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Friday, 11 June 2010 19:08 |
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While yesterday I had never heard of this girl, today I got up praying that she would be ok, and overjoyed that she has been found alive. For anybody who hasn’t followed the story, she is a 16 year old from California who has been attempting to set the world record for youngest solo sail around the world.
I’ve also read many articles today about the story, which show that public sentiment is clearly against the parents right now. The majority of people think the Sunderlands must be nuts, and that they are willfully endangering the life of their child.
So on the one hand, it is ok to send 18 year olds off to war, or off to colleges like the University of Virginia where that lacrosse player was so hideously murdered by a guy on the boy’s team, but to allow your 16 year old daughter to undertake this incredibly bold adventure which she has trained for years to do, can only be nuts.
I think a huge problem in our society is actually the opposite: the overprotection and low expectations placed on teens, along with the supposed “right of passage” that kids are somehow supposed to go off to college and party their brains out for the first year or two, and come out unscathed and more “grown up”. The idea that young adults are too young and dumb to bear any real responsibility, or to understand risk, is a dangerous mindset that helps create a culture of irresponsible and morally bankrupt young adults.
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Monday, 19 April 2010 22:10 |
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I’ve discovered some pretty cool technology lately, mainly how to create SWFs from .bat files using the Flex mxmlc compiler. I have a slew of great .bat files that also create XML from glossary word lists that I make for lesson units, so this has been awesome for creating Spanish words with embedded audio. I haven’t gotten to the really cool stuff yet like doing verb conjugation animations, adding images, including flipcard translations, etc, but none of that would be too hard. I do already have flashcard application, but having swfs that I could embed in other apps with a flip-able translation, audio toggle button, etc would be very cool. The most important thing is that I’m able to create this stuff rapidly and with few errors, since the computer is doing it all based on my Spanish – English wordlist. One thing I did this weekend was to create a new numbers audio tool, since numbers can be a very tricky thing for people to really learn to manipulate well. You can know the patterns for numbers, have spent time practicing them, etc – but when you are faced with something like a ticket counter in a foreign country where they are throwing big numbers at you in rapid sequence, even the best studied person can freeze up a bit!
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Friday, 16 April 2010 18:19 |
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Anybody reading the tech news lately has read all about the feud between Apple and Adobe; or Apple’s recent decision to make any software made for their iPhone or iPad via 3rd party software development tools like Adobe’s Flash – a violation of their terms of service. 
Whatever lame arguments Apple has offered – that Flash is too “buggy” to work on the iPhone or iPad, that Adobe is “lazy” and refuses to correct obvious bugs in their software, etc – are all pretty bogus compared to their main objective, which is to crush Adobe.
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Wednesday, 24 February 2010 01:42 |
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 It’s taken me a while to figure out exactly how to divide up all of my lessons, in particular because I decided not to base each unit around a song, but rather to present the songs as their own lessons, so that I could move bits and pieces around into an order that makes more sense for a Beginning and Intermediate structure. I’ll be working on getting all of these lessons into the system as soon as I can get all the activities created and testing done. The children’s syllabus will be up shortly. You can access these here:
Beginning Spanish Syllabus for eLearning System Intermediate Spanish Syllabus for eLearning System Our teacher admin is also live! Only members with students or kids will see it when they log in, but it is a great way to track progress of your students and quickly print reports. |
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Thursday, 04 February 2010 19:04 |
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We’ve finally sorted out the problems with the singing animals and the animated storybooks - I should have those changes uploaded today! |
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Thursday, 04 February 2010 18:18 |
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Getting closer to our full eLearning launch…so much to do, caramba! I’ve done some more work on my Paco the Penguin character, who will be one of the virtual teachers in the Children’s section, and uploaded the new eLearning Features Explorer. I decided to go with a visual explorer over a text based thing with icons, and we’ll see how people respond to it. If you’re waiting ever so patiently for the INTERMEDIATE lessons, they are coming – no te preocupes :) I’ve had so many things to finish up, and hopefully now that I have all the basic marketing things created I can go back to finishing up the content, with the goal of having 1 semester or 18 weeks of stuff for each level by the end of the month. My kids love Paco, can’t get enough of him – so let me know what you think of him. Also the free trial is still under programming…hope to finish up this week!
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