VOICEBOARDWhat is it? Voiceboard (VB) is ANVILL's most popular toolit adds spoken language to discussions, audio journals, pronunciation exercises, and other forms of oral language practice. Like text-based forums, VB allows teachers or students to easily post or respond to an oral/aural assignment. VB encourages multimedia communication; messages can be text, audio or video-based.Voiceboard has two modes: one for teachers which allow Ts to create VBs, add "topics" to existing VBs, and edit messages that have been posted. The other is for students (pictured at right). Students can create and post their messages, and, of course, read and respond to those of others.Voiceboard is easy to set up and administerin fact, you can create and publish a voiceboard in about 2 minutes. Students will see the VB as soon as they log in to your ANVILL course; they can begin adding their comments right away.How Does VB Work? This short video tutorial discusses some of the ways teachers use ANVILL, both as a whole-class complement to discussions or other speech work, and as a more private kind of portfolio where students can keep a term's worth of spoken language recordings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4BckINshCgGetting Started with Voiceboards1) Log into ANVILL and select your course from the Courses menu.2) From your course home page, you can always see all the Voiceboards for your class. Sometimes your teacher may put a copy of it in the lesson menu as well. This lesson, for example is called "1.11 Our Class Voiceboards".

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Picking a Topic3) Messages are listed in a drop down menu. You can change topics by clicking on the down arrow. For example, this topic is called "Pavlovian Observations". Only your teacher can create new topics.

Reading or Viewing a Message4) Messages are listed on the left side of the Voiceboard. Click a message to view and/or hear it.

Adding Your Own Message 5) To add a new message, click Add a Message (top right). A dialog box will pop up asking you if you would like to allow uoregon.edu to access your camera and microphone. Click Allow. If you dont want to see this message again next time you log on, check the Remember box.

Recording

Recording Your Message 6) Enter a title and a comment about the contents of your message (the text can be brief, but is required.) Choosing a recording mode: text, audio, or audio and video. Recording tools appear after you choose one of these options.Recording and Posting Your Message 7) Click Record to begin speaking. Click Stop when you're finished. Listen to it--Play.8) If you like your message, click the Add It! button to submit it. If you don't like it, click Forget It! to start all over.(Your message will not be saved unless you click the Add It! button.) Hardware Set-up Use the Camera/Mic Settings to select your recording hardware. If you do not see the microphone level meter (green bars) moving when you speak, your voice is not recording. Go back and adjust the microphone settings again. Note: Check your machines system settings (sound input/output), too, if these options do not work. Posted Messages 9) Once posted, only your instructor can delete or revise messages.How do I use Voiceboard? Voiceboard is aimed at extending or jumpstarting class discussions. As such it can be used in many different ways, from a language practice tool to a student journal to a broadcast medium, much like a podcast. If you have a microphone or a webcam, you can be online and contributing/responding very quickly. Here are some ways faculty at UO are using it: Some use its podcast-lite capability for short talks or reviews, such as summarizing a class discussion or previewing a chapter in an upcoming reading or lecture Others have Ss rehearse oral presentations, practice pronunciation or give short reports Language teachers like its "portfolio" capabilitiesthey have an archive of a student's work for a whole term/yearand their feedback can be spoken as well All teachers say that VB lets voices and opinions that dont get heard from the back of the classroom come to the forefront LIVE CHATWhat is it?Livechat is ANVILL's conferencing and tutoring tool. It works similarly to other web-based chat software with the important exception that it is advertising free and designed for audio and video chats as well as text.Access is restrictedonly registered course participants can access the chat function.Once an instructor creates chat rooms for his/her class, students can use them for text, audio, and/or video chats. Up to four people can chat at once (network bandwidth is a consideration for video). Note: A course has no rooms at the outset--the instructor has to add them. To do so click on Manage Course > Manage Livechat and then proceed to add as many as you like--there's no limit.Our initial release of Livechat targets language learners, especially those participating in tutoring programs, like YLCs free Language Exchange. Or teachers who've been able to successfully link their classes together -- ANVILL can provide a safe platform for students to participate in class-to-class exchanges.Livechat is designed with audio and video in mind. All a user needs is a microphone and/or webcam. Livechat allows chat participants to easily turn on and off their speech or video inputs. And because it uses Flash, nearly all web browsers are already configured to work. No other software needs to be installedit just works (or at least it should).Chat Instructions-TeachersANVILL's chat tools are course-specific, so rooms that you set up in the LiveChat Manager for one class (e.g. SPAN II) aren't available to students in another. 1. To create a chat room, click on the Manage Course tab, then the Manage LiveChat tab.

