all-languages | Thomas' Work Space

Protected: Slides for ARBC1201 Oral Exam

2012/11/28 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Arabic, audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, learning-materials, Slideshows, Speaking Tags: oral-exams

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

2012/11/26 plagwitz Leave a comment

“[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:
Weekly contact hours were cut in half (effectively doubling student numbers per teacher ) ,
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).
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
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.
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: emporium, flipped-classroom, hybrid-spanish, oral-exams, pilots, puntos-di-partido, sanako-study-1200, span120x

Use SharePointDesigner here to quickly and cleanly edit legacy static web pages

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:

Categories: audience-is-teachers, Back office, e-infrastructure, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Mandarin, service-is-learning-materials-creation, software, Writing Tags: MS-SharePoint-Designer

How to switch the input language in Respondus Lockdown browser, e.g. to Arabic

2012/10/23 plagwitz Leave a comment

Short answer:

Right-click the Language bar on the taskbar and choose “Restore the Language bar”, like so:
This makes the language bar a floating toolbar on top of the screen, like here: . This floating toolbar you can still access when in Lockdown browser.
The language bar can be temperamental, you may need to bring it up again, try switching back and forth between input fields.

Long Answer:

Respondus Lockdown browser blocks many functionalities, including the shortcut combination to change input languages (usually LEFT ALT + SHIFT) and access to the Language bar on the task bar.
This is not an issue when your quiz is in a western language and you have US- international keyboard layout configured as your default (which lets you type most Western diacritics without need for keys blocked by Respondus Lockdown browser )
It is an issue with e.g. Arabic. You cannot even temporarily set Arabic to your default input language before starting lockdown browser, since then you cannot log in (with MS Maren IME, you can override the Arabic default to enter your username in western characters, but not the password. Respondus Lockdown Browser is built on Internet Explorer, but it does not share the cookies, so being logged into your LMS in Internet Explorer does not carry over to your Lockdown Browser session).
Workaround: See above.

Categories: Arabic, audience-is-students, Farsi, Greek (ancient), Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Listening-Stations, lms, Mandarin, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, Spanish, Writing Tags: Respondus-lockdown -browser

Arabic LRC tutor training Fall 2012

2012/10/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

Categories: Arabic, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, Dictionaries, e-languages, Listening, Reading, service-is-tutoring, Speaking, training, Vocabulary, Writing

Ipatrainer.com community provides free phonetic transcription tables with sounds and exercises

2012/10/11 plagwitz Leave a comment

This is looking good, but …
1. There seem to be some coding issues, I am getting server errors 500 after registering.
2. The site is advertisement-based.
3. There is no content beyond the IPA sound which would put these bare basics in phonetics into language learning context and practice.
Site Contains:
1. tables for teaching your language – complete with phonetic symbols and sound samples
2. and exercises for your students (e.g. Memory games, Identifying characters , places, and sounds.
You can
1. Create your own, after free registration,
2. or assign one of the ones from many other teachers.
  1. Most popular ones are listed here: http://www.ipatrainer.com/user/site/?language=, and if the use numbers are accurate, there must be really some serious IPA learning going on here…
  2. I see no way to browse other tables without having the username of the teacher who created and assigned it.
There is also a phonetic writer.
And a user forum, in its infancy.

Categories: Arabic, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, learning-materials, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, Spanish, Speaking, Swahili, websites, Yoruba Tags: ipa, phonetics

MyGermanLab shortlinks and step-by-step chapter test for GERM1201, GERM1202 classes

2012/10/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

Using Internet Explorer, go here: goo.gl/JUSUC.
Log into MyGermanLab.
to open your test:
1. Click on the assignment for today on your assignment calendar to the right:
  1. if your test does not show as assignment in the calendar (Update for proctored make-up exam: this applies espeially to you), go to the top tab: “course materials”“. Hold the CTRL key and click on the assignment
    1. either in the list on the right or
    2. at the bottom in the list on the left.
1. Enter the password that you will be given during the exam in the LRC: , hold the CTRL key and click button: “OK”.
2. Click button: “start”.
3. Click through the pages until it tells you you have “submitted” the test.
to handle multimedia:
1. Use the headsets hanging behind the screens for questions that require listening/speaking.
2. When you load the audio player or audio recorder, you will see a dialogue like these, click button: ”Run” or “Trust”:
3. There is a step-by-step guide on how to record here.
4. If you get an error for the audio recorder saying “Authentication failed”, keep calm and carry on, your recording is not lost, you only cannot review it anymore:
5. If you have a question, do not disturb others. Rather put your headsets on and get in the queue by clicking button: “Call” in this window . Your call will be answered shortly.
Please be advised that this exam is
1. proctored and that your screen can be seen by the proctor at any time.
2. randomized, so that your neighbors’ screen will most likely display your current test question at a quite different time.