SEAsite pages include a number of advanced, interactive elements some of which you may not have seen in more traditional Web sites.
Please read the material below so you will know how to use and interact with these elements. You may want to bookmark this page so you can come back to it if you need to.
About Quizzes
About Pop-up windows
About Audio Players
About Frames
Many SEAsite pages include practice exercises (or quizzes) that allow you to review and test yourself on the material presented. There are several types of quizzes and their use may be fairly obvious, but you should read explanations below so you are sure you know how to use them.
simple multiple choice: When you start a simple multiple choice quiz, you will be asked to enter an ID and your name. If you are registered in a SEAsite-supported class (at Northern Illinois University or another cooperating school), enter your Social Security Number. If you are not registered, you may use a guest ID of 111-11-1111. (If you use a guest ID, your results will not be emailed to a teacher.)
Next, a series of multiple choice questions or short answer questions will be presented. You answer the multiple choice questions by clicking on one of the answers. Answer the short answer questions by typing in the answer. In some cases, the quiz author will allow you to check your answer immediately; in other cases you will not be able to check your answer until the end of the quiz. Some questions play an audio segment - either automatically when the question comes up or under your control by clicking on the "Play" button. If the "Play" button is grayed out, there is no audio for this question. If it is not grayed out, you can click it any time to repeat the audio.
At the end of the quiz, you (usually) will be able to review all the questions and your answers. You can also supply comments or questions that can be emailed to your teacher (if you are registered). In many cases (again, if you are registered) the quiz author will have arranged for your quiz results to be automatically emailed to your teacher. Your teacher will be able to tell you which quizzes are emailed and which are not.
sets-of-three questions: In this quiz type, you will be presented with multiple choice questions. Each quiz is divided up into several sets of three questions per set. After you have answered all three questions in a set, you can check if your answers (for that set) are correct (by clicking on the "Judge" button). If they are all correct, you will see the message "3 of 3" and the "Next Set" button will be enabled - you can click it to go on to the next set of three questions. If, however, one or more of the three are wrong you will see "2 of 3" or "1 or 3" etc. and you cannot go on to the next set. Instead, you must go back (click "Prev") and try to figure out which question(s) you got wrong, fix them and then click "Judge" again. Only when all three are correct can you move on to the next set of three.
Each question may or may not have an associated audio portion. If the "Play" button is enabled, you can play the audio at any time. There is no registration and no emailing of results for this quiz type.
word drag-and-drop: In this quiz type you will see a series of questions in which you can use the mouse to drag syllables, words, or phrases to answer a question. The question may be an audio question or a written question. You must form the answer by dragging the words to the bottom of the screen, underneath the upper horizontal line and above the middle line. The answer "chunks" must be arranged in the correct left-to-right order. In some cases, part of the answer might already be there and you will need to fill in the missing parts.
Once you have formed your answer, you can press "Judge". When you do so, small letters may show up beneath your answer parts. They provide clues about fixing your answer if it is wrong or they tell you if it was right:
These symbols are meant to provide hints about how to fix your answer. Sometimes they may seem a bit misleading. They will work best for answers that are just a little bit wrong. When there are lots of errors, these clues may seem more confusing than helpful.
You can move on to the next question at any time. There is no "see the correct answer" option. The clues should allow you to form the correct answer eventually.
Each question may or may not have an associated audio portion. If the "Play" button is enabled, you can play the audio at any time. There is no registration and no emailing of results for this quiz type.
picture drag-and-drop: In this quiz type you will see some pictures of objects (the pictures may look like letters, especially for some Thai, Vietnamese, or Burmese lessons). You will be asked to use the mouse to move the objects to answer a question or follow some order (like: "put the book on the table" or "drag the consonant you hear into the box"). You move one of the objects by clicking on it, and then, while holding the mouse button down, moving the mouse. The object will move with the mouse until you release the mouse button.
Once you have positioned the object(s) to your satisfaction, click on the "Judge" button.
If you cannot figure out the correct arrangement of objects, you can click on "See Answer" and the objects will slowly move to their correct positions.
You can move on to the next question at any time.
