Makahu School

A pleasure to visit Makahu with a roaring fire in the classroom when its sooo cold outside! Still some issues with uploading the webpages and finally managed to contact their web hosting service (was a bit worried they might have done a runner). Have got Makahu’s web pages on my computer now so I can try and problem solve this further in town (with better Internet access).
Explored the use of Excel to create graphs that BOTs can understand. We made a few different practise ones and saved these to add to later.
Troubleshooting with Emily how to burn CDs on the laptop. It does not have the drag and drop utility that some of the newer laptops have so we used the Roxio burning software installed. It was reasonably easy to burn files from the laptop but quite a process to make a backup copy of a CD and very slow! But we got there in the end. Tried out some webwacker software (Educational Edition Blue Squirrel) but it wasn’t very effective. Have since found that you can download files for offline viewing just by using the Favourites tool bar in Internet Explorer http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/learnmore/offlineviewing.mspx
We also played around with their nice new camera/video/mp3 player. Wondered how to convert music files so they could be used in different applications? Further reading here http://mp3.about.com/cs/tipstricks/a/convertfiles.htm Installed MovieMaker2 and downloaded Flash Extract Pilot for capturing and saving Flash files from the Internet. This would be useful to avoid the bandwidth problems of repeatedly loading online Flash interactives. (The problem is you have to download them in the first place and that takes forever – we tried to load the Clifford online storybooks but we just couldn’t get them). Emily is trying to track down some software for their old digital video so she can download video (suggested she said a request to the cluster schools) but I think they really need a fire wire card – will look at this next time if they’re interested.