2012 Courseware Showcase, June 14

 

Courseware Showcase

Thursday, June 14

6:30pm – 8:00pm

FLAn Hypermedia Editor

 

Thom Thibeault, Southern Illinois University

(ttbo@siu.edu)

 

FLAn (Foreign Language Annotator) is a hypermedia editor that allows language instructors to create hypermedia learning units for their students. Instructors can import text into FLAn and and then add relevant multimedia annotations to words or phrases. Students can then click on unfamiliar words in the text to gain understanding. Several learning units created with FLAn will be demonstrated in different languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages which use non-Latin writing systems. FLAn is available as a free download from redhotwords.com. For Macintosh and PC.

 

Adapting Moodle Reader to the Masses

 

Thomas Robb, Kyoto Sangyo University

(trobb@cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp)

 

MoodleReader, initially developed in 2009 as a means of checking the outside reading progress of students at a single school, has quickly been adopted by other schools around the world, with some 15,000 students currently registered on the moodlereader.org site. While the intended pedagogical aims of the software have been met, other aspects of software development such as funding for development, administration and server performance have not been able to keep pace. After a brief description and demonstration of the program, we will discuss these issues and our attempts to address them. The audience will be invited to share their own experiences.

 

Wow! It’s an OWL!

 

More information

Handout

 

Claire Bradin Siskin, Excelsior College

(csiskin@edvista.com)

 

The ESL Writing Online Workshop (ESL-WOW), an online multimedia program designed to guide non-native speakers of English through each stage of the writing process, will be demonstrated. Designed for community college students, ESL-WOW is a free Internet service designed to support individual writers as well as composition instruction.

 

Authoring with ANVILL: Getting Drupal and Flash to Cooperate

 

Jeff Magoto, University of Oregon

(jmagoto@uoregon.edu)

 

ANVILL is a web-based, speech-focused learning management system designed for language lesson authoring. It’s built with Drupal and Flash, taking advantage of the former’s great open source community, and leveraging the latter’s excellent A/V capabilities. But it’s far from a perfect marriage. For this showcase I’ll focus on the pros and cons of working with these two powerful tools in a language learning context, and demonstrate the kinds of tasks and lessons they enable teachers to create. ANVILL is a research project of the Yamada Language Center and the Center for Applied Second Language Studies at the University of Oregon.

 

The InGenio First Certificate in English Online Course & Tester

 

Antonio Martínez Sáez, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

(anmarsae@upvnet.upv.es)

Ana Gimeno, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

(agimeno@upvnet.upv.es)

Ana Sevilla-Pavón, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

(ansepa@doctor.upv.es)

 

The authors of this proposal will present the recently completed InGenio FCE Online Course & Tester, consisting of a preparatory course and exam simulator for students intending to take the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) examination or simply achieve an upper-intermediate level of English (a B2 level according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, 2001). The materials have been created within the framework of the multimedia courseware development carried out by the CAMILLE Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain. The authors will illustrate the courseware and describe some of its main features, structure, layout and selection of contents. They will also refer to the validation and assessment phases, which started last September.

 

Language Online at Carnegie Mellon University — 2012

 

Christopher Jones, Carnegie Mellon University

(cjones@andrew.cmu.edu)

Marc Neil Siskin, Carnegie Mellon University

(msiskin@andrew.cmu.edu)

Bonnie Youngs, Carnegie Mellon University

(byoungs@cmu.edu)

Therese Tardio, Carnegie Mellon University

(tardio@andrew.cmu.edu)

 

The latest updates in French Online will be available as well as information on other Language Online courses, including Arabic for Global Exchange (a culture and survival language mini-course) and the partial rewriting of Spanish Online (including video shot in Guadalajara in the summer of 2011) and its conversion to the Open Learning Initiative platform. The interface redesign for Fall 2012 will also be previewed.

 

The Use of an In-house Web App for ESL Academic Writing Class

 

Volker Hegelheimer, Iowa State University

(volkerh@iastate.edu)

Zhi Li, Iowa State University

(zlisu2010@gmail.com)

Sylvester Upah, Iowa State University

(supah@iastate.edu)

 

In recent years, the development of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) is further facilitated with a rapid growth in the ownership of internet-enabled mobile devices. In this courseware presentation, we will demonstrate the use of Mobile Grammar Clinic, a web-based mobile app of grammar practice, at Iowa State University as an outside class activity and a complement to formative assessment in ESL writing classes. Mobile Grammar Clinic features “fun-size” grammar practices, performance reports, individualized grammar reviews, and a mobile learning community. Preliminary analysis of the usability of this web-based mobile application will be reported and implications will be discussed.

 

Bookmarklets in Action: Using Bookmark Applets

for Dictionary Lookups

 

Lathrop P. Johnson, Ball State University

(ljohnson@bsu.edu)

 

Online dictionaries have gotten much better recently, but they are often not very easy to use. With bookmarklets and split-screen windows students get instant definitions which they can check against the second language text they are reading. The demonstration will show how easy it is to use bookmarklets for bilingual and monolingual online dictionaries in several different languages.

 

The Foreign Language TroubleShooters

with New Video Capabilities

 

Jay Bodine, Colorado State University

(jay.bodine@colostate.edu)

 

Stop by my station to get a look at the Foreign Language TroubleShooters with new video capabilities in new versions for the Macintosh OS X and later Windows operating systems. A secondary aspect includes using Microsoft’s (Macintosh’s) keyboard utilities for reconfiguring keyboards to allow for Foreign Language keyboards individually designed for North American typists. The demonstration can include not only the Microsoft utility, free to download, but then also four different keyboard configurations for German, French, Italian and Spanish that consist of variations of the U.S. keyboard, but with easy, normally one-stroke access or familiar two-stroke access capabilities for accents, umlauts, etc.; that is, on these particular individually designed keyboards, the general diacritical markings for the most common Western European languages are obtained through familiar foreign keyboard capabilities — but for the rest, the other more common U.S. keyboard layout is retained.