hearing things
Sometimes the blindingl
y obvious just eludes you, doesn’t it?
There we were in one of our MFL media centres and, despite the near proximity of shiny 17 inch monitors, the netbooks were the machines of choice. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But then it came to doing some activities involving listening (from the brilliant Australian Languages Online site, as it happens), and it dawned on me that here was a base we hadn’t covered.
Earphones. We need earphones. Why didn’t I think of that before? Too blindingly obvious, I suppose.
putting on an accent
First up, slightly surprising and disappointing discovery about the Acer netbooks, as unboxed last night by the students – they are running Windows XP, rather than 7 Starter. So no IE9 browser for the team, then. Ah well.
Next, I had worked out last night that some method of inserting accented characters would be needed, given the working methods I am proposing. Now, Acrobat.com does offer this facility for Buzzword, so document type tasks are ok. But nothing similar in Tables, which will be our method of recording vocabulary. And the Microsoft Office Web Apps (we are going to be using OneNote) ditto.
Now, you can use keyboard shortcuts if you have a numeric keyboard and a memory like a herd of elephants, but little floating toolbars like those offered by Lexicool and Avisoft make more sense for most of us. The best of the bunch is still, by my reckoning, FrKeys, as invented by an ex King Edward’s student about 15 years ago, so I put that on each of the students’ machines during todays lesson. Thanks, Patrick!
unboxing
Well, second lesson of the academic year, and it’s unboxing time. Not strictly true, as that was left for the boys to do at home in the evening, and in the classroom the little Acers just sat there quietly in their boxes while Uncle Bob explained how the year-long loan is going to work and übertechnician Joe Muscat explained the techy bits. Including some clever little dingbat that takes care of all that proxy server nonsense and means that you don’t have to alter your settings between home and school. Wish I had that!
So, much in the way of frissons of excitement. Hope the unboxing goes well tonight and we will see what tomorrow’s lesson brings.
starting out
At last! With enterprise-grade wi-fi installed across the School site and seemingly working, the time has now come to try to go truly paper-free.
Being lucky enough to have a tiny class of four students who are year 9 beginners in German, providing and managing the hardware isn’t too big a deal, so we are going to give it a go over the next ten months.
This site provides information about the background to this project, and this blog will provide (hopefully regular) updates on our progress. If anyone out there wants to share their experience with us, that would be most welcome!
