ExTemplate 2.3 Instruction Manual

I.                   Introduction

II.                True/False & Fill in the Blank (Listening)

III.             Wimba Voice Recording (Speaking)

IV.            Multiple Choice (Reading)

V.               Short Answer/Essay (Writing)

VI.            Assigning Courses and Assignments

VII.         Grading

 

I. Introduction

 

1.  Go to http://babel.rice.edu/try/

 

2.  Type your Username and Password.  (If you do not have a Username and Password, please contact Claire Bartlett [Bartlett@rice.edu] or Hajime Kumahata [kumahata@rice.edu].)  Click Log In.

 

3. After logging in, you will see the “Exam Management” link appear.  Click on the link.

Add Exam

 

4.  To add an exam, click on the “Add Exam” link.  (A list of exams may appear.  Ignore this for now.)

 

5.  At next page, you must specify Exam Type, Language, Description, and Active/Inactive check mark.  (When checked, the exam is active, meaning students can see the exam on line.)  For this demonstration, select Quiz as Type, select your language, and type “Demo Your Name” (i.e. Demo John Houston) as exam description.  Click “Add” when you are done.

 

 

In the description, please make sure to use English ONLY and DO NOT use any apostrophes.  Note: the check box next to “Active” will activate your exercise.  To deactivate the exercise, uncheck the box.

 

6.  Completing step 5 will take you back to the Exam Management page.  Now you should see the quiz you just created added to the list.  To continue creating this quiz, click on the title link of the quiz.

 

                                    Demo Your Name                                 Your Name

 

 

II. Enabling/Adding Listening Section

7.  Click on the “Enable Section” to create your first section.

 

 

8.  You will arrive at this “default first section” page.

 


9.  Now you must define the first section.  Fill in the form area as you see below.  Please use English ONLY.  When you finish, click on the Update button.

 

 

10.  Completing step 9 will bring you to this page.  Here you can add your first page.  Click on the “Add Page” link.

 

 

*Throughout ExTemplate, you will find “e” (edit) and “d” (delete) links at the section level and question level. At the page level, you will find the “Edit” link and the “Delete” link.

Why Unicode?

Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, Unicode consists of a character repertoire, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, a set of code charts for visual reference, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and rules for normalization, decomposition, collation and rendering.

The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language and modern operating systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

 

Adding Pages

 

11. Fill in the following information to create this page.

 

Then click Add button

 

WARNING

At this point, if you see a JAVA prompt for Wimba, you MUST click YES for Wimba to load.  If you click No or close the dialogue box, you will have to exit/close your browser and re-open it.

 

12. You should now reach a page like below.  Read the following paragraph and record your voice into “Wimba Teacher Recording” by clicking the record button .

 

“To get to the White House, you could take a taxi, a bus, or the subway.  We recommend that you take the subway.”

When you are done reading the above paragraph, click on the stop button .

 

 

During recording you may pause the recording by clicking on the pause button , then continue recording by clicking on either the record button or the pause button.

 

13. After recording your voice, click on the ADD QUESTION link.  Then Fill in the following information to create this question.

 

 

14. Now you should arrive at a page like below.

 

 

15. Let’s create another question type.  In ExTemplate, you can only choose ONE question type per page.  Therefore, we need to create another page in order to add another question type.  To create another page, click on ‘add page’ link.

 

 

16. Fill in the following information to create this page.  HTML tags, such as <br> and <font> can be used.  “&copy;” will create a copyright © mark.  When you are done, click on the “Add” button at the bottom.

 

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Page Instructions: Listen to the audio passage and fill in the blanks in the text below.

 

Page AV Link: http://lang.rice.edu/extemplate/MetroMap.html

Page AV Link Caption: Metro System Map

 

Page AV Link 2: rtsp://cinema.rice.edu/audio/realmedia/ExTemplate/White_House.rm

Page AV Link 2 Caption: &copy; Rice 2004

 

*If you are going to embed a webpage, make sure that the page is encoded in Unicode.  If not, accents and non-western characters will become unreadable. If you are using Microsoft Word to create a webpage to be embedded, then make sure to follow the following steps. Go to the “Tools” menu.  Select “Options …”.  From the Options dialogue box, choose the General Tab.  Toward the bottom of the dialogue box, you will find “Web Options” button.  Click it. In the Web Options dialogue box, choose the “Encoding” tab.  From the “Save the document as” pull down menu, choose Unicode (UTF8).  If you want you can check the “Always save…” box.  Please do all of the above steps before you save your document as Web Page.

