Click to watch an example below of the new (in version 6, we are now on 7) activity:”Vocabulary Test” which allows you to administer during a face-top-face-class just exactly what its name says –
  2. with these benefits:
    1. needing no paper,
    2. digital contents
      1. “can” and reuse past tests with ease
      2. TBA: can you swap target and source language?
    3. blending automated and teacher feedback:
      1. the example I give below is based on what the teacher gave me: single words and very short idiomatic expression.
      2. You can use longer phrases (I prefer teaching and studying vocabulary in context), but then it become increasingly unlikely that the automated feedback is accurate (The automated feedback is limited to exact, up to case-insensitive string matching – now distance metrics).
      3. You can override the automated feedback before sending the results back to the student. This is somewhat practical, since the submitting is fast and not all students will finish at the same time, and if you provided students with the follow up activity after submission, The teacher overriding the feedback gets unpractical in large classes, so it is recommended restricting the test to short source/target language pairs. Also be clear about or minimize punctuation and, if required, the format of other metalinguistic information  (gender, plural forms etc).
  3. Issues:
    1. not communicative, how can this be used or fitted in with other activities to make best use of a fully computerized face-to-face teaching environment?
    2. simplistic autocorrecting algorithm (case-insensitive, otherwise exact, right or wrong, my way or the highway” string matching)
    3. no tracking, no memory, personalization only via the other built-in Sanako personalization features (groups – to be left to the teacher to handle)
    4. no learning content – at least no vocabulary learning materials usable out of the box for us (TBA).
Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Learning-logs, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Student-Computers, Vocabulary Tags: ,

Wacom Bamboo Tablet enables Teacher to draw characters for class

2013/09/03 Leave a comment
  1. 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: image ,
      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: image
      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.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Speaking, Writing Tags: , ,