Thursday, February 19, 2009

Technology Downsides

Tonight I am blogging over dial up. Our house is located in a very rural area. Our only option for high speed internet is wi-fi. Tonight it stopped working. My husband called the provider and they told us there has been a fire where their equipment for the wifi system is housed. They have no idea how long it will be down. Apparently they don't believe in having a redundant system.

Fortunately for us, we use the homeschooling option PACyber offers. I really only need to log in one time a day to count for our school day. The rest of our time is spent in a more traditional setting. JT does take one virtual class right now on Thursdays. Hopefully they will have worked out the problem by then or we will have to find an alternative location. But it really made me think, what if we were signed up for virtual classes? Would it be our responsibility to find a way to attend those classes? I have been playing with the idea of switching to a new school that might involve regular attendance online. Maybe I need to rethink that possibility. At the very least, I need to find what the policy would be in those situations.

One other thing, this week I have started spending more time on JT's Spanish instruction. We have only been playing with it off and on from time to time. Today I made a whole pile of labels for all sorts of things around the house. I'm hoping that the presence of these Spanish words will indirectly plant them in his mind. I am looking for some good teaching materials for our foreign language for next year. If you know of any, please send it to my comments.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's funny you should ask about foreign language resources today. We are using Rosetta Stone for Spanish. I tend to let my oldest (7) just play with it on his own. Today, I was shocked to see that he understands, word for word, fairly complex sentences. For example, el nino esta tirando la pelota. He went on to explain that one boy pictured was in white or blanco, while the other boy was in red or rojo.

Anything that gets my sharp, but less than enthralled son learning with enthusiasm gets my vote.

Although we don't use the homeschool version, I have heard it is very good for tracking.