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Speaking/Listening Assessments and Oral Exams: A comparison what the LRC has to offer

2011/09/22 Leave a comment
  1. Moodle:
    1. I proposed for installing one of the free audio recorder plug-ins into our Moodle, but we are not there yet.
    2. However, we do have a new video recording assignment (which is based on Kaltura).
      1. Format: free form, according to your written instructions in the assignment. Students can review and repeat the recording as often as they wish.
      2. The video overhead is minimal since it is streamed, and video is better for authentic language assessments – unless you specifically prepare your students for phone interviews: then just have students step out of the viewing angle of the webcam).
      3. thanks to Moodle, the familiar interface and the underlying LMS support infrastructure, it is easy
        1. for the teacher
          1. to create and assign a video-assignment
          2. to grade it from the gradebook
        2. for the students to take it and submit it.
      4. LRC Support:
      1. Since our PCs have no built-in or added webcam (proposed), we can currently only use our 5 iMacs for Moodle video assignments. Since the MACs do not have headsets (but built-in microphones), the audio quality is not as good as on the PCs. Since 5 seats are not sufficient for class-size activities/exams, it is best to use this as a homework assignment  
      2. I list all necessary steps for a video assignment
        1. here for teachers
        2. here for students.
        3. all my Kaltura posts
      3. Additional support is available through the campus Moodle support team.
  2. Sanako
    1. Sources

      1. Dual-track comparative recorder:

        1. the teacher can prepare an input track (or provide one live. Preparing is easy, and worth your while, since easily reusable. I can help you)).
        2. the students records on her own track

      2. Pair  and group recording:

        1. Sanako makes it easy to pair or form groups of students and to record free-form conversations.
        2. These recordings can be either controlled remotely by the teacher or locally by the user
    2. Control
      1. Remote-controlled recording under exam conditions,
        1. responding to a listening cue within a preset (or live) pause in the teacher track
          1. model&imitation:  for phonetics and pronunciation exercises,
          2. question&response for a wide variety of activities as commonly used in SLA textbooks and classroom, including practicing grammar structures or vocabulary recently
          3. question&response&model response: the teacher can also include after the pause in the teacher track a model answer for the students to compare their own output to.
        2. automatically saved with student names to be accessed from the teacher office desktop
        3. easy comparative grading using Audacity (see below)
    3. User-controlled recording is also possible, using the student recorder in manual operation mode
      1. which has more language learner features (bookmarks, voice graph, dual band recording), and  a simpler  interface than a full blown audio editor like Audacity (see below).
      2. The task how to save and sent the assignment to the teacher is here left to the user.
    4. LRC support:
    1. I can help you
      1. creating an audio recording with your content and speaking cues and pauses – using Audacity (see below)
      2. conducting the remote-controlled exam
    2. Up to 20 seats can take an oral exam simultaneously, until we get more Sanako licenses. However, we  found a way to split classes into 2 halves and have consecutive exams (we can play audio on the other students’ headsets to provide for exam conditions). The LRC main classroom is equipped with 30 seats for 2 consecutive exams with Sanako headsets.
  3. Voicethread is a popular online recorder, especially  for educational institutions that have no onsite support.
    1. Visual and audio cues can be provided by the teacher.
    2. Pairing of students has been attempted via sharing and responding/commenting to the partner’s submission. This is not a realistic conversation.
    3. Recordings are stored in the cloud.
    4. There is no integration with the SIS (accounts – getting students set up with accounts that can communicate back with the teacher is a challenge) and LMS (the Moodle integration is superficial). 
    5. Voicethread is not free. The ELTI, however, has a subscription. LCS does not.
    6. LRC Support:
      1. We support Voicethread exercises with new and improved headsets.
      2. Help is available through the vendor.
  4. Audacity:
    1. for teachers and LRC staff and other language professionals:
      1. best free audio editor, also good for comparative grading. I routinely make my audio exam recordings with Audacity.
      2. LRC support: I have tips and tricks how you can use it in your teaching preparation and grading.
    2. for language learners: not the recommended option, since Audacity has not a feature set geared towards language learning nor support for language assessment workflows:  
      1. Language learners do no need an audio editor for speaking exercises, they need a recorder. If you are a language learner, it is not pedagogical to be able to technically edit and refine your audio recording. Rather rehearse, reflect on and repeat your audio recording, until you are happy with your language output.
      2. Audacity is too technical: It involves too many steps, options and settings for the students to record, save, export and name the audio and to get it to the teacher, and (if it is not uploaded into a Moodle assignment, which could then be a Kaltura  assignment anyway, see above), too tedious for the teacher to manage and grade files.

