Cheap Microsoft Software: At work licensing

2009/02/09 Leave a comment

University staff can purchase the following Microsoft software for a nominal fee (<£20, including s&h) under the Microsoft at Work agreement:

  1. Office Enterprise 2007 Work at Home Media
  2. Office Mac 2008 Work at Home Media
  3. Windows XP Professional w/SP3 Work at Home Student Media
  4. Windows Vista Business w/SP1 Upgrade Work at Home Media
  5. Project Pro 2007 Win32 English Disk Kit Student Media EMEA Only CD
  6. Visual Studio Pro 2008 English Disk Kit Student Media EMEA Only DVD
  7. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Win32 English Disk Kit Student Media EMEA

 

I put the Order form for staff on: “J:\Humanities arts and languages (HAL)\Language_services\software\Microsoft\Work at Home order form from Civica – London Met U.pdf”.

Categories: Documents, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University Tags: ,

Adobe-PDF support

2009/02/09 Leave a comment

Students often need to convert PDF files to Word, beyond having to select and copy/paste page by page in Acrobat Reader, text (preserve formatting, images, tables), including deleting carriage returns.

 

Re the latter, AFAIK even Acrobat Full cannot retain paragraphs without breaking it up line by line with carriage returns. This seems to be inherent to the nature of pdf as a page drawing language concerned with representation, not content.


Most students also need to convert from Word to PDF, e.g. for their CVs.

 

The Moorgate software image does not only seem to include “Acrobat Reader 9, but also an unspecified “PDF conversion utility” which seems to be PdfCreator 0.9 (see http://www.pdfcreator.de.vu). I explain using it here.

 

There are a number of other free pdf-creators around, with varying abilities, like primopdf, winpdf, bullzip… If you find something better, add a comment here.

 

There is also a free “Create PDF” service at http://www.acrobat.com/, limited to 5 pdfs (per email address?), and a conversion from pdf to html at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html.

 

KDE office on Linux is said to be able to convert PDF to editable formats.

 

Gmail and Google docs can view PDF documents as HTML in the browser.

 

Note that Office 2007 can convert Word to PDF (and much more) and that  HE Students can buy all of Office 2007 Ultimate at a hardly more than nominal fee (< £40) through http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-uk/default.aspx.

 

University staff can get Microsoft Software for a nominal fee under the Work “at home” license agreement, see here.


For further study, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software#Converters_5

 

Categories: Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University Tags: ,

Instant language services support on office and classroom IT lab computers. Part I: Initial Setup

2009/02/08 Leave a comment
  • If you have Windows XP on your office computer, we can use MS-Messenger (ver 4.7) “Application Sharing”  to provide immediate live assistance with computer problems in remote parts (also useful for collaboration with colleagues on documents, including web pages, when a phone call is too little and a meeting is too much).
  • click “Start”, “Run”, type (or copy/paste): “C:\Program Files\Messenger\msmsgs.exe“, click “OK”
  • Initial setup (you have to do this only once)
  • “Add a .net passport to your windows xp user account”:
  • Email account
  • Users of http://hale-translation.groups.live.com/, http://hale-interpreting.groups.live.com/, or the  Interpreting online calendar (http://calendar.live.com) can re-use their windows live account
  • Other users can use existing hotmail/windows live accounts or create a new hotmail/windows live  account (you may want to create a separate account for work related messaging)
  • On your office computer, also check the checkbox to “Associate your account with your windows user account”, like here: , when asking for help on a student computer, uncheck this
  • Add “Thomas_plagwitz” at “hotmail.com” as a contact (initially, I will have to accept this before you can contact me):
  • Click on “I Want To … Add A Contact” (green plus sign)
  •  Once set up with Messenger like described here, go to PART II.

 

Categories: Distance-education-format-is-Synchronous, e-infrastructure, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University Tags: , ,

Instant language services support on office and classroom IT lab computers. Part II: Usage

2009/02/08 Leave a comment
  • Once set up, if you have Windows XP on your office computer, we can use MS-Messenger “Application Sharing” to provide immediate live assistance with computer problems in remote parts (also useful for collaboration with colleagues on documents, including web pages, when a phone call is too little and a meeting is too much).

 

Click “Start”, “Run”, type (or copy/paste): “C:\Program Files\Messenger\msmsgs.exe“, click “OK”.