Each question may or may not have an associated audio portion. If the "Play" button is enabled, you can play the audio at any time. There is no registration and no emailing of results for this quiz type.
flashcards: a flashcard exercise simply allows you to practice selected vocabulary items. You'll see a foreign language word. You should try to think of the English equivalent. Then click on the word, and it will "flip" to the English equivalent. As you go through this practice, you will find you have learned some words well. You can click on a button to remove them from the set, so you won't need to see them any more. You can always restart the practice, which will restore all the words.
matching quiz: In this exercise type, you will see 8 foreign language words and 8 Engish words. Simply click on a word, and then click on its equivalent. If you are right, both words will dissapear and a picture will be displayed where the words were. If you're wrong, nothing will happen. There is a button so you can see the whole word list if you are stuck or puzzled. You can re-start the quiz anytime. If you do, you will find that some of the words are different if the quiz author has provided more than 8 pairs.
In some places in SEAsite, a pop-up window may appear. A pop-up window is a separate small window (with a border around it) that can be moved around the screen by dragging it with the mouse (drag the top title bar part). In some cases, it can be resized. Examples are
The (perhaps) surprising thing about them is that they may ("disappear") if you click with the mouse on another part of the screen. This can be disconcerting if you don't understand.
They really don't disappear. In Windows 95, they are either "minimized" on the Task Bar or are hidden "behind" your browser window. In either case, you can get them back, either by clicking on their Task Bar icon or by moving or minimizing your browser window so you can see behind it. If you are new to Windows, ask someone to show you how to do this.
Other computer types may behave a bit differently, but the pop-ups should be restorable using standard techniques for your computer.
07/12/2012 NOTE: the material shown below is partly obsolete and refers to the "old" SEAsite and its use of Real Audio files and RealPlayer. We have replaced the RealAudio files with mp3 files, which should play automatically with no special software. Exactly how and where a player will appear on your computer will depend on your computer type and its configuration. We will add guidance and advice on this topic here as it becomes available through our 9and others' experience.
SEAsite uses two kinds of audio files that play under control of a separate "pop-up player". Using them is fairly simple, but there are a couple of things you should know. The descriptions below describe Windows 9x-specific behavior.
Regular Audio (.wav files): most short audio segments are recorded and transmitted to your computer as ".wav" files. When you click on an audio icon (typically a picture of a little loudspeaker) the audio file will come to your computer (this may take 3 - 20 seconds, depending on your connection speed and other factors) and a little program (window) will pop up to play it. The pop-up player used will depend on how you have configured your computer.
Windows Sound Recorder/Player: In many cases, the pop-up player will be the Windows Sound Recorder (for Windows 95 or 98). Generally, you must click on the little ">" button to play the sound. After you have played it once, you can play it again and again, if you like. Subsequent replays will start with no delay.
When you finish listening to a particular audio segment, you can do one of several things:
Note that if you do not close the player, it will remain open on the task bar. If you listen to a lot of audio segments and don't close them, you'll get a lot of these piling up on the task bar. This generally does no harm, but does clutter things up. In some cases, if you accumulate many of these open audio players, it may affect the operation of your computer. In rare cases, it may even crash your computer.
Other Sound Players: Some computers ship with a different player installed. Some of these may not exhibit the "piling up" behavior described above (which some people find annoying). You will have to experiment with yours to see how it behaves.
Microsoft Multimedia Player: If you don't like the way your sound player operates, you can replace it with another. For Windows, we have used Microsoft's Multimedia Player (the new version which comes with Windows 98). If you don't have it, you can get it and install it on your (Windows 95) machine. Here is an outline of how to do this:
Once the MediaPlayer is operational, check a couple of things:
Streaming Audio (RealAudio .ram files): most audio segments longer than a couple seconds are recorded and transmitted to your computer as RealAudio files. These files will start playing before the whole audio segment has arrived at your computer, so you don't have to wait very long to begin hearing the sound. (A 30-second .wav file might take a couple of minutes to completely load before you could begin to listen to it.) The typical RealAudio delay is only about 7 seconds.
Unlike the .wav file player, there will never be more than one instance of the RealAudio player on your task bar, so it is not necessary to close it after you have finished listening to an audio segment.
To get the RealAudio Player (which is free), follow this link.
Many SEAsite pages are divided into sub-windows called Frames. Each frame can hold content independent of the other frames on the page, and can be scrolled separately. This arrangement has many advantages. However, it does tend to fragment smaller display screens into somewhat cramped areas.
If your monitor is not very large, or if you are using 640 x 480 resolution, you may need to do some scrolling to see all the contents of a frame. Use the mouse to move the scroll bar, or click once in the frame and then use the arrow cursor control keys.
Alternately, in most cases, you can temporarily resize the frames on a page by clicking on the line dividing two frames and dragging (i.e. holding the mouse button down while moving the mouse) the dividing line in the direction you want. This will increase the area used to show one frame, and decrease the area used for another.