Thomas' Work Space

How to find clip art for learning material creation with Google’s Advanced Image Search

2012/12/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Once you made it to http://images.google.com, click on the “options” button in the upper right and choose “Advanced search”:

One of the useful options for learning material creation is restricting search to “clip art”, like in the screenshot below:

The results in many cases are more different – and useful – than in this example:

So give it a try, and also let us know in the comments what other advanced image search options you like to use in your learning material creation.

2012/12/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

Snapshot summer 2012 in conjunction with our language center upgrade to Windows7 and Office 2010. Click here for larger version.

2012/12/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

Click bottom right menu for large version:

2012/12/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

In intl.cpl, we do not want keyboards installed for western and central-European (= characters a-z, merely altered by diacritics) languages, including US. We type these languages, including US-English, with the us-international keyboard extended 2.1, which has to be set as default, and that US-English extended 2.1gets checked as the keyboard for all western languages ("show more"). The regular US keyboard gets removed/made invisible to the user, and with any reasonably recent version of MS Sysprep tools, that is no problem anymore.
For non-Western languages, the built-in windows keyboards should be "checked", and also the alternate input that we had to download and install methods need to be "checked" under their languages: MS Maren, Google input methods nee to be enabled (checked): e.g. Farsi is not enabled (checked).

Or why is my input language set to Chinese after the Sanako tutor install:
Unclear whether the tutor install has an effect on the default language, but we observed this problem earlier on an XP computer that also had the Sanako study 1200 tutor.

2012/12/12 plagwitz Leave a comment

UPDATE: Using Junctions and Symbolic Links has limitations, e.g. I have not found a way to point a network share location of to my Skydrive folder. A solution using a secret windows live writer supported key in the registry is explained here seems simpler and better (assuming support for this key will not vanish in a new release of windows live writer).
Benefits:
1. Recently, the documentation and training materials I do with windows Live Writer have become somewhat more evolved, and my Live writer posts both big and live documents.
2. With this method, I can access and edit your posts and drafts from different computers. Possibly also save drive space on the drive where the “My weblog Posts”points to be default.
Prerequisites:
1. MS-SkyDrive account and app.
2. Here we are using the Link Shell Extension, but you can use the mklink command built-into Windows.
3. To create Symlinks, you need to have admin rights.
Steps:
1. After closing Live Writer, go to “My Weblog Posts” in your “My Documents” folder, move it to your SkyDrive folder.
2. In the new location, right-click on the folder “My Weblog Posts”, choose “Pick link source”.
4. Right-click on the “My documents”folder in the original location and choose Drop link / Symbolic Link.
5. The original location is now only a link (see folder icon), but Live Writer still opens.
6. Final step: Blog this from Live Writer, then check the location of your weblog post.