Archive

Posts Tagged ‘7’

“Back to basics”: Need once again to default to color scheme basic on teacher computer

2014/01/27 Leave a comment
  1. Same problem as last term: (What made it come unstuck/unfixed?): CAM04573
  2. CAM04574
  3. No Sanako screen sharing activity involved here, but MS-Community-Clips screen sharing.
  4. Classes are moving in, and we cannot have the teacher computer slow to a crawl and eventually crash in the middle of a Sanako class, especially not when an assessment is involved.
Categories: e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors, hardware, Presenter-Computer Tags: , , , ,

Overview over speech recognition assignment possibilities in the LRC–from beginning to end

2014/01/21 1 comment
  1. UPDATE: now with more videos to watch.
  2. First switch languages, once you are in the right language:
  3. The speech recognition loads at startup with this window:
    image
  4. or can be started from the desktop shortcut:
    image
  5. To activate = make it start/stop listening, click on the microphone image
  6. create and save individualized voice training data (only the first time you use speech recognition in the LRC),
    1. Watch how to train (for English, short 5 minutes);
    2. Watch how to back up/restore;
    3. beginner voice training example (long, before/after effect in speech recognition),
  7. homework assignment exercise design,
    1. Watch how (for English, with correction in MS-Word)
    2. dictation example.
Categories: assignments, e-languages, English, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, os, Spanish, Speaking Tags: , ,

Sanakoaudioconfigonthefly software utilities updated for Vista/Windows7

2013/12/09 Leave a comment
  1. (Shortcut to download – now fixed) The reason why a colleague’s signature reads: “Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it’s on fire" (Bruce Sterling) might just be that a multimedia-capable fully computerized classroom – think 30 PCs and 30 students trying not only to listen to, but record responses to exam audio – is a notoriously difficult beast to control, and all too easily spins out of the same (a classroom humming in an endless audio feedback loop is neither a pleasant nor an unfamiliar sight).
  2. The Sanako Study 1200 is a digital audio lab software that facilitates the use of personal computers in face-to-face class settings. However, while the Sanako Study 1200 features many ways for the teacher to control and manage the student PCs, the students’ audio settings cannot be controlled on the fly.
  3. Enter these little sanakoaudioconfigonthefly utilities (written in AutoIt) for Windows 7 and Vista  (old Windows PX version still available here) that extend the Sanako Study 1200.
  4. We now use  (as it is completely adequate and actually superior to to the seemingly more applicable PC control / Launch programs features which is requires the program executable to reside under the same path on student and tutor computer) Playlist / copy and launch (folder icon) and the Sanako grouping feature to send a program with your choice of action to the student PCs  of your choice. In this example,
    1. click playlist, 01
    2. and in the window that opens, click (1) to send to “all”, then click (2) to select which program to send: image_thumb[3]
  5. Files included in this release (each for 64-bit, and as source code, so that you can compile your own if you are still on MS-Vista/MS-Windows-732-bit platform):
    1. Change student recording levels (microphone sensitivity).
    2. Toggle student sidetone ( in Sanako = “listen” to this device in Windows)
    3. Control student playback level (headphone volume).
  6. Likely these programs can be adapted beyond Sanako Study 1200, but I do not remember (helpful comments appreciated)
    1. whether other digital audio lab platforms (Sony Virtuoso, Robotel SmartClass) allow for changing the student audio config on the fly
    2. and what mechanism (if any – but likely) they (and Sanako Lab300) provide to launch programs on the students’ computers
  8. Prerequisites:
    1. None other than your digital audio lab software and the utilities you can download below. In particular, it is not required to install AutoIt on teacher or student computers.
    2. However, there should be only 1 microphone/speaker per student computer in the digital audio lab. If you have more, you likely have bigger problems to solve first, but you also need to alter the source code (included) to select the microphone you want to work with (should be easy; note however, that I have not tested this scenario, for: “There should be only 1 microphone/speaker per student computer in the digital audio lab” Smile
  9. Request here to download these utilities.
    Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, digital-audio-lab, multimedia-recording, service-is-configuring-learning-tools, service-is-programming Tags: , , , , , , , ,

    Forced downgrade to Color scheme Windows 7 Basic since “exceeded its allowed memory”

    2013/10/31 Leave a comment

     

     

    1. clip_image001
    2. This warning and forced downgrade appeared on the teacher after starting using MS-Community Clips (which is just a GUI wrapper for Windows Media Encoder internally, which we used on the same machine successfully while it was still on XP).
    3. The error seems slightly more informative than what we received earlier, but I did not manage to investigate since this was in the middle of supporting a teaching use .
    Categories: e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors, multimedia-recording, Presenter-Computer, software-old Tags: , , , , ,

    Switch to Color Scheme Basic not working for students

    2013/10/25 Leave a comment
      1. Works for me: CAM03648
      2. Does not work for students for whom it primarily has to work: CAM03640
      3. Strangely, student seems to be not stuck on the original, but on an unsaved theme:

    CAM03641

    Categories: e-infrastructure, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, Student-Computers Tags: , , , ,

    "Server busy” error?

    2013/09/08 Leave a comment
    1. This dialogue appears regularly on student log in: image
    2. Update: This seems to have disappeared in the 2nd half of the term.
    Categories: e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors Tags: , ,

    Refine your pronunciation by operating the LRC Windows 7 PCs using voice commands

    2012/08/20 Leave a comment
    1. No speech recognition assignment, and only a bit of spare time to practice the language you study in the LRC? Try the Command mode with these Try the Command mode with these voice commands that Windows 7 speech recognition recognizes
    2. Note there are some hoops to jump through, including some one-time setup: We have them/you covered in this step-by-step guide on using speech-recognition in the LRC

      3. .

    Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Speaking, step-by-step-guides Tags: , ,

    Supporting Swahili – A running log

    2012/01/18 Leave a comment
    1. Learned today that we will begin offering Swahili in the Fall. Here is the place to plan how the LRC can better support it.
    2. For starters, I am thinking of adding to the list of our custom configured languages for
    3. Windows 7
    4. Office 2010
    5. Learning materials?
      1. Existing?
        1. FSI, naturally.
      2. There should be more need for producing learning materials in this LCTL.
        1. automated?
          1. Note that the Stuttgart TreeTagger has a Swahili parameter file (gzip compressed, Latin1). The Swahili parameter file was trained on the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili (HCS) and uses a simplified version of the HCS tagset. The HCS was created by Prof. Arvi Hurskainen by means of his Swahili Language Manager (SALAMA) which uses Lingsoft’s TWOL compiler for constructing morphological analysers and Connexor’s CG2 parser for syntactic disambiguation.
    6. Keep an eye on the Swahili Category.
    Categories: Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, mental-notes, Swahili Tags: , , ,