      3. LRC Support:

        1. If your students are technically inclined, we do have Audacity installed in the LRC.
        2. Your students should not find it difficult to read the documentation. Here are my posts on Audacity.
Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Listening, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking Tags: , , , ,

How a Student takes a Moodle Video Assignment in the LRC

2011/09/22 2 comments
  1. On one of the LRC iMacs, in the Safari web browser (open new window with COMMAND-key+n),
  2. go to your Moodle course, (1) find the video Assignment, read the assignment instructions (what your teacher wants  you to record). Then click underneath the  (2) button: “Add video Assignment”, to open the (3) submission window:  moodle-add-video-submission
  3. Note that she will also have to allow the flash player to interact with her webcam first.
  4. kaltura_thumb1 If you see no web cam video window, only a black frame, read in.
  5. In the submission window, choose the tab “Webcam” (1), use the dropdown to select the camera hardware (2). moodle-kaltura-webcam-tab-camera-dropdown
  6. Check the headset microphone audio: The external headset microphone on the iMacs did not work., but now it does, provided you do this: control-click on Flash’s a video preview window (= the window where you see yourself like in a mirror) for the  web camera, and click on “settings”.
    •  
    • Click on the microphone icon :
    • CIMG0021
    • Make sure the USB PnP  device is selected.
    • CIMG0022
    • 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, by tabbing (don’t speak yet) on the headset microphone, test the volume levels with the built-in volume meter (should  show lots of green bars when you tab). Unlike in the picture, do not choose “reduce echo ”.

    student-recording-CIMG0015_thumb1

  7. Start (3) the video recording.
  8. Afterwards, the student can review (4) her submission.
  9. If you don’t like your first recording, (3) “record” over it and review again with (4) “Play”. If you do this and the video appears frozen, drag the timeline cursor forward to get the re-recorded video to play. If this does not seem to work, you are likely still able to submit your 2nd attempt, just not review it again.  kaltura-timeline-drag-me1
  10. Click through all the “Next”etc. buttons:
    1.  pauline-moodle-kaltura-next3 pauline-moodle-kaltura-next4CIMG0070CIMG0071
    2. until you get to the feedback page for the student (caveat: in IE9, the video does not fit into the frame provided on the page). student-assignment-result
    3. Note, it warns you to be patient now: kaltura-teacher-upload-student-upload-combineda
  11. LRC support:
    1. Depending on your hardware (webcam), software and network support, you can record your language speaking video assignments on any device that has a webcam and a browser that supports flash – and even more devices, if you are willing to post process and upload the video clip.
    2. If you run into problems or want to use a tested setup, we recommend using the LRC. Since our PCs have no built-in or added webcam (proposed), we can currently only use our 5 8 iMacs (see LRC Layout, see Classroom Calendar and iMacs Calendar for availability). Our (limited) tests worked better in Safari than Firefox.
Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-students, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, step-by-step-guides Tags: , , , ,

Successful test of the new streaming video recording assignment for language proficiency assessment in Moodle.

