Thomas' Work Space

When you open the Study1200 tutor, a dialogue comes  up which lets you select you the “classroom layout’. What this actually means – since the physical classroom (LRC layout) is obviously immutable –, is: which computers do you want the Study1200 to connect.

The “template classroom” (this happens to be just  the default name within Sanako) tries to connect all students logged in on computer in COED434  to the teacher from the “corridor” (= where Study1200 leaves all computers that it knows of, but that you do “into” want to let into the classroom; the corridor has link in the bottom center of the Study1200 teacher window, and it flashes if there is a change “in “ the corridor Stuy1200 wants to make you aware of) that the Study1200.

However, beyond the 20th client (first come, first serve), this will fail because of licensing restrictions, and a grey exclamation mark will appear in the classroom layout in the Study1200 window for these student icons.

The “left-half”and “right-half” layouts that I created load only the computers in either the left or right half of the COED434 classroom (each without the wall/window-facing computers at the very edges) into the classroom layout (other logged-in students will remain in the “corridor”, linked in the bottom center of the tutor interface, if you want to add select students – note that the student icon will not appear on screen in their approximate physical position in the classroom.

You can also bring up the dialogue from which you can choose classroom layout after the initial startup of the  tutor: Go to top menu: file / classroom layout. A 45-second screencast of this switching  our classroom layouts in Sanako Study 1200 is available for download (requires Windows Media player).

In the screencast, you can see how the visual layout on screen reflects the physical layout in the classroom (the number labels on top of our computer monitors appear (optionally) in seat numbers): rotate by 90% clock- or counterclockwise (I wish we would have not only more licenses, but also a higher screen resolution. Stay tuned).

This technique of splitting the classroom, unloading and loading half of it at a time, you can exploit for administering oral exams consecutively with class sizes (current maximum is 25/30, depending on level) that exceed the number of licenses we have (currently 20 + teacher).

This technique of excluding computers from connecting to the teacher we could also use to merge the listening station computers, even though they have a different audio hardware configuration (analog headsets only, no Sanako headsets with built-in sound card and disabled on board sound) into the main software image without consuming valuable licenses – not without other problems.