Tuesday 21 April 2009

Skype-at-my-school windmills are beating this tired Don Quijote!



For almost two weeks now I have tried to solve the difficult equation of arranging the Skype video call session between our students and the students in Italy. A lot of emails have been exchanged by us two English teachers keen on the experiment. But sadly, my initial enthusiasm and persistence is fading away ...

Every step of the way there have been bigger and bigger windmills for me to fight to get to my destination (previous lamentation here). My chances had already been reduced to only one laptop (mine) plus my own headset and webcam. I reckoned that would still be better than nothing, and the rest of the students could still carry on with the text chat while a couple of students at a time would try the video call. I was almost there this afternoon - managed to install Skype on my school laptop, got my headset to work on it, but doing the final testing with the webcam proved to be the last unbeatable windmill - I can't install the webcam on my laptop without the system manager's password and approval. And they bluntly said they were too busy to do it for me!!
One more try - a helpful friend recommended I could try my digital video camera instead via a USB cable... Windmills be aware!

Photo: Flipando como Don Quijote by FerPer on Flickr

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