The Testing Skills work environment allows language teachers to completely manage every educational activity in the language laboratory.Testing Skills is a useful tool of the IDM Premium laboratory. It can be used by teachers to conduct and monitor laboratory activities directly from the instructor’s computer as well as control every lesson phase: planning, implementation, delivery to the class, collection and correction of class work (this phase can also be carried out at home) and a printout of completed work.

Testing Skills features in Builder, which allows content creation, and Player, the lesson reader. Using Builder, teachers create ‘pro-fessional’ exercises with the utmost simplicity and flexibility, us-ing a wide range of multimedia files from audio, video, images, texts and a set of complete exercises able to meet the demands of students with different language levels. With the Auto build function, teachers automatically transform any analogue audio program (such as traditional audio cassettes) into a Testing Skills library file sent in real-time to the class (the audio file can also be used in subsequent lessons). Auto build allows teachers to modify digitalised audio tracks, dividing them into sentences to ease student comprehension. The teacher decides how many student tracks to set (up to three); allowing students to practise not only by comparing their work with the master track but also by comparing their own recordings. Thanks to the Player (and without acting on his or her workstation), the student can receive the lesson and immediately start work on the set task.

multimedia language laboratory

IDM PREMIUMTESTING SKILLS

Say good morning in all the languages of the world

COMPLETE YOUR IDM PREMIUM WITH TESTING SKILLS TESTING SKILLS ACTIVITIES:

Lis• teningListening and comprehension •Model imitation•Model translation •Open answers•Dictation •Easy dictation (missing word) •Written text•Written answers•Single quiz or Multiple (multiple •choice – true/false) Text reconstruction (shuffled •words)

All these activities can be enriched with external multimedia stimulus files such as: Audio, Video, Text and Images (Using the current standard formats).

SELF-LEARNING:

Students can autonomously load the Test-ing Skills lessons from a folder prepared by the teacher on the instructor computer/server.

IDM PREMIUM is a multimedia educational net-work designed to make teaching more dynamic in the laboratory thanks to the simple, effective and rational use of new communication technologies. The IDM PREMIUM teaching network is a reliable tool for multidisciplinary education and is suita-ble for all teaching practices, whatever the media used (audio, video, data). User friendly, it allows teachers to use the educa-tional material at their disposal whilst offering the option to integrate them into interactive media, such as CD-ROMs, DVDs, Satellite TV, Internet, video conferencing, etc. IDM PREMIUM is strictly network hardware con-cerning the management of analogue audio-video. The dedicated equipment is connected outside the personal computer and is totally autonomous in terms of power and communication.

MAIN FEATURES

TRAINING AND REMOTE SUPPORT

Tecnilab puts in maximum effort to ensure that the labs are properly in-stalled for intensive use. For this reason, Tecnilab, through free tools for remote connection, con-nects with the PC which manages the laboratory.This option allows teachers to ben-efit from further training and, impor-tantly, it allows very quick upgrading of workstations connected to the laboratory.

IDM Premium

teaching laboratorySay good morning in all the languages of the world

REALTIME VISUALIZATION OF THE STUDENT’S APPLICATIONS

The teacher monitors the application in use by any student. A window opens on the control panel with in-formation on: student number, name, group and applications. This interactive service informa-tion is updated in real-time, automatically and simultaneously to all students’ work spaces. It can therefore monitor the work of each student in real-time.

SIMULTANEOUS ACTIVITIES OF GROUPS

With IDM PREMIUM four different activities are available for four different groups. For example, one group can work with a quiz, one group can receive an external video source, one group can practise with a written chat session and another group can work in a self-learning activity. For ex-ample, audio or video on demand which allow the students to choose the contents to practise with themselves.

STUDENTS’ ATTENDANCE AND CLASS REGISTER

One of the most important functions of IDM PREMIUM is the presence / absence of stu-dents. Teachers, in a very simple way, create their own classes by sending students a window in which they have to write their names. Automatically, the teacher receives back all the students’ names and the software request to create a new register for this class.The teacher can always update the register in terms of presence / absence, and also with marks and comments given to the students and related to the activities they carried out.

TWO POSSIBLE CONFIGURATIONS WITH IDM PREMIUMIDM Premium is available for an individual stu-dent (single) or two students sharing the same Unit.

IDM PREMIUM SINGLE

In the individual configuration, each student possesses a computer with a monitor, mouse, keyboard and headset with microphone.

IDM PREMIUM DOUBLE

In the double configuration, two students pos-sess a computer, two keyboards, two mice, one monitor split or two separate monitors (de-pending on the VGA card installed) and two headsets with microphones. With the double solution, the languages activity is really inde-pendent for the two students in terms of video, audio and writing.

LABORATORY ACTIVITIES

User-friendly interface with real classroom •layout reproduction.Personalised access to the instructor soft-•ware with a USB drive. Switch ON/OFF for all the student units from •the main instructor software. Class loading with all the information stored •(name, marks/comments and activities car-ried out). Automatic saving of all the activities carried •out. Group creation of up to four groups with as •many students as needed for each group.Simultaneously and differentiated activity •sending to each group. Each activity or function can be executed on •a single student or on a selected group of students with a simple mouse click. Independent group creation for independ-•ent activities.

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Analogue sources sending to one student/group/•whole class. Communication to one student/group/whole •class. Student interviews. •Sending student interviews to another student/•group/whole class. Audio pair creation: manually, automatic and se-•quential or automatic random. Student CALL with memorisation of calling time •delay. Discrete listening of the selected student regard-•less to the activity carried out. Automatic discrete listening of the selected group •(AUTOSCAN) with the possibility to set the auto-scan time. Intercommunication with students with automatic •remote control of key board and mouse. Remote control of the instructor program, for •training and updating, also including the student’s position (requires a DSL Internet connection). File transfers. •Automatic student attendance with automatic •class register creation.

Real-time visualisation of the application in use •for each student. Student mouse and keyboard lock. •Attention message (blank screen). •Snapshot creation and saving.•Working session concerning: •Quizzes, multiple choice – true/false. •Written chat. •Audio and video on demand (self-learning). •Multimedia session audio and video but man-•aged by the teacher (Play, Stop, Fw. Rw., Pause). Working session with office application (teacher •sends a document, sets a working time, when the time is over, automatically receives back all the students’ documents with: the original doc-ument, students’ documents, and correction for students). Automatic back-up wizard that guides teachers •to save all the lab data, including teacher’s and students’, and including audio. Teachers can correct students’ activities and cre-•ate new contents at home with the lite software version.