LiveChat Teacher View

2. Type a name for the chat room in the Room Name (blue) box, and click Create (the name of the room appears in the box on the left.) 3. To create more rooms, repeat step 2 (there's no limit to the number of rooms per course). 4. If you want to delete a room, highlight it (in box on the left) and click Delete. 5. As a teacher, you can join a conversation from here by highlighting a room and clicking Join. There's a maximum of 4 speakers per chat room. 6. Once rooms are created, you can "manage" them from the list in the Manage Livechat area. 7. Suggestions: 1. Expect to spend some time helping students correctly configure their microphones and webcams. 2. Livechat relies on a correctly configured Flash player plug-in.Chat InstructionsStudentsLivechat1. From the main menu of your couse--click on the Livechat tab to open the chat room; there may be many rooms listed (if someone is in one, the star will be yellow). 2. From the Course Lesson menu (if your teacher has linked to it from there 3. From a URL (but you'll still have to log into ANVILL and pick your course first)

Log-in

To use Livechat1. Click on the name of the chat room and Join. This takes you to a second window. 2. Check your A/V settings: Cam Settings (requires web cam) and Mic Settings. Can you see yourself? can you see the volume level increase or decrease? 3. Click on the buttons at the bottom to activate your camera and microphone. 4. Start talking (or typing). To go to another room or quit Livechat

LiveChat in Action (Lyon, France Eugene, OR

1. Click on the "x" in the upper right corner. Doing so exits you from this chat session. You can now join another room or do another activity in ANVILL. Suggested LiveChat Uses Virtual office hours Some students, maybe the same ones who don't speak much in class, never come to office hours for the kind of consulting/tutoring that they need to do well on a research paper or in preparing for exams. Faculty or GTFs who find it hard to fit in office hours when they're truly available may enjoy the scheduling freedom that Amiga makes possible. Its particularly good for short, focused sessions where both parties are bringing a fairly high level of preparation to the meeting: e.g., clarifying goals, explaining a lecture, encouraging. Collegial conferencing Working with a colleague on a grant deadline and she happens to be home with a sick child and the phone just won't suffice? Need a brief appearance by an expert in Seattle to provide another perspective to a class discussion? Want to check in regularly with fellow collaborators, e.g., teachers in the field just after they've tried out some new technique? Because it provides more than one channel (voice and text), personal communication can benefit. Peer Chats Here, Amiga functions as essentially an online version of peer advising or tutoring. This is the model we employ with our Foreign Language Exchange, e.g., you help me with Portuguese and I'll help you with French. Obviously, the partners need something to talk about, and initially the more structured this is the better (at least in language learning)weve got 15 minutes and this is what were going to accomplish. Chats like these are good early in the term when you want students to get to know one another better; later in the term students can set their own parameters and goals. Group work Like other collaboration tools this one makes it possible for groups (albeit pairs) to meet online and plan and discuss class work. This is especially valuable once a project is underway and group members' roles are well established. An instructor can create as many chat rooms as necessary. Information gap tasks seem to work particularly well. Quizzes & Surveys-OverviewAssessing students' spoken (and written) language skillsQuizzes and Surveys (Q&S) is ANVILLs tool for creating and grading on-line quizzes and surveys. As with ANVILL's other tools, it is optimized for speech, so teachers can create media-rich tasks and students can respond in a variety of ways, including via a spoken language response. When it is used in combination with the Voiceboard and/or Forum, Q&S can provide teachers with several ways of collecting and assessing spoken language performance.Input can come from an external source (like in the example at right) or teachers can simply record themselves and let students respond in kind, much like in an interview.Items can be simple and straightforward, What did you do last weekend? to detailed and involved: Watch the following video, listen to the questions that accompany it, and respond to them as if you were addressing an audience of fellow teachers. These instructions introduce the major components of Q&S, demonstrating how to quickly create a survey or quiz.Getting Started: Creating a new Survey or Quiz in ANVILL1. Choose "Add a Quiz" from the Manage Course menu (the pencil icon). 2. Give your quiz a title and a short description and click save. 3. This takes you back to the lesson menu, where you need to click on "Manage Quiz" to begin adding items or edit existing ones. The first question is already there waiting to be edited.

