Create A Spelling Study File Using WinFlash - The Award-winning Flashcard Program

How To Create A Spelling Study File

To illustrate the use of Educator for spelling study, let's do a step-by-step example. We'll just do three spelling words for this - aardvark, bureaucrat and cacophony. You do need Educator for this example - Scholar and Basic to not support the direct record to pairs feature. You can download a trial copy of Educator here.

Tip: If you haven't used Educator to create a flashcard deck before, please do the first exercise in the tutorial before undertaking this project. This quick (5-minute) session will familiarize you with the basic operations used to create study files with Educator. You can access the tutorial by selecting the Tutorial entry in Educator's Help menu.

1. Attach a microphone to your sound card and verify that the sound card and internal Windows drivers are operating properly by recording a short audio file using the Windows Sound Recorder applet.

In Windows XP Sound Recorder is located in Start|Programs|Accessories|Entertainment, in Vista/7 in Start|Programs|Accessories and in Windows '9x in Start|Programs|Accessories. This applet must operate properly before the record capability in Educator can be used.

2. If step 1 is successful, create a new deck, SPELLING.FLU, using File|New

3. In the editor, for pair 1, clear the text from the Question memo edit box

4. Select Fill-In-The-Blank as Type Of Question

5. Go to the Answer tab

6. Enter "aardvark" - without quotes - as the first FIB answer

7. Repeat steps 3-6 for pairs two and three, entering "bureaucrat" and "cacophony", respectively for the FIB answer

8. Go back to pair 1

9. Switch to the Associated Files tab (click the Associated Files tab along the bottom edge of the editor)

10. In the Associated Files For Question section, click the Record/Overwrite button. This should bring up the recording control titled Direct Record To Question with three radio buttons controlling recording quality and a Start Recording/Stop Recording button pair. Leave the setting on high quality for now

11. Be prepared to clearly speak the word "aardvark", click the Start Recording button, wait a half second or so then say the word, wait half a second and click the Stop Recording button. Close the recording control dialog by clicking on the upper-right-hand-corner "x"

12. The Play button will now be enabled. Click it to hear your rendition of "aardvark". If you want to re-record your efford, simply repeat steps 10 and 11 and the sound for the Question will be replaced with your new recording.

13. Repeat steps 10-12 for pairs two and three, recording "bureaucrat" and "cacophony", respectively for the sound files.

14. Close the editor and check out the operation of the file. It should "speak" the spelling word and allow you to type in the proper spelling of the word - then grade your effort when you click the Check My Answer button.

15. We've dressed up the sample file a little by adding a common graphic for the Q's and A's by using the Options|View|Hints, Comments, Tips and Associated Graphics Files|Show Graphic Below for Text Only Questions (and Answers) options to display an appropriate graphic file and also selected horizontal and vertical text centering from the Options|View|Alignment & Q/A Dialog Control section.

You can download the completed file, which has been compiled into a .flz study file, at

http://www.openwindow.com/ftp/spelling.flz

to see how the end result should appear and operate.

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