Setting up a High-Tech Language School?

Bakerybob writes "My wife and I are currently setting up a small Japanese language school, and I am in charge of all of the technical aspects, with a small but not tiny budget. What would Slashdot recommend as technologies we could use to improve the student experience (and hopefully to interest more students in the school!)? We have the easy bases (free Wifi access for students, a stunningly poorly designed homepage, and a few cheap computers lying around for them to play on between classes) covered, but I'm sure there are a lot of better ideas out there. Has anyone used Moogle? What about online lessons via webcam? Give it your best shot, revolutionary thinkers!"

Comments

Computers and education

[bludstone]

Do yourself a favor. Dont waste your money on computer stuff for a LANGUAGE class. Most of the language programs out there simply wont help the kids do any better.

I know there has been this massive rush to get computers into everything-education, but its simply not needed.

The tech you need is a good language teacher, some dictionaries, and maybe a few textbooks/workbooks.

Maybe a japanese->english english->japanese dictionary could be useful, but even then it could make for some seriously lazy students. But I imagine those kids already know about babelfish.

Maybe I'm being shortsighted, but I feel that, in this specific case, computers would be more of a distraction then a benifit.