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How to speed up jumping around YouTube videos in class with YouTubeCenter

2013/08/27 Leave a comment
  1. Problem: When you use – that is to say: analyze – YouTube video clips in a classroom setting – whether in Film studies or second language acquisition classes –, you will find yourself jumping around a lot in these clips. This can be slow and enter a lot of undesirable little interruptions into your teaching (or learning) flow.
  2. Root cause: Since pedagogical use is not the primary use case for YouTube videos, their download configuration defaults to streaming, which preloads the video only a few seconds ahead of the cursor or playhead.
  3. Solution:
      1. If you want to buffer or preload the entire YouTbue video clip before examining it in your class, you can install a browser add-on called YouTubeCenter.
      2. Here is more on how to install YouTubeCenter.
      3. No configuration necessary, ”Dash Playback” which buffers videos completely locally, is the default setting.
Categories: all-languages, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-learning, Film-studies, service-is-configuring-learning-tools Tags: ,

YouTube Center, a power user extension for your video usage in class

2013/08/27 Leave a comment
  1. YouTubeCenter comes for a variety of browsers, but note that Firefox seems the only practically supportable browser in our campus computing environment.
  2. To download and install, go to : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/youtube-center/ and click on:image
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  6. There is not shortage of settings (e.g. preselected is the Dash Playback, useful to speed up jumping around a video, by disabling streaming):  image
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Categories: all-languages, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Film-studies, reviews, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, software-old, web-browsers, websites Tags: ,

Freely downloadable samples from the IPA Phonetics Handbook

2013/08/21 Leave a comment
  1. This handbook provides audio pronunciation samples (in WAV) for many different languages. While they are more useful in conjunction with the book, they also can be searched by filename (= the pronounced word in English translation).
  2. We make these file accessible in the LRC on the Sanako share (S:\COAS\LCS\LRC\media\TUTOR\phonetics\ipa-phonetics-handbook\). Here are the languages included:.
    1. American-English
    2. Amharic
    3. Arabic
    4. Bulgarian
    5. Cantonese
    6. Catalan
    7. Croatian
    8. Czech
    9. Dutch
    10. French
    11. Galician
    12. German
    13. Hausa
    14. Hebrew
    15. Hindi
    16. Hungarian
    17. Igbo
    18. Irish
    19. Japanese
    20. Korean
    21. Persian
    22. Portuguese
    23. Sindhi
    24. Slovene
    25. Swedish
    26. Thai
    27. Turkish
Categories: Arabic, e-languages, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, learning-materials, Mandarin, Portuguese Tags: ,

Protected: McGraw-Hill Connect Online Textbook Teacher Links

2013/08/20 Enter your password to view comments.

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Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, Documents, e-languages, Spanish

Demo of Puntos de partida on the McGraw-Hill Connect online platform for Hybrid Spanish teachers

2013/08/17 Leave a comment
  1. For your review:
  2. Highlights:
    1. Learnsmart: adaptive learning content that asks for and tracks for the teacher and adapts for the student to students metacognitive confidence about her knowledge before testing it
    2. In a flipped classroom setting, highest failure areas in the online learning results can be easily seen by the teacher to adapt the next class meeting.
Categories: assignments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, grading, Screencasts, service-is-documenting, Spanish, textbooks, training, websites, workshops Tags: , , ,

Example 6: How even a false beginner can work with foreign language Speech recognition on Windows 7 Enterprise

2013/08/14 Leave a comment
  1. Executive summary: Don’t let initial poor speech recognition results discourage your from using this feature. Results will much improve if you go through a few minutes of the built-in voice training for speech recognition. Like in the last 30 seconds of this video.
  2. With the upgrade to Windows 7 Enterprise in the LRC – and the continued availability of high-quality Sanako headphones on the majority of LRC PCs – , we can now offer speech recognition in a number of foreign languages – including French.
  3. This feature can be used for language learning exercises, including dictation, like in this example. How robust is windows 7 speech recognition?
  4. You can expose yourself to some embarrassingly bad French in this screencast – and that is the point. (My French is limited to a mere 2 high school years of 3-hour per week voluntary French studies, more than 30 years ago, no practice since).
  5. The screencast shows how even a (false) beginner can,
    1. 0:00-1:00: from terrible initial results,
    2. 11:45-12:10: considerably improve (not make perfect!) the foreign language (here French) speech recognition on Windows 7,
    3. 1:00-10:40: by going through the built-in voice training.
  6. The LRC computers are “frozen”between reboots, but students still need to train them only once, since they can back up and restore their training data easily.
  8. (This is not proof of the overall validity of the recognition – for that, you are better off watching this screencast with Windows 7 Enterprise speech recognition in German).
Categories: assignments, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, French, Operating-system, Screencasts, Speaking Tags: ,

Protected: How to configure the LangLabEmailer for your school, and share back

2013/06/07 Enter your password to view comments.

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Categories: Arabic, assessments, assignments, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, compiledcode, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, service-is-programming, Spanish, Speaking, Swahili, Writing, Yoruba Tags: ,

Introducing the LangLabEmailer

2013/06/04 Leave a comment
  1. The LangLabEmailer helps integrating the digital audio lab (still widely operating based on files and network shares)  into the departmental language teaching and learning process by automatically forwarding  (audio, text) assessments and assignments collected in the digital audio lab to teachers and students via campus mail (using MS-Exchange automation).
    1. Easy on the Language Lab Manager who can "set up and forget": 1000s of assessment files will reach their originating students and teachers in near real time without you lifting a finger.
    2. To earn "extra credit", show your teachers how they can override the default LangLabEmailer behavior by adding “_noemailing” or “_nostudentemailing” to the folder name when saving their digital audio lab collections.
  2. Status of the language lab and purpose of the software
  3. Features
  4. Prerequisites
  5. Downloading
  6. Installing
  7. Configuring (and sharing back)
  8. Running or scheduling
  9. End User options
  10. Troubleshooting
  11. Requesting features
  12. Getting Updates
  13. Uninstalling
  14. Samples & questions at my IALLT 2013 session.
Categories: all-languages, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, Coed432, digital-audio-lab, documentation, e-infrastructure, recording-software, service-is-assessing, service-is-programming, Speaking, table-of-contents, Writing Tags: ,