 

17.  As you can see, you have finished creating the header portion of the new page. Click on the “Add Question” link to add questions.

 

Add Question

 

18.  Now you can add questions.  The brackets, [  ], indicate the blanks and the words within the brackets will be set as the correct answer.

 

Click Add.

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Question:  You are [flying] to Washington, D.C. to visit the White House.  Your Plane is going to [land] at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Once at the airport, look for [signs] for the Metro.  Take the metro [blue] line and get off at “Capitol South” metro stop.  You will then need to walk [two] blocks to the White House.

 

19. Congratulations.  You have finished creating the LISTENING COMPREHENSION section. Let’s move on to create the next section.  To do that, click on the “Add Section” link.

 

 

 

III. Adding a Speaking Section – Wimba Voice Record Question Type

 

WIMBA

20.  This step is very similar to step#8.  You specify the section, as you see below.  You can insert HTML code such as <font> and </font> shown here.  This will cause the text in between the HTML code to appear in a preferred style such as a red color. When you finish, click “Update”.

 

 

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Instruction:  Reply to the following question using Wimba to record your voice.  <font color="red">Click "Run" when prompted to install Java.</font>

 

Add Page

 

21.  Upon arriving to the next page, click on the “Add Page” link.

 

 

22.  As you did in Step #11, fill in the following information.  Click “Add”.

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Page Instruction: Click on the link below.  A webpage will launch in a new window.

 

Page AV Link:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/whtour/

 

23.  You have finished adding a new page.  Click on the “ADD QUESTION” link.

 

 

Add Question

 

24.  Specify the areas.  Then click “Add”. The <b> tag will result in BOLD characters.

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Prompt: Take your time and observe the image on the linked web page. Record your description of the image, but <b>DO NOT</b>write it down.  Speak for about 2 minutes.

 

25. As you can see, you are done with the speaking portion.  Click “Add Section” to add the reading section.

 

 

IV. Adding a Multiple Choice (Reading) Section

 

26.  To add a Reading section, fill in the required areas as you see below.

 

Add Page

 

25.  Click on the ADD_PAGE link.

 

 

27.  Fill in the form as you see below.  Then click the “Add” button.

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Page Instructions: Read the information on the White House below and answer the questions at the bottom of the page.

 

Page AV Link:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/whtour/library.html

 

 

28.  You should see a page like the one below.  Now click on “Add Question”

 

 

Add Question

 

29.  We will add a question here.  Fill in the fields as you see below.  To indicate the correct answer, select the corresponding radio button.  (In our case, it’s “the library”.)

 

 

- The “Add Answer” link under the multiple choice field allows teachers to add more answer choices.

 

 

30.  You should see the question as it appears below.  (When students view an exam, answers will not be marked.)

 

 

 

 

31.  We will now add our last section, Writing.

 

 

V. Adding a Writing Section

 

32.  We will fill in the section name, but we will not fill in the instructions at this section level.  We will do that later.

 

Add Page

 

33.  Let’s add a page.

 

 

 

34.  Fill in the fields as you see below.  We will choose “Short Answer” as this question type.  Click the “Add” button when you have finished with this page.

 

 

35.  Now click on the “Add Question” link.

 

 

Add Question

 

36.  Fill in the fields as you see below.  We show you here how you can add AV properties at the question level.  Also, unique to the “Short Answer” question type, the number of Rows and Columns in the answer field can be specified. Click “Add” to go to complete your quiz.

 

If you are looking at this document via web, you can copy and paste the following.

 

Page Instructions: Describe the Green Room in 50 words or less.

 

Page AV Link:  http://lang.rice.edu/development/extemplate/greenroom.jpg

 

 

37.  Now you should see the finished page.

 

 

 

 

Congratulations.  Your exam is complete.  Click on the ExTemplate banner to get back to the main page.

