Old Time Summer

Tag: Artes Latinae

  • August 2012 Educational Preview

    A new “school year” is beginning. We have a new family computer to use for education. It’s a nice HP TouchSmart AIO Core i5 23″ beauty, though it doesn’t have any of the features I wanted to add on, in store we had no options, only this one. HDMI input, Bluetooth, Blu-ray … none of them exist on this model. It wasn’t super important, but I did want at least a Blu-ray player. Really want a Blu-ray burner and have thought for awhile that maybe I should just get a stand-alone version, so … the other thing is a Bluetooth module … I can get a dongle, but that’s not as nice as built-in on an AIO.

    My laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth nor Blu-ray. I hated that back when I got it. Guess what I feel now? I really hate that I STILL don’t have those features on a machine. I have a dongle on my laptop for bluetooth. It doesn’t work right unless I put it on the e-Sata port. It’s a special combo port, anyhow, it provides better power, and it’s the only port on my laptop that will run it correctly, troublesome, since my keyboard and mouse use it and I have an external sata device …

    So I have a job I need to finish and that is archiving all my photos and making something out of all my video footage. I need Blu-ray disc burning for that. I refuse to use DVD’s nowadays, so I do nothing at all. I have a lot of video that I need to process and this new computer can handle it better. Which means I need to put my Sony video programs on here (the machine I’m typing on is the HP AIO.)

    As for the educational things: I have LEGO We Do software which will work with this desktop, finally a desktop! Our other things never worked with it, only my laptop. I am actually missing one of the discs, I hope I can figure out which one and find it. I have Artes Latinae installed. I’m having them ‘start over’ again, for the 2nd or 3rd time. It’s been that long since I bought it and we’ve had so many computer issues … augh! Hopefully that ends here.

    I need to get them all started on more stuff, so the main topic is how to REALLY use a computer, use programs, and create things. Also they need to learn to use their cameras better, and how to really make the photos nicer, delete when necessary, organize like crazy.

    They will have a better time on this computer writing blog posts and other documents. We have OFfice 2010 Home and Student. I’ll upgrade this computer to Win 8 and have plans to upgrade to the new Office programs.

    Years ago I had Office 95 (actually still have it, just isn’t installed). I loved it, I loved Access. I really wish they had that in H & S … but they don’t. It’s just not possible for us to buy 2 or 3 licenses for Office Pro, but I wish I could. In the old days it was easier to deal with these things, You could put it on a laptop and a desktop both. No real life restrictions. So we have H & S since it’s affordable for family use, even though it’s a lesser product, but not so bad.

    I need to get more things going than ever, and it’s hard with limited funds. I’m hoping I can get some packages of somethings for my oldest two to rip through soon … it’s a high possibility. So we need to get on point and finish the Math-U-See levels they are on and go through more than one more before the end of the year.

    Well, that’s just starting peek into what we are planning and getting done, or need to.

  • First use of Artes Latinae I

    On Friday I did use the Artes Latinae Level I program through 108 Frames at least. It is a nice program. My eldest, Russell, worked on it also. On Saturday my second child, Victoria worked on it.

    I’m an adult and found it easy to understand and had to force myself to pay more attention to it so as not to have to go back to find out how an earlier frame had an answer to a later frame and I couldn’t remember what it was. I have relaxed my brain over the years some with study methods, so this is a nice program to make one THINK about that and solidly apply themselves forward from there.

    Russell turned 13 just in the last couple of weeks, and was slower than me advancing through the frames, but did understand them easily and get faster as he went along. Victoria is 10 (and almost 1/2) and struggled a bit here and there, but eventually was on-board and going through it faster. She is the one I was most concerned about using it, and I was hopeful it would motivate faster thinking for her, and already I’ve seen progress.

    The point of the first section of Artes Latinae Level I is to get the user familiar with how the program works and to start using better study skills (remembering what you have read). One does learn some facts of Roman origins and some other things along the way, but they are not to be tested on.

  • Installing Artes Latinae

    I’m currently installing  Artes Latinae – Level I on our desktop computer. It looks to be quite a heavy install, saying 30 mins. to an hour for installation, depending …

    This computer isn’t the most modern, it’s not bad,  just not super recent, an Athlon 64 processor, no dual or quad … but it’s faster than a lot of peoples computers, probably. At any rate, it took about 1/2 an hour, I got taken away from writing this post for awhile.

    Something that DOES bother me about this program is that now it says that it runs under a specific version of Mozilla-Firefox and that if I use the currently running version it I could have problems with bookmarks, playing sound clips, etc. … so I have to re-start … hence finish this post to be able to shut down this instance of Firefox to start the Artes Latinae program. Just a little quibble here, if it’s only … if it doesn’t interfere with using Firefox generally day in and out. FWIW I just think the wording is not explicit enough and only talking about instances, but doesn’t state that.

  • New Learning Tools for us

    We ordered a Latin course in April. It arrived today, this afternoon! It’s Artes Latinae … which we got as part of the HomeSchooling Co-op (online) we are members of.

    Also we got an online Art course there, with instant access to it. It looks to be very interesting, adding both these programs to our household.

    The other day I also picked up a “complete works of William Shakespeare” to finally get going on some of that in the family.

    Of all this I am most anxious to start. all of it! It’s all needed and wonderful stuff. Living learning. The best kind.

    I was going to do more with it today already, but our Baby Q is too full of energy to start anything new right now. He’s quite the deterent to actually getting things done, with “What’s that?” coming from him most of the time, over and over. He’s so small it gets in the way of other things for us older folk. Baby Q is in a new phase, and has seemed to outgrow most of his baby toys. That plays havoc with computers, books, disks, anything in the kitchen … So he’s ready for some bigger lessons himself, it’s the fun of juggling three different ages 8 to 13 with a toddler in the mix.