2011/07/20 1 comment
  1. Video recordings allow for a more authentic assessment of spoken language proficiency. Today, we could test a new Moodle video assignment type for Almut’s Summer II Elementary German II class: Preparing a natural sounding statement on one’s favorite holiday. This Moodle assignment type is an extension to students of the teacher video upload tool using a service Kaltura – we hinted at that earlier.
  2. Teachers, when editing their Moodle course,  can find this assignment type in the dropdown: Activity as “Video”. dropwdown-activity
  3. The assignment options: Note that creating a video assignment is pretty much the same as creating other assignments in Moodle, and so is grading, except instead of reading, you view the submission, right within the web page.  kaltura-assignment-options
  4. An example of guiding questions for a recording assignment is here (topic: holiday, language: German): moodle-video-assignment-guiding-questions
  5. Here is how the teacher sees the student submission in the gradebook.
  6. kaltura (1)
  7. teacher-grading-roster-CIMG0021
  8. Caveat: in Safari, we were not able to close the video popup, after viewing it from the class roster, and could only back out of the entire gradebook. Instead, from the roster, first open the page with the individual student submission, and review the video there on that page:
  9. teacher-grading-CIMG0027
  10. For the student experience, see here.
  11. Further reading: The CTL has a number of step-by-step instructions which we recommend for further reading: Student Video Assignment, and specifically for students: Upload a Video for a Video Assignment; for instructors: Grading Video Assignment Submissions.
  12. The LRC had originally prepared to record the students with our old, handheld mini-DV cameras, import the movie into iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, then find a way to get the files (with easily identifiable submitter names) to the teachers. Hitherto, our best option was compression of the video to to fit into the Moodle 64MB file upload size limit  (which, even if you decide to shoot and produce your video elsewhere and bring it as an uploadable  file to the assignment , does not apply to the Video assignment either).
  13. Preliminary testing seems to indicate that video recording of pairs/dialogues is also possible with the LRC’s webcam setup . However, because of the angle restrictions, capturing such sessions will be less natural.
  14. Overall, the new Moodle video assignment seems a major improvement for  all parties – students, teachers and support –, and can help with more authentic assessment of
Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking Tags: , , , , , ,

Free Farsi Proofing Tools available: VafaSpellchecker

2011/07/18 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, the VafaSpellchecker Proofing Tools are now not available anymore for Office 2010. The links to the Office 2010 on the website have been broken for a long time, the developer seems to have left the university, the project manager has not answered my inquiry. Here is hoping they will be resurrected.

Even though proofing tools are neither designed for non-native language learners nor, traditionally, used  in a pedagogically sound way by language learners without proper guidance, they form one of the greatest opportunities to apply advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to second language acquisition (SLA) tasks, given that they are a widely installed and commonly understood artificial intelligence providing automated feedback on natural language issues.

The management and licensing of proofing tools has been much improved since MS-Office 2007 which made it easier (and cheaper) to install modular proofing support for additional languages distributed as Language Packs.

However, in an SLA context, even this may still not be a convincing value proposition, whether for the personal computers of individual student learners, or even – due to apparent the lack of concurrent licensing options within proofing tools –   for Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) in an imaged computer lab environment (in our case, we would need to purchase 45 licenses à $25 before tax for a language that may have about half as many learners or less).

All the more welcome are  freely downloadable add-ons- – thanks to the MS-Office platform extensibility – the VafaSpellchecker, a Persian Spell&grammar and real-word error checking system by the Natural Language and Text Processing Laboratory in University of Tehran, funded by Iranian Research Institute for ICT, available for both MS-Office 2003 and 2007. A VafaSpellchecker user guide (in Farsi) is also available.

VafaSpellchecker

As always with NLP in SLA, caveat emptor, use with a grain of salt, or two.

Categories: e-languages, Farsi, office-software, software Tags: ,

Keyboard overlay stickers improve foreign character writing support in the LRC

2011/06/17 1 comment

Some non-western, but character-based languages benefit from having keyboard overlay stickers installed. Here is a list of what the LRC has:

Amount Languages installed@
3 Arabic 1 list. station, 2 rightmost computers in the front row of the left (teacher perspective) half of the main classroom
2 Farsi 2 rightmost computers in the middle row of the left (teacher perspective) half of the main classroom
1 Greek 1 list. station
3 Russian 1 list. station, 2 rightmost computers of the rear row of the left (teacher perspective) half of the main classroom

Here are photos of the Arabic and Cyrillic keyboards:

lrc-arabic-keyboardslrc-russian-cyrillic-keyboards

We installed the stickers, so that they reflect the software layout of the keyboard that you get when choosing the respective language from the international toolbar. Note that the letters marked in red on the Cyrillic keyboard picture below are not supported by the Russian keyboard layout:

 russian-keyboard-stickers-ukrainian

Since only one set can be added to any existing physical keyboard, the teacher computer keyboard can not have an overlay. The student computers with overlays are the listening stations and computers 6,7,12,13,18,19 on the LRC layout map.