 

VI. Working with Courses feature

38. From the default page, click Courses.

 

 

 

39. You will arrive at a page indicating the course(s)/section(s) you have been assigned to teach.  This setting must be configured by one of the ExTemplate administrators.

 

Let’s add students to this section.  To do that click on the section number or section name as indicated below.

 

 

 

40. You should arrive at a page similar to the following screenshot.  Next, type in the student number of the students you wish to add to the course. Typing 3486183 and clicking the “ADD STUDENT” button will add Hajime on your list.

 

41.You can remove a student from the list by clicking the “Remove link”.  You can also activate or deactivate a student by clicking the corresponding button.

 

Now click on the “Return to Home” link at the top

 

  1. Click “Courses” again. To add yourself as a student to any class, choose your class from “Subscribe to a course in (language)”.  First choose the language, and then click Go. 

 

For this demonstration, let’s add yourself to your own class.  From the pull down menu choose the language in which you created the quiz. (You SHOULD ALWAYS add yourself as a student to test your own assignments thoroughly.)

 

  1. Next, choose the course.  Then Click the “GO” button.

 

 

 

  1. Now, choose the section # with your name in ( ).

 

 

 

 


  1. Now you are subscribed to a course. (The student’s self-subscription feature can be configured ‘without instructor’s approval’ or ‘with instructor’s approval’.  By default, it is set to ‘without approval’.  Please ask one of the ExTemplate administrators to configure this feature, if you require the approval.)

 

 

 

 

 

Assignments feature

  1. Click assignment.

 


  1. Let’s add a quiz.  Choose a Quiz from the pull down menu and click GO.

 

 

  1. Configure dates, specify description, and select resource. (The quiz you just created at the beginning of this workshop.)  If you want to activate and deactivate the assignment, please use the check box for manual configuration.

Make up an appropriate description and type it in the description field.  From the pull down menu, choose the quiz you just created.  Now, click GO.

 

 

 

  1. You should now see the quiz added to your list under instructor.

 

You can click “e” to edit the configuration. If you click on the name of the exercise, it will take you to the grading page. 

 

  1. At this point, you should take the quiz you just created, so that we can go through the grading procedure next. To take this quiz, click on the Quiz link under the student section.  When you have finished taking this quiz, you will be asked to perform “final submit”. Clicking “Final Submit” will take you to the “immediate feed back” page where students can see how s/he performed.  To go back to the home page, click on ExTemplate Banner at the top.

 

VII. Grading

 

** Multiple-Choice, True-False, Fill-in-the-blank, and Matching type are automatically graded.  You must manually grade Short-Answer, Essay, Wimba Voice Record, and Flash Voice Record. **

 

The grading section is divided into two parts: Assignment Grading and Placement Test Grading.

 

Assignments Grading

 

  1. From the menu, click on the Assignments link.

 

 

 

  1. Click on the name of the assignment you want to grade under INSTRUCTOR SECTION.


 

  1. Click edit to view the Grading Page.

 As you can see in the grading page, the multiple choice section will be graded automatically.  However, you can always override the correction manually by using the pull down menu.

 

  1.  In Wimba section, the instructor can listen to the student’s recordings, then leave voice comments.  This section will not be graded automatically.

 

  1. In the essay/short answer section, the instructor can edit/correct student’s work.

 

 

Use the Formatting Pallette.

 

 

The Essay section, too, must be graded manually.  Use the pull down menu to assign the appropriate points.

*Bump will bump the user to take the assignment again.

 

 

*Delete will delete the record.

 

 

  1. Observe %, Suggested Grade, Grade, and Comments. When you are done grading and adjusting the points, click on the Update button. Updating will place a key icon by the point value if the points were edited.  By placing the cursor on the key icon, you can see who and when the particular answer was graded, if team grading.

            Now fill in the suggested grade, grade, and comment field and click on Update one last time.

 

 

  1. There is another feature called Activity Log. 

 

A. Click on the Activity link.

 

B. A new window will pop up with the log.