General FAQ

Main FAQ | Webmaster FAQ

Are you a partner of Amazon.co.uk?

Yes we are and we hope that this partnership allows you to get all the information that you want about relevant books and if want to buy, please buy them through our site, because you'll be helping towards our running costs...

Copyright of this Website

Every attempt has been made to ensure that this Website does not infringe the intellectual property of others. If you believe that any item on this Website is not appropriately credited or you feel you have a prior claim to the material, then please contact us immediately. It is certainly not our intention to cause any offence in this area.

With regards to the material presented on this Website, please feel free to use it in anyway you wish, but we ask you to acknowledge us as the original owner and if you own a Website, please link to us rather than trying to host the material yourself, because we do update our materials and want teachers to get the best possible versions.

Typos

Don't be shy, please contact us about any typos you see...

IPA Symbols

Every effort has been made to make this Website compatible with as many systems as possible, but the IPA characters were only added into computers recently and as such if you don't have a compatible browser and the right fonts, then you'll only be able to see rectangles where the symbols should be. To compensate I have put sound-a-like words nearby and the PDF download uses very standard graphics, which everybody will be able to see.

To see IPA you will need Firefox 1.5 or IE6+ and Unicode compatible fonts. (Built into Windows XP, Mac OS 10 and most distributions of Linux)

Files Formats on this Website

Why doesn't the link from the archive or Homepage go straight to the PDF?

News items normally send you to the page with the download on it, but it may be at the bottom of the page. We have a policy of never sending users to PDFs or large files without telling them that they are going to download a different type of file and the size of that file. We hope that this is seen as a consideration for users on narrowband connections rather than an annoying extra click.

What are FLP files?
They are files used by ActivStudio for electronic Whiteboards. If you don't have an electronic Whiteboard, then I'm afraid this software is of no use to you. Where possible I will try to include Powerpoint files instead.

What's a PDF?
A PDF is a Portable Document Format file and can be downloaded at: Adobe I try to use it where possible, because everybody can read these files.

What about Excel, Word and Powerpoint Files?
You can either use Microsoft Office or download the free application openoffice.org

How Can I use Interactive Resources?
Many of our interactive resources require Flash you can download it here.

Please let me know if you are having difficulties downloading interactive resources for lesson usage. Where a file is a lot less than 200KB, I don't make executable versions, because an executable version is at least 1MB.

How can I download videos?
Videos on this site are NOT protected and all you need to do is Save Target As in Internet Explorer or Save Link As in Firefox. If using in class, I'd suggest copying the video to the harddrive of each PC to ensure it plays correctly. ww

What are Zipped files?
Zipped files save time downloading and where a file can be compressed effectively we zip it. If you have Windows XP, you can just click on these archives. For older operating systems you will need Winzip

Using Advanced Features

What's Firefox? To use all the facilities on this Website, such Live Bookmarking, integrated search box tools you'll need Firefox. There's a lot of other good reasons for using Firefox, which you can find here... (According to our stats about 35% of you are using Firefox at the moment) What's RSS? RSS allows you to keep up to date with the content on this site without emails. If you have Internet Explorer 7, you just have to click on the orange icon to add it to your list of news feeds. If you have firefox, you can just click on the icon to the right. If you have an older browser you can use My Yahoo to help.   The RSS feed for this site is: http://www.jamesabela.co.uk/news.rss Alternatively, why not sign up for our monthly update!

Other Common Questions

Why don't you fill all the screen with text?

We've tried to make this site as compatible with as many screens as possible, those of you with large monitors and huge screen resolutions have a huge advantage over the teachers with old laptops and PCs who can only display 800 x 600. (Unfortunately scaling commands in html don't work very well with old PCs, so I've chosen a fixed table and CSS stylesheet approach.)

When I use the search why are a lot of the resources not on this Website?

The search engine doesn't just search my Website, because I want to make sure you get the best possible resources available on the Web. If you want to search just my site, then go to the sitemap page, for other searches go to the searches page.

Are executables safe to download from this site?

For larger flash files we allow you to download them as executables. Every effort has been made to ensure that they are virus-free, but if you are in any doubt you should use the online flash file. We would NEVER recommend downloading any executables from any site unless you have upto date virus protection on your PC.