The last couple of months have brought some really exciting developments for Insta Spanish. It started when we were selected as a finalist in the Adobe/Sony Air App Challenge.  We reworked our entire app, making the visuals much better, and enhancing several of our learning activities. We also added a cool dress up game as a main feature of the app, so kids can use the pesos they earn during the lessons to actually do something fun.

While we didn’t end up winning one of the prizes, it turns out we didn’t exactly lose either… We were selected as one of the top 17 apps in the contest – which Sony will be featuring in their Select App site on all of their tablets. This was a huge honor and we owe a big thanks to both Sony and Adobe for getting us so motivated to improve our app!  This week the InstaSpanish Kids app got yet another exciting nod when Barnes and Noble added us to their list of “Top Picks in Apps”. Wow! Thanks B&N – we are humbled and extremely grateful for the recognition!

You can now get the app just about everywhere! I have not had time to update the slideshow, description pages, etc for all of the changes in the InstaSpanish app, and the addition of this new app – but you can check each of them out directly in the app store of your choice. We have many more fun things in the works, as well as a lot more content for the InstaSpanish Kids app – so stay tuned!

Update: We’ve added the new ESL or English learning children’s version of our app, InstaPhonics, plus new Dress the Cat and Dinosaur games. Check them out below.

 

InstaSpanish Kids App

Nook	Android	Amazon

 

InstaPhonics: Letters and Words

 

Nook	Android	Amazon	Apple

 

Dress the Cat App

Nook	Android	Amazon	Apple

 

Dress the Dinosaur App

Nook	Android	Amazon	Apple
		coming soon!	coming soon!

 

Dress Up Donkey App

Nook	Android	Amazon	Apple

You may notice that the title of our website has changed, to indicate our new focus on Homeschool Spanish. This doesn't mean that our program can't be used by anybody who is learning Spanish, but we are adding some exciting new features to the Members Zone that will be geared towards families who are homeschooling.  This is in addition to the materials that we already have, so if you are a grown up interested in using our system, don't worry - nothing has been taken away.  But as we are spending a lot of effort preparing the system for homeschool Spanish, I thought it was time to change the website title as well.

As we are considering homeschooling our own children (actually parents of toddlers are all homeschoolers!) - it has taken us into a whole new world, and I saw that there is a huge need in the homeschooling community for an easier way to manage Spanish teaching. I'll post more soon about this soon - hope you are all having a lovely holiday season!

Well this is a geek only type of post, so Spanish students may want to skip it - but for the Joomla users who do come to the site to read some of the articles and mods I've posted in my downloads section, I thought it would be helpful to post about what caused today's outage.

The dynamic websites (PHP, MySQL)  were down for over 6 hours - after I used Cpanel to update my Apache install, as the recent PHP update did not include GD support.

I thought it would be a few clicks and a few minutes - as I had already updated Apache in this manner via Cpanel (WHM) before. What I didn't know, was that selecting to activate the suexec modules - would lead to a total shutdown of my PHP pages.

When trying to access these pages, I would get the dreaded Server Error 500: The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Upon examining the error logs in Cpanel for an individual site - I found this error: Premature end of script headers:

After trying to reinstall Apache with all sorts of modules selected and unselected, I finally found a website talking about how the suexec function can cause all kinds of trouble. When I rebuilt Apache with all of the suexec things unchecked - as well as renaming the 2 suexec files on my system  to suexecxx - the Apache restart finally produced actual PHP pages again instead of error messages.

Hope this info can help somebody so they aren't down for 6 hours with this same issue!

Welcome to the new InstaSpanish!

I'm very excited to announce our first line of Mobile Apps! We've developed our first one, called the InstaSpanish Kids App. We are now LIVE on the Android Marketplace, which you can visit here:

It will shortly be available for Nook, iPad/iPhone as well. I'm also working on a Musical Spanish app - featuring all of newly updated song animation videos, as well as lesson units for each song. So stay tuned!