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Free screencast recording software from Microsoft

2011/08/02 Leave a comment

Teachers ask me about software for making screencasts explaining procedures to their students. I have not googled for free screencast recorders recently, since I have been happy for many years to use (or rather work with extensively, and recommend) Windows Media Encoder 9 on MS-Windows. Allegedly as of end of 2010, this software is not linked on Microsoft’s website anymore (but can still be googled and downloaded). Even though not officially supported on this OS any more, I have also used it successfully on Windows 7 (64-bit) (after Vista (64-bit) and Windows XP)).

The official replacement screencast recorder from Microsoft is Windows Expression Encoder (of which I still use the inexpensive Version 3), which is available here (Version 4 SP1) for free. Media Encoder is almost 10 years old, so Expression Encoder is clearly superior – however, the free version is somewhat crippled, most notably in this context I seem to remember the time limit for screencasts is 10 minutes.

Both Encoders are somewhat technical in nature. In particular, I suspect the reason why considerable experts did not know Media Encoder as a screencast recorder (which is not the same as a documentation and training maker: its post-editing capabilities are limited and not specialized for documentation, unlike e.g. Camtasia), was that its default settings for screencast recordings are low quality.

To “uncork” the real possibilities of this software, your first need to alter the compression settings within the WME configuration file that your screencast is based on (you can do this from within Windows Media Encoder itself). Moreover, for this change to stick, you need to alter an underlying PRX template file also. This file is hidden away in the depths of the Encoder install directories; after installing Windows Media Encoder, search your programs folder for a file named schia.prx, it is an XML file that will open with the Windows Media Encoder utilities.

Categories: e-infrastructure, software Tags: , ,

How to do Call forwarding on the Cisco IP Phone 7912

2011/07/29 Leave a comment

Press button “CFwdAll“:
phone-forwarding-1
Type the phone number:
phone-forwarding-2.
To un-forward, press button “CFwdAll” again.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, e-infrastructure, phones Tags: ,

How to enable screen cloning and switching between display modes on the LRC reception desk dual screen Dell OptiPlex 780 with WinXP

2011/07/26 Leave a comment

Short, non-technical answer: on the keyboards of the reception desk computers, press key combination

  1. ALT+CTRL+F10 to mirror the same image on both monitors;
  2. ALT+CTRL+F11 to return to extending the primary screen, i.e. showing something different on the second screen.
  3. if this stops working, restart the computer.

We do not use any more key combination ALT+CTRL+F10 to cycle through the different desktop configurations, which include cloning/mirroring the same image on both screens (also keep pressing the key combination, in order to get back to extending the image to the 2nd screen, for running an informational display (calendar, PowerPoint) to display on the 2nd screen after mirroring the lab assistant’s screen onto the 2nd screen when interacting with a client on the other side of the help desk counter).

Longer, technical answer: You have to configure this. But the Win XP dialogue: Display Properties / tab: Settings only allows for “extending” the desktop to the secondary screen. However, button: Advanced leads to another dialogue, with a tab: ATI Control Center, by the graphics card manufacturer.

If you also enable the advanced settings in this dialogue, you can get to the hotkey settings where, among other things, you can enter a key combination for cycling through Display Configurations, one of which being cloning.

reception-screens-hotkeys

In addition, you can save this configuration as such:

reception-screens-hotkeys-profile

Why all these minutiae? You cannot have LRC clients and staff at the help desk communicate with the help of a computer (and all the goodies accessible now, from intranet to interwebs) if they cannot easily share the screen (and, in order to both even interact with the screen, share keyboard and mouse, which are easy to duplicate, if you have some spare USB input devices lying around). If you can make them share, you have applied AI to business problems (compare dual screen system in the LLC entrance area here). If calling the after state “AI” sounds too lofty to you, you may call the before state  “flying blind” instead: I just care about the delta which remains the same.

Categories: e-infrastructure, hardware, Reception-desk, software Tags: , , ,

Moodle metacourses, part V: The support workflow: Uploading

2011/06/17 2 comments
  1. In Windows Explorer, sort file by name. Select as many files as to make a meaningful content unit (e.g. a component, like lab audio, of a textbook), but not more than 64MB (if Windows Explorer Status bar does not keep count for you, right-click with multiple files selected and choose Properties from the context menu).
  2. Right click on the selection and from the context menu, use 7-zip or the in-built windows Send-to zip-files (neither has a move-files-into-archive option like InfoZip’s command-line zip, so you have to keep track of files completed manually). In 7-zip, you can use “store” which is faster and, unlike attempts of further compressing the already highly optimized input files, should not result in an increase of the file size of the archive.  See zipping screencast.
  3. In the Moodle Resource course corresponding to the language of the file upload, go to lower left corner menu: files, “make a folder”, the name of which identifies the component you are uploading, enter the folder, “upload” the zip file into the folder, next to the file uploaded, click “Unzip”, when done, delete the zip file (to save space). See uploading screencast
  4. Repeat for all resource files (audio and non-audio ) for all languages
  5. see also here on how to batch upload into Moodle
Categories: e-infrastructure, learning-materials, Screencasts Tags: ,

