Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

Ay caramba it’s been way, way too long! Somehow between burying myself in the biggest software and authoring project of my life, and having not 1 but TWO toddlers (15 months and just a few months shy of 3…) – I’ve been in what would best be described as a constant state of chaos.

My backlog of email is unimaginable; tomorrow I’ll dive in headfirst to see what all I have missed. I have a lot of things I’ve thought about writing about lately. On the technical side, my love of Dos Batch programming! On the family front, a miraculous story of survival against bacterial meningitis on the part of my sister in law. On the language development front, my perplexed and delighted reaction as my son begins to consistently choose the “correct” words when confronted with a babyish word he’s heard way more often…on the childcare front, deciding that I’d rather get up 3 or even 4 hours earlier, and work before they get up, than sacrifice that time with my kids (not a judgement on childcare by any means, after 5 months or so my lady got another job and the getting up early was at first going to be temporary, but ended up working even better than having her).

Again on the technical front, the fun I’ve had with Google App Engine, who would have thought I’d be moving into the cloud! Python has always seemed like a sweet language to me, and GAE Python just proves it! At first I just didn’t really get what it meant to have a Cloud like system like GAE running your  backend (your database – like all your written content, user information, etc – which for most blogs is run by PHP with MYSQL). After working for several months with a very nice Java guy, whose code I didn’t have a clue about – switching over to the App Engine was amazingly simple.  Ah, but I’m a bit of a MYSQL diehard I guess, as I did immediately look for a way to use it rather than just the Datastore and the simple admin you can create with a mod for App Engine. Approcket is another mod that proved priceless – I use MYSQL for just about everything, and have a full backup of my db to boot.

On a person front I’m sorry I’ve not kept up the blog better, or kept better track of emails. Some of that was due to a visitor using some weird software which wreaked havoc on my email app (still not sure if it gave me a virus or not) – and some of that has been my switch to gmail, and not all my mail forwarding there.

At any rate I’m going through back stuff this week, so if you’re waiting on an email from me, you’ll get one soon. And for those waiting for the brand spanking new elearning application; it’s here!! I’m adding my content each day, this is tedious task as I have to upload and test each item, as well as make sure the virtual tutor video files are properly synched w/ the content, etc – but the system itself is ready to go, ready for students to begin, and by Jan 1 or so I’ll have at least 1 semester of each of the 3 levels.

I ended up doing way more activities for the original lessons, so basically after each page of instruction, the student has an opportunity to USE what they just learned.  For this site and the others I’ll be adding a slideshow presentation as well as an activity gallery where people can check out some of the awesome activities we’ve created (I had the help of a wonderful Flash AS3 programmer from Bulgaria, a woman coder – what a wonderful thing :)

So thanks for anybody still reading this blog, and stay tuned for some new stuff on the homepage this week!