Thomas' Work Space

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 plagwitz Leave a comment

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

ALT+CTRL+F10 to mirror the same image on both monitors;
ALT+CTRL+F11 to return to extending the primary screen, i.e. showing something different on the second screen.
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.

In addition, you can save this configuration as such:

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: ati, dual-screen, FAQs, video-card

How teachers can more quickly open/update/save their Moodle files from MS-Office

2011/07/21 plagwitz Leave a comment

MS-Education Labs has published a plugin that speeds up editing MS-Office Files in Moodle.

To use the plugin, download (for 32-bit Office) , run, and from (2007) Office Button or (2010/2003) Menu: “File”, use menu item “Open from Moodle” (and later “Save to Moodle”).

You have to (once) let MS-Office (e.g. MS-Word or Excel) know the URL of Moodle (e.g. http://moodle.uncc.edu), , then your login credentials: .

Note that your categorization of Moodle courses (in the tree menu on the left, all courses are filed away in folders called “Training”) prevents an instant load: .

Instead, search for (part of) your course title: .

Select the results you want to add and click button: “Add”: .

Wait for the courses to be loaded: .

You can then use the left course tree to browse for matching MS-office files within each of your loaded courses:

MS-Office files are likely involved in the majority of Moodle edits, so this promises to be a great timesaver.

For more information, see also the CTL’s step-by-step instruction Using the Office Add-in for Moodle.

Categories: e-learning, office-software, step-by-step-guides Tags: moodle, office-software

Successful test of the new streaming video recording assignment for language proficiency assessment in Moodle.

2011/07/20 plagwitz 1 comment

Video recordings allow for a more authentic assessment of spoken language proficiency. Today, we could test a new Moodle video assignment type for Almut’s Summer II Elementary German II class: Preparing a natural sounding statement on one’s favorite holiday. This Moodle assignment type is an extension to students of the teacher video upload tool using a service Kaltura – we hinted at that earlier.
Teachers, when editing their Moodle course, can find this assignment type in the dropdown: Activity as “Video”.
The assignment options: Note that creating a video assignment is pretty much the same as creating other assignments in Moodle, and so is grading, except instead of reading, you view the submission, right within the web page.
An example of guiding questions for a recording assignment is here (topic: holiday, language: German):
Here is how the teacher sees the student submission in the gradebook.
Caveat: in Safari, we were not able to close the video popup, after viewing it from the class roster, and could only back out of the entire gradebook. Instead, from the roster, first open the page with the individual student submission, and review the video there on that page:
For the student experience, see here.
Further reading: The CTL has a number of step-by-step instructions which we recommend for further reading: Student Video Assignment, and specifically for students: Upload a Video for a Video Assignment; for instructors: Grading Video Assignment Submissions.
The LRC had originally prepared to record the students with our old, handheld mini-DV cameras, import the movie into iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, then find a way to get the files (with easily identifiable submitter names) to the teachers. Hitherto, our best option was compression of the video to to fit into the Moodle 64MB file upload size limit (which, even if you decide to shoot and produce your video elsewhere and bring it as an uploadable file to the assignment , does not apply to the Video assignment either).
Preliminary testing seems to indicate that video recording of pairs/dialogues is also possible with the LRC’s webcam setup . However, because of the angle restrictions, capturing such sessions will be less natural.
Overall, the new Moodle video assignment seems a major improvement for all parties – students, teachers and support –, and can help with more authentic assessment of

Categories: Arabic, assessments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Speaking Tags: audio, kaltura, moodle, pilots, recording, video, windows-movie-maker

Free Farsi Proofing Tools available: VafaSpellchecker

2011/07/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Unfortunately, the VafaSpellchecker Proofing Tools are now not available anymore for Office 2010. The links to the Office 2010 on the website have been broken for a long time, the developer seems to have left the university, the project manager has not answered my inquiry. Here is hoping they will be resurrected.

Even though proofing tools are neither designed for non-native language learners nor, traditionally, used in a pedagogically sound way by language learners without proper guidance, they form one of the greatest opportunities to apply advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to second language acquisition (SLA) tasks, given that they are a widely installed and commonly understood artificial intelligence providing automated feedback on natural language issues.

The management and licensing of proofing tools has been much improved since MS-Office 2007 which made it easier (and cheaper) to install modular proofing support for additional languages distributed as Language Packs.

However, in an SLA context, even this may still not be a convincing value proposition, whether for the personal computers of individual student learners, or even – due to apparent the lack of concurrent licensing options within proofing tools – for Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) in an imaged computer lab environment (in our case, we would need to purchase 45 licenses à $25 before tax for a language that may have about half as many learners or less).

All the more welcome are freely downloadable add-ons- – thanks to the MS-Office platform extensibility – the VafaSpellchecker, a Persian Spell&grammar and real-word error checking system by the Natural Language and Text Processing Laboratory in University of Tehran, funded by Iranian Research Institute for ICT, available for both MS-Office 2003 and 2007. A VafaSpellchecker user guide (in Farsi) is also available.

As always with NLP in SLA, caveat emptor, use with a grain of salt, or two.

Categories: e-languages, Farsi, office-software, software Tags: office-software, proofing-tools

Moodle metacourses, part V: The support workflow: Uploading

2011/06/17 plagwitz 2 comments

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).
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.
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
Repeat for all resource files (audio and non-audio ) for all languages
see also here on how to batch upload into Moodle

Categories: e-infrastructure, learning-materials, Screencasts Tags: metacourses, moodle

Keyboard overlay stickers improve foreign character writing support in the LRC

2011/06/17 plagwitz 1 comment

Some non-western, but character-based languages benefit from having keyboard overlay stickers installed. Here is a list of what the LRC has:

Amount	Languages	installed@
3	Arabic	1 list. station, 2 rightmost computers in the front row of the left (teacher perspective) half of the main classroom
2	Farsi	2 rightmost computers in the middle row of the left (teacher perspective) half of the main classroom
1	Greek	1 list. station
3	Russian	1 list. station, 2 rightmost computers of the rear row of the left (teacher perspective) half of the main classroom

Here are photos of the Arabic and Cyrillic keyboards:

We installed the stickers, so that they reflect the software layout of the keyboard that you get when choosing the respective language from the international toolbar. Note that the letters marked in red on the Cyrillic keyboard picture below are not supported by the Russian keyboard layout:

Since only one set can be added to any existing physical keyboard, the teacher computer keyboard can not have an overlay. The student computers with overlays are the listening stations and computers 6,7,12,13,18,19 on the LRC layout map.

Remember that the On-screen-keyboard software remains accessible at all PC’s through clicking “Start”, “Run”, typing “OSK”, clicking "OK".

Example where you can get your own keyboard overlay stickers.