Eltham Primary School

Friday 11 June
At the Tech Centre with Peter, Gavin & Brenda. Looked at Sound & Music software – Audacity, Music Maker & Super Dooper Music Looper. Super Dooper Music Looper is aimed at very young children & really easy to use. Good starting point for learning about recording sounds & making compositions. Costs around $50 NZD. Peter investigating buying this for the Tech Centre. Demonstrated using the head set microphone to capture sound in Audacity. Also investigated Extranets – KnowledgeNet, Interact (logged Peter on as a new user) & Think.com. We really liked Think.com – free, online software, not available to us at the moment as being piloted in other NZ schools. I will contact Doug Harre about being able to access this software. This ties in really well with the needs of the whole cluster & the Tech Centre wanting an online area for students from all their schools to share and display their work. Talked about upgrading and networking the Tech Centre computers. They are currently networked through peer to peer shared files. Need to install network operating software if you want students and classes to have separate logons & folders. Windows NT, 2000 or 2003 available through the Microsoft agreement. This only needs to be installed on the server computer & desktops configured. Checked out the new cameras with Brenda. Loaded software to main computer and practised downloading pictures. Created an album "On Holiday at the Tech Centre" :-)