INTRODUCTION TO WIN CALIS


"Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand"

This Chinese proverb expresses the importance of interactivity in learning; WinCALIS makes interactivity accessible and effective. WinCALIS, the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction System for Windows, is an authoring system that provides you with a format for creating your own lessons. WinCALIS allows you to choose your language, your material, your question type, your responses, and your style.

INTERACTIVE:
Multimedia has become a standard base of presentation in the education field, and proves particularly strong in language learning and teaching. By making the integration of multimedia so simple, WinCALIS allows teachers/authors to make the most of their lessons, so students get the most out of them.

FLEXIBLE:
You, the author, decide what text, graphics, audio, video, and animation to include in your lesson. From this material, the lesson is created: you may choose the layout of the screen, the question format, the anticipated responses, and the directed feedback. You may also include buttons, hotspots, tutorials, and branches along the way.

SIMPLE:
The Windows format makes WinCALIS easy to use for both teachers and students.

RESPONSIVE:
Video alone does not make a lesson. In a WinCALIS lesson, students can receive helpful feedback and extra information at their own individual pace, making WinCALIS a valuable supplement to classroom and textbook learning. Teachers have many options in response evaluation: when to Check Case and Punctuation, when to allow the student to Give Up and view the correct answer, where to allow mouse or keyboard use, and when to allow the student to Pass between answers or groups of answers. The use of wild card characters increases the range of flexibility in response analysis, and allows answers to be flexible and open-ended.

MULTILINGUAL:
WinCALIS boasts accessibility to hundreds of character sets and languages. Through the incorporation of Unicode, more than 65,000 unique characters can be represented -- making the blending of languages in one lesson a snap.

SMART:
WinCALIS not only displays keyboards and languages: it knows about them, too.

HELPFUL:
Teachers/authors have access to an extensive on-line help system (context-sensitive) and printed user's manual, and we welcome any questions, comments, and suggestions about WinCALIS. Write, call, fax, or e-mail us at the addresses listed at the end of this piece.

EVOLVING:
WinCALIS is in a stage of continual development, as more languages are added, more features are implemented, and as more users pass on their thoughts. As language teaching and technology evolve, so will WinCALIS.
At present, we are enhancing and extending our new 32-bit WinCALIS 2.5, which offers a slew of new features (e.g. speech recognition, more lesson templates, more customization, etc.), as well as superior integration with the Internet. See our Downloads Page ftay tuned for official release information or call or e-mail us for information on how to obtain an evaluation copy of the latest version.


Download WinCALIS Demonstration ExercisesSee WinCALIS Price Schedule (non-Argentina)


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