ACORNS Version 6.00 Overview

We are pleased to announce release ACORNS version 6.0 available for free downloads. This software’s intent is to support tribal efforts to revitalize language and culture. The name ACORNS (ACquisition Of Restored Native Speech) is in honor of the tribes of Northern California where the acorn is sacred. Those tribes were instrumental in spawning this long term project.

NEW LESSON TYPES

The new version introduces two new language lesson types (in addition to the seven of the previous version) that language teachers can create. These are:

  1. Magnet Game lessons - These lessons, when they execute, display a series of virtual magnets where each magnet contains a single indigenous word. The student’s job is to drag a magnet over another magnet that contains an adjacent word of a sentence. ACORNS will then merge the two magnets together. After constructing an entire sentence in this way, students can click to hear the audio along with relevant textual information.
  2. Pictionary Pictures lessons – Pictionary lessons consist of a group of pictures to which audio and text are attached. Language teachers pick a category of words, like animals for example, and create a dictionary in pictures. Students click on these pictures to hear audio and see culturally-based text. These lessons provide a fun way for students to reinforce their vocabulary.

ENHANCEMENTS TO VERSION 5.0 LESSONS

  1. Picture and Sound lessons: For pictures that are large, students can pan to see portions of the picture that are hidden. Picture and sound lessons can now include additional culturally relevant information.
  2. Multiple Choice lessons: Additional setup mode options enable language teachers to customize background and foreground text colors. The undo/redo options can now restore pictures that are incorrectly removed.
  3. Hear and Click lessons: An icon is now available to facilitate the process of removing picture annotations. A reset option is available to enable students to restart the lesson.
  4. Hear and Respond lessons: A continuous play option enables students to hear a story straight through where the words highlight as the audio plays back. A reset option is available to enable students to restart the lesson.
  5. Story Book lessons: In setup mode, inserted background pictures now show in the sound panel after they are inserted.

SIGNIFICANT GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS

  1. ACORNS now can extract clips from video and store them as animated pictures (gif files). These animated pictures are available to include in many lesson types.
  2. The copy/paste lesson feature now can copy a multiple picture lesson of one type and paste it as another type. In this way, language teachers do not have to create a lesson from scratch to change its type.
  3. There is a help facility in lessons that execute on the Web, which can be helpful to students who need additional instruction.
  4. The on-line help facility is much improved. The facility now exists for ACORNS to operate in other primary languages than English. This facility facilitates contributions from third-party groups.
  5. There are significant improvements made to the ACORNS web-site. For example, there are lesson samples available for every lesson type. The developer’s corners section of the web-site provides instructions that enable third-party groups to contribute new ACORNS lesson types.
  6. Language teachers can embed fonts and keyboard layouts in web-based lessons so students do not have to install them on their systems.

MINOR GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS

  1. The layer name display during execution mode is more easily seen.
  2. The default location for ACORNS files are in a folder more accessible to users. On windows, this is My Documents\acornsFiles and on Macs, the location is Documents/Acorns Files.

BUG FIXES

  1. At some point, an update to version 5.0 introduced a bug to picture and sound lessons, where acorns were lost after a file was saved and reloaded. This problem was fixed in the last 5.0 update and in version 6.0.
  2. Lessons containing many pictures (like Hear and Click or Multiple Choice for examples) could overflow available memory in version 5.0. This occurred when large pictures were used. Changes were included in version 6.0 that use much less memory, so this problem can be avoided.
  3. Hear and Respond and Hear and Click lessons had a bug that caused removal of annotations to sometimes not work.
  4. A number of minor bugs have been corrected in version 6.0.

ADDITIONAL NOTE

When creating a web-page of language lessons, put all ACORNS lessons in the same folder. Otherwise, browsers give a security exception or lesson not playable message when switching from one web-page to another. It seems that waiting a minute and trying again works, but still frustrating. The problem seems to vanish if all the lessons are in the same folder. We’ll need to further investigate why this is true

The ACORNS application is designed to work with any language and is easy to learn and use. It is freeware, and you can freely install the software on as many computers as you wish as long as it is not sold for profit. The author, Dan Harvey retains full copyright privileges, so please feel free to send your questions or comments to harveyd@sou.edu

Dan Harvey
Professor of Computer Science
Southern Oregon University
harveyd@sou.edu