My Space

Posted on January 29th, 2007 in Uncategorized by lynnehorn

I’ve never really looked at My Space before, but have suddenly come across it twice in as many days.

Yesterday I had a look at http://myspace.com/prototypes - this is the site of French indie band The Prototypes whose track “Who’s gonna sing?” is being used to advertise the new iPod shuffle (according to iTunes you should start downloading their work now so that in a month or so when everyone else is raving about them you can say you were there first).  You can’t get into this in school, but good for a bit of research!

The second is the page of our local arts centre, An Tobar - during our recent Equal Futures concert some pupils worked to write a song connected with the thoughts of the day - you can hear this  at http://www.myspace.com/antobar, it’s called “Never Forget” and is worth a listen - if only I could work out how to leave a comment.

Télé en direct

Posted on January 26th, 2007 in Uncategorized by lynnehorn

Earlier this week we tried to get the Murray v Nadal tennis match live via the internet (for the benefit of the Higher PE class!), but there always seems to be a problem playing tv and radio live from the internet especially on the BBC site.

And yet it’s not impossible, as I write this I am watching the funeral of Abbé Pierre, a French priest who worked for the Resistance and spent his life working for the poor and homeless, live from Notre Dame.  The clarity of the picture and the sound are fantastic and it gives a real sense of the the atmosphere there today. 

We definitely need to investigate the BBC situation again, but thanks to http://tf1.fr, we are looking forward to the French Open…

Some Technical Difficulties

Posted on January 18th, 2007 in Uncategorized by lynnehorn

Not been my week for technology.  The projector in my room (the oldest in school) died last week, when the lamp gave up - was quite glad about this as it’s been making noises like a dentist’s drill for some time. 

On Tuesday I went to use the wonderful French CD “Doki” on a computer where I’ve used it before, it wouldn’t play.  After a day of tearing his hair out and trying it out on several computers (it would only work in Maths), our technician Jeff finally discovered the problem - the CD Rom uses Flash 6 and there is a problem when used on a computer on Flash 8, something which he finally found hidden away on the maker’s website.

All sorted I went off to the Gaelic room with my working CD Rom, only to discover the projector there has also gone, this time the cooling fan.

I could of course resorted to pens, but couldn’t find one of those that worked either…

i-Gear v the European Union

Posted on January 14th, 2007 in Uncategorized by lynnehorn

Haven’t quite worked out what it is about the official site of the European Union i-Gear doesn’t like, but it’s certainly doing its best to ensure my S6 Social Education class can’t find out about it.

I found it was blocked before Christmas and asked to have it unblocked.  I have used the site in the past so it was obviously a recent blocking.  So far the English language part of the site has been unblocked (but with my language teacher hat on, I’ll want it all unblocked!).  Unfortunately when we started using it yesterday we found there were lots of pages we still couldn’t access, so almost back to square 1.

In fact technology really let us down completely yesterday, as we should have been video conferencing with Alyn Smith, MEP, but the video conferencing equipment was down at their end.

In  the end we had a happy end to the afternoon playing some of the EU games we were able to access,  but hopefully next week we can sort out the technology gremlins and find out a bit more!

Bad Astronomy!

Posted on January 7th, 2007 in Uncategorized by lynnehorn

Quite fantastic astronomy actually.  If you’re looking at space at all in school, the Bad Astronomy blog run by Phil Plait is surely worth a visit. In fact worth a visit just for images on the page I’ve linked to.