How to efficiently find help on this blog

2011/06/10 Leave a comment
  1. Searching
    1. Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results. wordpress-fulltext-search
    2. Human-curated search: The author adds metadata to his posts as he sees fit. The metadata vocabulary is somewhat stable from past experience, but may change (”The author is only a human.”  Smile). You effectively execute a humanly-curated search when clicking in the right column on either
      1. a tag link, e.g. wordpress-tag https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/
      2. a category link, e.g. wordpress-category
    3. Humanly-curated and Boolean AND search combined: This can be powerful in drilling down to an answer to a specific problem – provided there is one on the blog.
      1. Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar address-bar-multi-tag-search, combining tags or categories with the plus-sign, you can execute an AND-search against multiple tags(or categories) on WordPress.com
      2. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/ finds posts that the author related to both Moodle and eRepository. This can be especially useful for searching the FAQs: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
  2. Notifications: Subscribe to RSS-feeds to receive timely updates on the topics that matter most to you.  Both
    1. WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the wordpress-rss-linkicon, it will link to the RSS feed – Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/feed/) – watch either the webpage or your browser GUI for orange RSS icons you can click on to initiate a subscription  -and also for multiple categories/tags (even though this feature is even better hidden, you need to construct a URL in your browser address bar. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/feed/). If you want to go beyond our own metadata, WordPress allows also for subscribing to your own searches via RSS: “To keep up with your favorite search results we offer an RSS feed for all search results. Simply click the Follow this search via RSS link in the side bar of any search results page to subscribe to updates in the search result”, consult the WordPress search documentation.
    2. and MS-Outlook, making RSS-subscriptions look familiar like email (of importance in certain environments), greatly facilitate this.
  3. Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link. wimba-room-quicklinks
Categories: blog, e-infrastructure, service-is-documenting Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

How to self-enroll in a Moodle course

2011/06/02 Leave a comment

If a Moodle course is set to allow for self-enrolment (both regular and Project courses here can be), if you go for the first time to this such a course  – e.g. by clicking on a link to the course (which we don’t show you here, since we want to give only a select user group to self-enroll in our course) – you will be taken to a logon page (if not already logged into  Moodle), and, upon successful login, be immediately offered to self-enroll. Click the “Yes” button and you are taken to your course, like is done in this screencast on self-enrolling in Moodle.

Categories: e-infrastructure, Screencasts Tags: ,

Moodle metacourses, part II: The technology

2011/06/02 2 comments

One of the most missed business requirements for a LMS in version 1 of Moodle has been lack of support for sharing files across courses. This has been addressed by the e-Repository API in version 2 of Moodle, which, however, we will not have in the foreseeable future. In version 1, metacourses have been the most widely used workaround.

The technical concept behind a metacourse in Moodle seems to be best described like so: “A child course gives its [student -  TBA:teachers need to be added manually, but fortunately do not change as frequently as students] enrolments [= access to] to the parent course” or meta course, which has no enrolment of its own. In practice, this can go either way: Using metacourses, one can “populate many [meta]courses [= building blocks of content (e.g. chapters, weeks, can even be separate, but required courses with different teachers – TBA: then exclude the teacher role from being added with enrolments, in Admin/Users/User Policies , flexibly combinable to make up a specific version of your regular course] from one enrollment or one [meta]course from many enrollments [= many sectional regular courses that need access to the same content]”. Either assign to many metacourses [= building blocks] 1 child course each, or vice versa assign 1 metacourse many child courses [=sectional regular courses].

For base Moodle version 1.9 administration information, simply watch the first half-minute of this screencast, or read this extract from the Moodle documentation:

“To change a course to a meta course, set "Is this a meta course?" question to yes in the course settings.”

image

(Note that this option will disappear as soon as the course has an enrolment!)

image

In your metacourse “you can link [=”associate”] to or unlink from (add or delete) "child" courses by the course Administration menu. This icon and link only appears in meta courses: “

image

How to make a metacourse visible: “Making a metacourse visible before the metacourse is properly setup can cause Moodle to return ‘This course does not allow public access'(…) Verify that the linked "child" course(s) exists. “

Note: Metacourses may be set to inactive and unavailable to enrolled students until the teacher activates the metacourse.

Note: It takes some time for the meta-enrollment to apply (time depends on the setting for the cron-job).

How to handle metacourse teacher role enrollments: Certain roles can be excluded from being passed on as enrollment from child courses to metacourses. For our shared resource courses, this does not make sense (in the contrary, since any teacher from the child course may want to manage resources contained in the metacourses – this does not to be coordinated between teachers of similar child courses.).

TBA: How to handle metacourse enrollments across terms: Our metacourse shells will stay across the term, while enrollment will be automatically dropped with the child courses “going out of scope”.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, e-infrastructure Tags: ,

How to manually add a user to your course.

2011/06/01 Leave a comment

Less than intuitive, but you have to go via “Assign roles”. Here are the steps:

  1. Go to “Assign Roles” in your bottom left hand course menu
  2. Choose a role you want to assign
  3. Search, add and assign the role to a user. This will also add the user to the course.
  4. Check results by going to “Participants” in your bottom left hand course menu

Here is the screencast of  adding users to your Moodle course.

Categories: e-infrastructure, Screencasts Tags: , ,