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How to use MS-Skydrive with your university account here

2012/11/29 Leave a comment
  1. One of the benefits of live@edu is institutional access to file storage space in the cloud. You need not set anything up for that. Just go to http://skydrive.com and log in with (1) your university account, here is what you get: Screenshot - 11_29_2012 , 5_01_18 PM
  2. You can create (or upload) folders and files (this one is from a long time ago, since I briefly could log in when live@edu was first introduced. Students always could log in).
  3. 7 GB of free space in the cloud should be plenty, including
    1. for teachers looking for a convenient way to bring files to the classroom beyond the limitations of the H: –drive “ My documents”
    2. for film students misplacing they backup hardware. No more hogging of checked out cameras just since you did not bring your portable hard drive. Just upload your clips to skydrive.com, access them from home.
  4. If you install the optional free Skydrive app (available ofr Windows Vista and up and MacOS X.7)
    1. the file size limit is expanded from 100MB to 2GB.
    2. files can be automatically synchronized between your classroom and home computer.
  5. To access files on classroom computers without the skydrive app, just use skydrive.com
Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, Film-studies, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-documenting Tags: ,

A classroom-management-system-based emporium to improve tutoring support for Hybrid Spanish students

2012/11/26 Leave a comment
  1. “[T]o bridge the gap between students’ demand for introductory Spanish courses and adequately staffing”, UNC-Charlotte – using, among others, a UNC-Chapel Hill pilot as a model, which, however, served a different student population and was soon faded out again – introduced a hybrid model for 1st year Spanish:
  2. Weekly contact hours were cut in half (effectively doubling student numbers per teacher ) ,
  3. and attempted to be replaced by more extensive assignment of homework exercises/quizzes from the online textbook component
    1. for lack of own technical resources (p.54), not that the components were designed for a hybrid purpose – but always nice to see language teachers adopt technology for ROI in creative ways when they have to.
    2. for the same reason of incapability of “adequately staffing”, so that teachers do not have to operate the computers, only those activities from the  online components were chosen that could be automatically graded (while the continued reliance of online quizzes on right/wrong black/white schemes instead of at least considering editing distance (maybe reasonably also for foreign language diacritics), not to mention attempts on a truly semantic understanding of student input, makes one wonder if this subset of assignments could effectively and should be left to auto grading).
  4. and other, auxiliary syllabus guidelines, like:
    1. taking more advantage of the online textbook component for
      1. heavier formative testing
      2. outcome testing
    2. requiring “oral testing administered two or three times a semester” (p.46, 64)
    3. increased focus on taking advantage of contact hours by communicating, what is now often deemed flipped classroom pedagogy and used to be called homework preparation
  5. tutoring,  for students that could not handle the cut in face-to-face time with teacher (note, tutors were from the grad student teacher pool – not all teachers were grad students)
    1. face-to-face:
    2. online, during off-hours (weekends):
      1. seems a welcome extension, and a convenient time-saver
      2. however,  little adoption
      3. additionally, hindered by a technology change from Wimba to Centra.
    3. also hybrid? The LRC
      1. could be host to an emporium like Virginia Tech’s: computerized for access to online assignments, but under tutor guidance;
      2. could provide the Sanako classroom management and digital audio lab system for making this learning experience even ore efficient. The tutor on teacher station can monitor many students (simultaneously or automatically cycling through student stations at an interval of choice, while stopping interactively where desired) via screen sharing. Interact with any student computer via remote control, with the student over headphones, without disrupting,
      3. easily escalate presentation of tutor or model student screen and audio discussion of endemic problems to either student group as a whole or subset (meaningful as long as 2 or more students overlap in their assignment activity and have similar issues) via the Sanako – and of course also use the classroom projector.
  6. Hybrid Spanish clearly constitutes a radical program change, dictated by shortness of funds and requiring measures to efficiency and effectiveness of instruction, upholding of standards, and management of attrition.
Categories: LRCRoomCoed434, Presenter-Computer, service-is-tutoring, Spanish, Student-Computers Tags: , , , , , , ,

Fall 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Clinic on creating teaching materials for use with the Sanako