Remember that the On-screen-keyboard software remains accessible at all PC’s through clicking “Start”, “Run”, typing “OSK”, clicking "OK".

Example where you can get your own keyboard overlay stickers. 

Categories: Arabic, audience-is-students, e-languages, Farsi, Greek (ancient), Greek (modern), Russian, student-computers, Writing Tags: , ,

Protected: How to conduct an easy oral exam with Sanako1200 (Model imitation/Question Response) – Part II: Implementation/instruction of examined students

2011/05/04 Enter your password to view comments.

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Categories: all-languages, Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hindi, Institution-is-Aston-University, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, learning-materials, learning-usage-samples, Mandarin, multimedia-recording, Polish, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Russian, Spanish, Speaking, Student-Computers, Swahili, Videos, Yoruba Tags: , , ,

Foreign Language Character Input on Windows XP in the LRC

2011/04/14 1 comment

The LRC offers the following foreign language characters writing support:

American English us international not needed us-int
Arabic Google;MS;MS-maren;fontboard maybe later, now osk demo
British English us international not needed us-int
Dutch us international not needed us-int
Farsi Google;MS maybe later, now osk demo
French us international not needed us-int
German us international not needed us-int
Greek Google;MS maybe later, now osk demo
Italian us international not needed us-int
Japanese MS not needed
Korean MS maybe later, now osk demo
Mandarin MS;pinyinput not needed pinyin
Portuguese (Brazilian) us international not needed us-int
Russian Google;MS maybe later, now osk demo
Spanish us international not needed us-int

The support is best accessed from the “international toolbar”, like so: lrc-international-keyboards-cropped

You can also use the windows on-screen keyboard to input non-Western characters on a computer that has not the corresponding keyboard overlay stickers. In the small-group workspaces, which have writing pads, you can also use the MS-Handwriting IME for East-Asian languages.

Categories: Arabic, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-languages, Farsi, French, German, Greek (ancient), Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Presenter-Computer, Russian, Screencasts, small-group-work-spaces, Spanish, Student-Computers, Writing Tags: , , , ,

How to: Send email with non-western (e.g. Japanese) characters in Outlook Web Access (e.g. 2003, e.g. from Safari)

2011/04/01 Leave a comment
  1. If your emails with Japanese sent from Safari arrive with unreadable characters (squares or question marks, meaning the recipient’s computer cannot decode how to display the character your computer sent), you may have set your browser to the wrong characterr encoding.
  2. However, the encoding Unicode (e.g. UTF-8) can handle both western and .
  3. Simply go to Safari (similarly in other browsers)/ Preferences / Appearances / Default Encoding and change to UTF-8, like so:
  4. charinput-japanese-outlook-owa-2003-utf8-sender1
  5. charinput-japanese-outlook-owa-2003-utf8-sender2
  6. charinput-japanese-outlook-owa-2003-utf8-sender3
  7. This has been tested to work already from/to OWA 2003.
  8. charinput-japanese-outlook-owa-2003-utf8-recipient4
  9. However, for your reference, here a matrix of imminent upgrades of email clients on your computer and the corresponding university server software:

When?

Your office computer

recommended?

Any computer (travel, home)

University server

mac

pc

 

soon

Outlook 2011

Outlook 2010

is better than

Outlook web access 2010

Exchange 2010

recommended?

is better than

is better than

 

is better than

is better than

now

Entourage (limited support for Exchange)

Outlook 2007

is better than

Outlook web access 2003

Exchange 2003
Categories: Arabic, e-infrastructure, Farsi, Glitches&Errors, Greek (modern), Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian