German | Thomas' Work Space

Deutsche Welle ends her live German program streaming today

2011/10/29 plagwitz 5 comments

Too bad:

And in those last news: “The Chinese government demands reforms in the Euro-zone before providing financial help”.

I remember a time when Deutsche Welle was available during family vacation only via short wave radio. Now, the on-demand offerings of the Deutsche Welle will be expanded. They are more useful for language learning than live streaming anyway.

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, German, Media Tags: dwelle, links, radio

Sample of how students use the foreign language TTS (text-to-speech) in the LRC

2011/10/21 plagwitz Leave a comment

Last week, I noticed this student in the LRC working on a speaking assignment in her SLA class. First, she wrote a draft of her presentation. She then had the Deskbot TTS wizard (in the lower right of her screen) read out the draft to her. She recorded her version, modeling after the Deskbot’s pronunciation. Then she had the Deskbot read out the draft again, to compare with her own recording.

Look for the little guy in the lower right corner of the screen with the cartoon bubble over his head.

I favor the use of the Deskbot TTS (a Windows XP technology) as an easily accessible speaking dictionary, including during face-to-face teaching, when students may otherwise be too shy to make an utterance because they are not sure about the pronunciation of a single word, or even ask the teacher to pronounce it for them. Prosodically, the deskbot TTS leaves many things to be desired. Let’s hope that Windows 7 will enable us to set up more advanced TTS support in the LRC.

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, English, French, German, Intermediate, Italian, Japanese, Korean, learning-usage-samples, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, software, Spanish, Speaking, Videos Tags: deskbot, text-to-speech

German public TV on the internet

2011/10/06 plagwitz Leave a comment

http://www.ardmediathek.de/

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek

http://dwelle.de

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, German, learning-materials, Listening, websites Tags: ard, deutsche-welle, tv, video, zdf

DeReWo German Word Frequency Lists

2011/09/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

Frequency-based word (lemma and forms) lists and instructions are based on the Deutsche Referenzkorpus DeReKo of the IDS (Institut für deutsche Sprache).

If you are not bound by a textbooEditk:

Frequency level 1-9 contain the 550 most frequent words = 1st term?
Frequency level 1-10 = about 1200 words = 1st year?

An online spreadsheet of the 40k list of 2009 with frequency level comparison and English-German dictionary links is here and partially embedded below.

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, German, Spreadsheets, Vocabulary Tags: lists, word-frequencies, word-lists

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

2011/09/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

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
  3. Additional support is available through the campus Moodle support team.
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.
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.
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: audacity, audio, oral-exams, sanako-study-1200, voicethread

How a Student takes a Moodle Video Assignment in the LRC

2011/09/22 plagwitz 2 comments

On one of the LRC iMacs, in the Safari web browser (open new window with COMMAND-key+n),
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:
Note that she will also have to allow the flash player to interact with her webcam first.
If you see no web cam video window, only a black frame, read in.
In the submission window, choose the tab “Webcam” (1), use the dropdown to select the camera hardware (2).
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 :
- 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, 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 ”.
Start (3) the video recording.
Afterwards, the student can review (4) her submission.
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.
Click through all the “Next”etc. buttons:
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).
3. Note, it warns you to be patient now:
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: audio, kaltura, moodle, recording, video

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

2011/07/20 plagwitz 1 comment

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.
Teachers, when editing their Moodle course, can find this assignment type in the dropdown: Activity as “Video”.
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.
An example of guiding questions for a recording assignment is here (topic: holiday, language: German):
Here is how the teacher sees the student submission in the gradebook.
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:
For the student experience, see here.
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.
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).
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.
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: audio, kaltura, moodle, pilots, recording, video, windows-movie-maker

UNCC LRC Language Placement Test: Web-CAPE Online Placement Exam Step-by-Step

2011/06/08 plagwitz 1 comment

“The Online Placement Exam is designed to help you determine the first course you should take, based on your ability. This multiple-choice [no speaking, listening or writing required] exam presents questions of different ability levels, adapting the next question’s level according to your answers. The number of questions you will be required to complete depends upon your ability to use the language. The duration of the test varies, but it usually takes 15-20 minutes to complete [but can be finished after only 4 questions, and we will give you up to an hour time to complete the exam]”.
The proctored exam takes place in the LRC (COED434). The exam schedule is published in the LRC COED434 calendar. Read more on how to view the LRC calendar from within the new NINERMAIL.
When taking the exam during the proctored session in the language center [do not take the exam on your own], to sign up for the test, you have to go to: https://www.aetip.com/student/RegisterStudent.cfm (note: the “s” behind “http” is required), this now forwards to:https://www.perpetualworks.com/secure/register/student/, for which sthe shortcut is: http://goo.gl/PBjhhS:
First chose UNCC (Avoid the common error of choosing another University of the UNC system, you will not be able to take the test if you do):
Then choose your language – note that UNCC only allows testing in French, German and Spanish.
Fill out the other form fields with your information.
Finally, you need one of these credit cards, and the proper billing info, to take the test:
Next, you will have to enter your NINERNET student id number.
The exam results will eventually go to your file. However, they will have to be post-processed by the department. Do not take the exam without coordinating with the Department of Language and Culture Studies, or else your exam results will get lost!
Remember that you can repeat the placement test, even though the number of retries per languages is limited to two (your score will get invalidated after that!).
Remember also that is not advisable to study for (let alone cheat during) a placement exam, or else you will get placed into a course that is not right for you.