Archive
How students can record their picture or photo presentations with PowerPoint 2010
- The screencast shows the necessary steps:
- inserting a photo album,
- presenting while recording the presentation with narration
- saving as a show (.ppsx) – make sure you have ribbon:”Slide show”/ “Play narrations” checked:
- to prepare an assignment for a Moodle single-file-upload (How a student takes a Moodle Simple file upload assignment).
How to use MS-Skydrive with your university account here
- 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:
- 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).
- 7 GB of free space in the cloud should be plenty, including
- for teachers looking for a convenient way to bring files to the classroom beyond the limitations of the H: –drive “ My documents”
- 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.
- If you install the optional free Skydrive app (available ofr Windows Vista and up and MacOS X.7)
- the file size limit is expanded from 100MB to 2GB.
- files can be automatically synchronized between your classroom and home computer.
- To access files on classroom computers without the skydrive app, just use skydrive.com
Sanako Light Recorder insert recording has no teacher track audio, but voice graph?
- UPDATE: We reinstalled and this time made sure we restarted the system, and voice-insert is working fine now.
- 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
- the (repeated) click of red “speak” button
- and a “save as” (default format MFF preferred).
- On a teacher computer, we recorded and saved as
- 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;
- or WMA.
- We tested playing back, and hear the student original audio recording, but could not hear the teacher insertion, no matter whether we tried
- in the Sanako light recorder
- or in Windows Media Player.
- Because of the proprietary formats, it is a bit difficult to troubleshoot this. Audacity won’t open either audio format.
- In the Sanako light recorder, we can see the audio inserted in the 2nd track (lower) in the voice graph:
- 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.
- Investigating… Update:
- Must be demonstration effect, as voice insert works fine on my office computer, as expected and it had before.
- Will try the usual suspects when getting my hands on this computer again (refresh, restart, reinstall, replace hardware…)…
How to mix SANAKO- recorded individual students’ audio tracks together
- If the students’ audio tracks are not already time-aligned, first use audacity: "time shift tool" to align individual tracks
(with this tool selected, you can move individual tracks back and forth, to the left or right). - If/ When they are time-aligned, use audacity/ menu: tracks/"stereo track to mono".
Example 7: Exercise dictating in German to an LRC Windows 7 computer
How can we get language students more speaking practice with qualified, but affordable feedback ? Native speaker contact remains difficult to organize even in the days of online conferencing. The LRC hosts language tutoring, but numbers are limited. Enter speech recognition, the holy grail of iCALL, much easier for learners to relate to than the voice graph that digital audio can be broken down to, and thus for a long time a standout feature of costly second-language-acquisition packages like Auralog Tell-me-More (speech recognition in English tested here) – but now the LRC has Windows 7 Enterprise (and its free add-on language packs), and another crucial prerequisite: headphones with excellent microphones.
We are setting up the new Windows 7 computers in the LRC to allow for speech recognition in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. Here is an example of me using this facility for a practicing my German during a dictation exercise:
Granted, German is my native tongue; but the example text is from the online component for the final chapter of the “Treffpunkt Deutsch” 1st-year textbook in use here, which sends the readers to the website of the Swiss (-German) employment agency.
Apart from infrequent words ("Archiven") and Lehnwörtern ("Bachelor" etc.), Windows 7 speech recognition accuracy seems quite impressive. The above example was actually my first dictation, except that immediately beforehand, I invested a few minutes into the standard Windows 7 speech recognition training (aimed at training the user, although may behind the scenes teach the computer a few things about the speaker already also) and a few more minutes of voice training (this one is meant exclusively for the computer, but the user can also see it fail and why). The – rather simple trick to boost speech recognition results – certainly accessible to our students – seems to be to speak not only clearly, but also slowly, with short pauses between most words.
Speech recognition in these languages is a feature of the Windows 7 (Enterprise/Ultimate version) “language packs” that we installed and switched to – that is why the entire computer interface appears in German. Practicing the L2 with (computer—operating) “voice commands” (instead of with a mouse) is also possible, simpler than replacing the keyboard (mostly) by voice, but not as easy to devise homework exercises for.
Tips for designing exercises using speech recognition: As the example shows ("Archiven") , doing all corrections by voice can quickly become tedious. But there is no pedagogical need to have your students’ bang their heads against this wall. Instead, just ask your students to correct their automatically recognized words manually at the end of their video, after their dictation. This way both you and your students get a clear summary of what they achieved – even clearer if they dictate in MS-Word with the spell and grammar check for the language (automatic with the switch to the language pack for the language) and (using key combination CTRL+SHIFT+E) track changes. We will show you later TBA:how we now enable students to easily record their screen and TBA:upload their screencast into Moodle Kaltura.
SOLVED: How to record, in Adobe-Flash, video from my built-in iSight web camera on an 2010 iMac, combined with sound from an external cs100 PnP USB audio device
- Problem : Our new campus-wide Moodle Kaltura installation enables authentic oral proficiency examinations (we have no other Moodle Plugin for audio recordings). However, we still have no webcams on our mainstay PCs. We do have a few iMacs with built-in iSight webcams, but for providing students more privacy during their assignments in the language resource center, we need headphones. We have for spare some old headphones which we would like to use up, but they are analogue. These iMacs do not have an analog headset connector, only a line-in which would require a preamp. We have good sturdy USB headsets from Sanako, but these are too expensive to purchase for the iMacs that have no ways to secure them and little other specialized language learning use which we do not already get from the PCs (and more…).
- Workaround :
- Try an inexpensive USB audio device that has 3.5mm analog headset inputs.
- On my iMac 2010
- If in system preferences / sound/ I direct input and output to the USB PnP device
- test passes playing system sounds
- in audacity (if you CRANK the microphone sensitivity to the max!)
- recording test passes: The headset loudspeakers and micro work (not well, but they work, as a tab on the microphone indicate: there is static, and the recording volume is still softish, but better than the built in webcam microphone)
- in Kaltura,
- Flash only brings up the security dialogue (in Safari 5 and current Firefox ESR and Chrome) for allowing the web application accessing to the built-in iSight web camera, but no options to choose a separate audio device
- However, if you control-click on Flash’s a video preview window for the web camera, and click on “settings” (not “global settings”, although that is useful for always allowing access from certain URLs like your LMS) .
- Click on the microphone icon :
- Make sure the USB PnP device is selected.
- You can bring up the settings dialogue, make sure the USB PnP device is chosen for audio and CRANK up the microphone input sensitivity! Then test the volume levels with the built-in volume meter (should show lots of green bars when you speak. You may have to adjust the Califone headset microphone arm so that the microphone is very close in front of your mouth. ) Unlike in the picture, do not choose “reduce echo ”.
- Remaining
- Questions :
- Can this sensitivity setting be permanently stored for all users in the iMac software image, or do our students always have to adjust the microphone sensitivity?
- It remains to be seen whether this inexpensive and unsecurable device survives long when being used by our student population.
- Problem : The review video function of the Moodle Kaltura Flash video remains very temperamental on the Mac OS X (In my testing, one of the numerous problems we had with Moodle Kaltura on the iMacs popped up again: when starting to review the recording, the time counter goes, but the video stalls for a few seconds – afterwards everything seems to play fine, but this is enough to confuse the heck out of my users) . While we made another small step of progress towards enabling Moodle Kaltura webcam recordings in the language resource center, it seems easier to just get web cameras for the PCs.
- Questions :
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Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
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