  • Start a conversation by double clicking on the user icon (“Thomas Plagwitz” or whoever) in your contact list.
  • Right Menu: Section: “I want to” / “Start Application Sharing”
  • All is well if the other party has “accepted your invitation”, like above – allow some time for the screen sharing to start up on old computers.
  • When a dialogue comes up which asks you which application to share, use “Desktop”, like below  – this will allow the other party to see your screen. 
  • At the end of the session, “Unshare” your desktop, or simply end the “conversation”.
Categories: Distance-education-format-is-Synchronous, e-infrastructure, Institution-is-London-Metropolitan-University Tags: , ,

Auralog Tell-me-more Demo Screencasts

2008/09/17 Leave a comment
Categories: 4-skills, audience-is-any, documentation, e-languages, learning-materials, Screencasts, service-is-learning-materials-creation, software Tags:

Pedagogical rationale of timestretching audio for differentiating instruction

2008/09/06 Leave a comment
  1. Context: Higher Education in the UK has made considerable investments in digital lab infrastructure to improve second language instruction in times of deteriorating language take-up in the secondary sector, including widening participation. Digital language labs, apart from generic digital media, suffer from a lack of custom-made teaching materials that take advantage of the pedagogic features of the lab: grouping for personalization of teaching and learning. Pedagogical integration and development is needed to achieve the original intentions. A project to timestretch audio language learning materials for the digital audio lab promises integration software, pedagogical materials and, above all, a model of effective digital language lab use in teaching.
  2. Problem: In times of uneven language provision at the secondary school level and of shrinking language program sizes in HE, increasingly language teachers find themselves confronted with uneven language proficiency in their courses. Digital lab technology can help them to overcome the  “one size fits all” approach and personalize the students learning experience, for a greater inclusiveness in language programs and an increased proficiency boost for both the below and above average proficiency student groups.
  3. During my work with the language programmes at an English university, I could witness – and had to record – that the least proficient students, seeing themselves confronted with what was nowhere near “comprehensible input” (Krashen) for them, not only let the communication break down, but appeared so distressed that, despite being fully aware that their language output was being recorded as an assessment for the teacher to evaluate, started to curse and swear (in their native tongue) – while at the same time the upper portion of the class breezed through the exercise without any apparent difficulty.
  4. Proposed Solution:
    1. Technology to the rescue: The slowing down of digital audio – without pitch alteration –has been, while not a perfectly accurate representation of natural slow speech output, a popular benefit of digital technology in the language learning field for several years now (cf. e.g. Calico 2004), and I myself have experimented with it in the digital audio lab (Model imitation and Question – response exercises) and in publications (cf. Plagwitz, Karaoke in the Digital Audio Lab (2006)).
    2. What seems lacking are
      1. both an application that automates (by monitoring one of the network share directories that are part of the digital lab system) the slowing down (and speeding up) of audio for instructors (e.g. in 5% increments from 70% to 120% of original input) that are too time-pressed for producing materials, or even seeking out recordable on-air sources, and
      2. a model implementation in the digital audio lab (using dynamic grouping of students through the digital lab software) that creates exercises that would create exercises that can benefit from this approach (and can be shared), that applies them in a number of suitable (interpreting, ab initio language learning) modules and that assesses the proficiency improvement with this approach (using the outcome exam and a control group).
  5. Benefits: Greater fluency of both the least and most proficient students is to be expect after they were exposed to – as deemed fit by their instructors – slowed down/sped up exercises – ca. 20 exercises in the ab initio language learning module, practicing a small set of suitable new structures and vocabulary compared, with 2 control groups, and five interpreting rounds of 20-30 minutes. We will operationalize this by reusing regular assignment grading and use a control group, also of module-size, which must also use the digital audio lab, but with “one size fits all” audio.
Categories: all-languages, audience-is-teachers, classroom-activities, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, Institution-is-Aston-University, Interpreting, Listening, projects, proposals, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-programming Tags: , ,

A syllabus integrating language learning technologies into iLearning

2008/09/05 Leave a comment

iLearning means more intelligent

Categories: animated-GIFs, assessments, assignments, classroom-activities, e-languages, flowcharts, service-is-applying-learning-tools

Producing and managing language learning content

2008/09/05 Leave a comment

produce-manage-content

Categories: animated-GIFs, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, flowcharts, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Slideshows