service-is-learning-materials-creation | Thomas' Work Space

MS Windows Media Encoder, your free audio and video encoding utility

2012/11/02 plagwitz Leave a comment

Benefits
1. Free
2. Can cut and convert
  1. video
    1. Makes screencasts also.
    2. can capture video
  2. audio
    1. including pause removal.
3. can stream
Limitation: Outputs only to MS media formats (WMA, WMV) (
Download here. There is also a 64-bit version.
1. Officially supported on
2. Windows 2000 and XP. I use it on Vista and Windows 7 (both 64-bit) also (for audio; no guarantees).
3. f I remember correctly, Windows Media Encoder has a built-in limit to support only up to 4 CPU cores, you may have to limit CPU usage if you run on more advanced hardware platforms).
a bit of config:
1. For good quality video and audio, put a prx file like this in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Components".
2. Put a wme file like this anywhere and start by double clicking the file, then press green “Record” button.

2012/10/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

For teacher (research, learning material production etc.) transcription tasks (as opposed to language learner tasks, for which we can use the Sanako),
if you have

no switch (foot pedal) hardware (which usually comes with its own software), :
no budget (a professional, but not free tool described here earlier is Swift-TX)

Simple enough, but functional for the occasional transcription task: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ebreck/code/sscriber/.
More oriented towards research and large-scale (corpora) transcriptions:

2012/10/23 plagwitz Leave a comment

Confronted with the need to have faculty classify my variable speed animated GIF collection of Mandarin characters linked from static HTML pages, I find:
SharePointDesigner is a FrontPage derivative, but still beats dealing with the special markup MS-Office tends to smuggle into your legacy web pages.
And you can download it for free from MS here, install and open a file by right-clicking it and “Open with”, like so: .
User then can e.g. select a pinyin word, right-click it, access the font-dialogue, like so: , and, to align this alphabetic pinyin list to the progression in the syllabus if the Chinese language program, assign a heat-scale like so: . E.g this would denote an easy character for Chinese 101: .
Note 1: Do not use SharePointDesigner 2010,, this doe not allow easy editing of single web pages anymore: .
Note 2: The CSS style markup that SharePointDesigner puts in smartly for the font color change is ignored by Internet Explorer 8 (Huh?!), so we will have to TBA:ask students to use Firefox instead.
Note3: Why not just use MS-Word as HTML-Editor. Even if you save as and choose “Web-page filtered, like so: , to avoid MS-Office specific markup, MS-word puts spurious markup in that makes it not only slow down the road to open the file, but also difficult to post-process them with regular expression (I have a few hundred copies to make for different animation speeds). Compare the file sizes here:

2012/10/18 plagwitz 2 comments

Problem: Oral exams with visual cues have been popular, but the Sanako Authoring Tool we used to create them has been faded out. How can we quickl replace it?
Workaround:

collect your files in my Word template (left part of screenshot) like before (question/cue, repetitions, response pause time), including your images
Save your MS-Word files as html.
This will create a subfolder with media (right-side of screenshot). All your images are numbered sequentially in the order they appear in your template. Some are duplicated: select the first ones (the duplicate is a size reduction), plus the unique ones, and copy them to a new folder, e.g. “pictures”, on the Sanako teacher share, somewhere underneath your course folder where also your audio exam files resides.

During the exam , you can display the pictures while playing the audio portion of your oral exam, from this folder sorted by name (= numbered sequentially) with the default teacher computer image viewer. No need even to fling out PowerPoint….

2012/10/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

Copy the RSS feed URL for an interesting tag and paste it here:

2012/10/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

To avoid having to manually find a segment of a YouTube video clip during presentations, or worse, downloading the video clips from YouTube before the presentation, to edit them into shape,
try using the “&t=”(for “time(line)”, I presume) query parameter, followed by “#m” (for minutes) and "##s” (for seconds) where the segment you want to show starts.
Example links that you can try inserting into your PowerPoint Slide deck:
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDngRk5vImU starts the movie clip Aicha part 1/10 from the beginning;
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDngRk5vImU&t=1m10s starts Aicha at 1 minute and 10 seconds;
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDngRk5vImU&t=5m10s starts Aicha at 5 minutes and 10 seconds.

2012/09/26 plagwitz Leave a comment

…comes now at least with “China price”. e-learning is not about digitizing, but in tape, you can get entangled. : –)

2012/09/25 plagwitz Leave a comment

To keep things simple (and, at least in our work environment, free) during smaller Animated GIF projects (larger projects may warrant use of ImageMagick, scriptable image editor), you can use
1. MS-OneNote screen clipping (configured right, it seems the fastest way to collect source material)
2. Update: I recommend now screenshotcaptor instead, if you do screenshot projects more than occasionally. MS-Paint (or pretty much any image editor) to mark up your images
3. IrfanView to batch convert to GIF:
4. UnFreez to easily create animated GIFs in differing speeds: , which can be automated.