Study-program-is-any | Thomas' Work Space

Memrise: Another flashcard site for vocabulary learning

2011/11/21 plagwitz Leave a comment

Yet another attempt to tackle foreign language vocabulary learning with a crowd-sourced flashcard site: What is different this time, other than the layout?
The site works with a seed/greenhouse/garden metaphor for spaced repetition (how intelligent is the underlying algorithm for that?) and processing/short/long term memory
You can have the word pronounced (is this Text-to-speech? does not sound like it. So will it scale?) The focus on non-target language “ponies” seems not fruitful. Actual target language context should be under “Samples”, but seems widely missing. Communicative motivation also. Multiple meanings and grammatical information seem to be missing from the lemmata. .
Looks like a long list of flashcard lists, but note that the number of included words is descending quickly, hardly one of the many textbooks
The site allows you to download the word lists as Excel files:

Categories: all-languages, e-languages, Vocabulary, websites Tags: flashcards

How to use the online Spanish pronunciation help to generate phonetic alphabet transcriptions and text-to-speech

2011/11/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Go to http://showroom.daedalus.es/es/tecnologias-de-la-lengua/phonetictrans/phonetictrans.php, enter your text, select your phonetic symbol set:
Unlike with the Portuguese help, there is no text-to-speech option here.

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, learning-materials, Spanish, Speaking, websites Tags: links, phonetics, transcribing

Web-based romanized letters to Cyrillic transliteration tool.

2011/11/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

Our Russian tutor uses this transliteration tool HTTP://TRANSLIT.RU which allows for phonetic input on a keyboard that does not have Cyrillic letters and seems popular with native speakers of languages written in Cyrillic.
As so often, that implies: not designed for language learners. The explanation attests to that:

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Intermediate, Russian, websites, Writing Tags: character-input, websites

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: links, thesaurus

MS Universal Language Input Tool offers correction and transliteration on any web page

2011/11/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

Using the UIME, you can “type any language with any keyboard on any web page, using only the Roman characters present on every keyboard.”

And you can install your favorite input language in your web browser, like so:

Categories: Absolute-Beginner, Advanced, Arabic, Beginner, e-languages, English, French, Greek (modern), Intermediate, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, software, websites, Writing Tags: character-input, ms-uime

How a teacher creates and grades a Moodle streaming video assignment.

2011/11/02 plagwitz Leave a comment

Click button: “Turn editing on”, from the “add an activity dropdown, choose: “video”, like so:
Edit your assignment, like so:
1. using the following options (or else expect problems)
  1. Due date: not DISABLED (is the default)
  2. Prevent late submissions: YES (is not the default)
  3. Allow resubmitting: NO (is the default)
after you post your assignment and your students took it, like so,
and if you turned notifications (not recommended; rather grade the assignment well after the deadline, or else expect problems) on (if you get already enough email, remember you can turn notifications off, rather send a deadline to the assignments which the students can see in their calendar, and until they get used to it, tell them there will be more video assignments, best: make it a routine and leave 2 for extra credit could be enough to get everybody to catch), you will get an email like this:
where you click either on the link (1) to go to the assignment, then click through to the submissions (3)
or on (2) to go directly to the grade book:
where you are best advised to click on the button: “grade” to view the video submission, , or else you might run into this bug.
In the grading window, play the video, add helpful comments, if any, add final Grade and click “save and next” (but click “next” if no video submitted yet and you grade before the submission deadline. Better: do not grade before the submission deadline).
If video seems unwilling to play (frozen frame), drag the play cursor forward on the timeline underneath the video. If this does not unfreeze the video, let the timeline run to the end (both workarounds have helped with Kaltura issues we encountered here).

Categories: all-languages, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, lms, Speaking, step-by-step-guides Tags: 1.9, kaltura, moodle, video

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.