2012/11/22 Leave a comment
      1. (Being planned and scheduled, therefore this post is a work in progress, please stay tuned: ).
      2. 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.
      3. 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.
Categories: announcements, audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, documentation, e-languages, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, learning-usage-samples, Listening, LRCRoomCoed434, Reading, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Speaking, workshops, Writing Tags: , ,

Fall 2012 Faculty Workshop I: Intermediate Sanako Teaching Techniques

2012/11/22 Leave a comment
  1. (Being planned and scheduled, therefore this post is a work in progress, please stay tuned: ).
  2. Using the Sanako classroom management system for training (“loop induction”),
  3. we will present learning usage models, based on the work done by our language teachers in the LRC Sanako this term.
  4. We will then provide you with hands-on practice how you can do the same with the Sanako system.
  5. This will hopefully give you some ideas for for writing LRC visits into your face-to-face teaching syllabus next term.
  6. 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.
  7. You can review our past Sanako Workshops (online screencast).
Categories: announcements, audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, documentation, e-languages, Listening, LRCRoomCoed434, Reading, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-training, Speaking, workshops, Writing Tags:

Sanako Light Recorder insert recording has no teacher track audio, but voice graph?

2012/11/19 Leave a comment
  1. UPDATE: We reinstalled and this time made sure we restarted the system, and voice-insert is working fine now.
  2. We are trying to introduce having teachers using the Sanako voice-insert feature to issue spoken feedback into student assessment recordings, since the Sanako Recorder makes voice-insert as easy as
    1. the (repeated) click of red “speak” button
    2. and a “save as” (default format MFF preferred).
  3. On a teacher computer, we recorded and saved as
    1. either MFF (fast for the teacher to save; we were hoping to have the students download the free Sanako light recorder to be able to play this format;
    2. or WMA.
  4. We tested playing back, and hear the student original audio recording, but could not hear the teacher insertion, no matter whether we tried
    1. in the Sanako light recorder
    2. or in Windows Media Player.
  5. Because of the proprietary formats, it is a bit difficult to troubleshoot this. Audacity won’t open either audio format.
  6. In the Sanako light recorder, we can see the audio inserted in the 2nd track (lower) in the voice graph: sanako light recorder no insert audio on 1 (2)sanako light recorder no insert audio on 1
  7. Is this a licensing restriction? No, even the free light recorder can do this. See here for the installation options to choose when running the studentrecorder.exe on the teacher computer.
  8. Investigating… Update:
    1. Must be demonstration effect, as voice insert works fine on my office computer, as expected and it had before.
    2. Will try the usual suspects when getting my hands on this computer again (refresh, restart, reinstall, replace hardware…)…
Categories: e-languages, Glitches&Errors, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: , , ,

How you can resolve Enterprise Library 5 Visual Studio 2012 error: "Could not locate the Enterprise Library binaries required to launch the configuration console"

2012/11/17 3 comments
  1. When right-clicking on my App.config to access the Enterprise Library configuration tool, I kept getting this error:entlib5install2
  2. after installing
    1. VS.net 2012;
    2. Enterprise library 5.0.414 through nuget (why does nuget install only this older version?);
    3. the unofficial Enterprise Library Extension vsix updated for VS.net 2012 published by the Enterprise Library team here.
  3. What fixed this error for me was (YMMV, November 2012):
    1. installing Enterprise Library 5.0 optional update 1 (=5.0.515) using this approach:
      • msiexec /i "Enterprise Library 5.0.msi" REINSTALLMODE=vomus REINSTALL=ALL
    2. – Adding to the vs.net 2012 SLN file, at the end of "Global" (immediately before "EndGlobal")
      • GlobalSection(ExtensibilityGlobals) = postSolution
        EnterpriseLibraryConfigurationToolBinariesPath = C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0\Bin
        EndGlobalSection
        entlib5install
Categories: documentation, Glitches&Errors, service-is-programming Tags: , , ,

Language Lab Emailer, new software to integrate the digital audio lab and classroom management system into the language teaching and learning workflow

2012/11/15 Leave a comment

image

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, compiledcode, digital-audio-lab, service-is-programming Tags: , ,

Language Lab Emailer: First test batch…

2012/11/14 Leave a comment

first test batch in owa

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-programming Tags: , ,