Rounding Off An Electric Year
After the recent sucessful completion of a beta test, a live market test is now being conducted with up to 3000 So-net subscribers. Subscribers purchase the WebCDs from So-net and get five initial hours of study time.
After the first five hours the students may purchase and download hourly time tokens which activate the CD without having to remain connected and incurring on-line telephone charges. The courseware runs on Windows 95, Window NT and Macintosh Power PCs Sytem 7.1 or greater.
The DynEd course currently available from So-net is Dynamic Business English levels 1, 2, and 3 which cover topics such as Company Description, Manufacturing and Trade, Product Comparison, Job History and many other important business subjects. Each level provides approximately 30 hours or interactive study and incorporate DynEd's advanced Speech Recognition lessons. The new speech recognition feature allows students to perform interactive oral exercises, practice speaking, and receive immediate feedback.
Another DynEd product, the Let's Go ESL course for children aged three to 10, recently won the EDDIE prize awarded by ComputED in its 2nd Annual Education Software review. Let's Go is based on the Oxford University Press American English textbook series of the same name.
Tandberg Educational, Inc. has announced th addition of the Tandberg Partner Video Server to its line of classroom media distribution networks and standalone equipment. This new addition gives educators who have single-source access to a full range of analog/digital learning laboratory networks and standalone equipment combinations, including a courseware-on-demand system.
According to Tandberg "The integration of the Tandberg Partner Video Server with Tandberg's PRISMA master console and hardware and Teleste Open software in a multimedia learning lab offers educators a hardware-software solution for media management, learning lab(s) management, student/class database, computer-based oral/written testing compilation and analysis, and authoring software tools for on-site development of multimedia programs."
The Tandberg Partner Video Server delivers full-screen digitized video at 30 frames per second to as many as 300 simultaneous users. The servers incorporate large hard disk arrays and symmetrical multiprocessors to store and distribute data.
Langmaster, a group of teachers and computer programmers based in the Czech Republic, has produced a series of CD-Roms which could revolutionize the role of readers in English language teaching.
The disks are based on Heinemann titles, including Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray and were produced with the cooperation of the Collins COBUILD project. Students can either read the texts as they would a non-electronic book or can employ the incorporated dictionary features to create and individual learner dictionary. A storybook cinema, color illustrations and interactive exercises are additional features which can be heard also on an audio recording where students can record their own voices and listen to the playback for pronunciation practice. There are also exercises in gap filling and text comprehension including predating what will happen next in the story.