Quiz Creation

Settings: Custom Introduction/instructions | Edit |1. Click on | Edit | 2. You can customize introductory and end pages using the Change button. 3. Intro Page Message This is where you setup the quiz/survey, telling the Ss what theyre going to do. 4. End Message This is where you indicate that the test has ended. Here you can link to another activity and/or give further instructions. 5. Show progress indicator This is where you allow the Ss to see how many items theyve completed (recommended). 6. Allow students to go back This lets you restrict navigation within the quiz (discouraged in surveys). 7. When finished with Settings, press save. If you are editing previously created settings, you can choose Save to save the new settings, and Cancel to restore settings..

Item Creation 1. Question Number (1). Here you assign a number to the item (you dont have to be sequential).2. 3. Heading (2). You can use this to tell the Ss something about the item (e.g., special instructions for answering, or include a hint). Note: The heading or category can be hidden from the survey/quiz Ss.

Heading

4. Question Text (3). Use the text (WYSIWYG) editor to write your question (or paste from MS Word). Note that different text sizes and fonts can be used. Also, multimedia can be part of the question (see below) there are buttons for images and YouTube; hyperlinks are possible, too).

Text Editing

5. Audio and Video files to include in the Question (4). Heres where you can speak the question or include an audio or video file for students to listen to or watch. You can either link to an existing file, or create a new one using the recording features for either audio or video, if a microphone or camera is connected.

Audio and Video

6. If you add files, click the Save button (or cancel to eliminate all changes). In addition, clicking the Autoplay button will permit uploaded files (sound and video) to begin playing as soon as the item appears. For directly recorded audio and video (record audio, record video), the student has to click the play button.Item Types 1. Answer (5). Question type. After changing the question type, press the Save button to bring up the appropriate options for that question type. Multiple choice is the default. The question fields will depend on the type of question chosen. For multiple choice, you can indicate the correct answer. Scaled questions will have no options, while Short and Long Answer questions will have room for the correct text (for graders). The last choice, Spoken Answer, is what you want to use to have Ss respond orallythey'll need a microphone to record themselves.2. 3. Allow students/survey takers to add comments? (6) An option allowing Ss to leave comments is available at the bottom of the pagevery useful for surveys.

Comments?

4. Finally, choose to Save Changes & View the question, to Delete it, or Cancel to eliminate changes made to the question. 5. The screenshot below shows the output from the information in the screenshots above and on the previous page.

Quiz ResultsBesides the basic set up choices in Q &S (introductory/concluding remarks, skipping ?s, etc.) ANVILL gives you two more important options: the chance to make your quizzes available to those not in your course (very useful for Surveys) and, of course, it lets you see the results of those who have taken your Q or S. On the upper right hand side of the screen you will see the Options Menu and these links URL for unregistered quiz takers. This allows you to send potential respondents a web address so they can take the quiz without being registered in an ANVILL course. View Responses. Here's where you see your students' quiz or survey results. For objective items (T/F, Multiple Choice, etc.) the computer will evaluate the answers. For the open-ended items, including "spoken answers", you have to assess each item. There' The results can be saved as a file (including Excel) for use in an online gradebook. These results include a list of all who have taken the survey/quiz and the time they needed to do so. Quiz EditingMost quizzes and surveys need to be edited. The Add Question | Renumber Questions are two useful tools for doing so.

1. Click (+) Add Questions from the Settings (first screenshot above) to begin creating your quiz or survey. Here is where you add items, including any associated media.

2. The screenshot above for item #3 creates the quiz output below.

The Administration ScreenPublishing, Managing, Deleting Weve already seen this Administration screen (below). Notice it has several other options, including:1. Publish/Unpublish post. This allows you to construct a quiz or survey, and make it available to students when you wish. 2. Manage. This link takes you back to the questions (see screenshot above) so that you can edit your quiz. 3. Delete. You may decide that you no longer want the quiz.