Guide
Guide > Technical Questions > What equipment is required?

What equipment is required?
Cultura is a standard web site that can be loaded on most servers and does not contain any specific software. It is therefore imperative that you check early for the availability of the module enhancements such as Search, CGI scripts, Forums on your campus. If your school uses a course management system such as Blackboard or WebCT, both program can be retooled to accommodate Cultura.

For students, constant access to computers is essential. For the optimal results, we suggest students work on the web outside of the classroom and therefore having access to the web either in a language lab, a campus lab, the library or their dorm. Since Cultura is entirely web based, any computer (Mac or PC), any browser (Netscape (up to 5), Internet Explorer) or any connection (phone modem to T1) will do but naturally, the fastest connection will make the experience more enjoyable. In the classroom, a computer set up allowing students to check the web during the class has proven quite effective. Some faculty have had access to language labs during classtime which can also be useful to make certain students answer messages and post answers but also can stifle discussions among the students in the same group.

Note: since web browsers are not truly identical, you may notice some changes in font sizes or lay-out of the pages on the screen.

For faculty, the same equipment is needed to use or to set-up the experiment. Special attention must be paid to the type of server you have access to, permissions to load pages and configurate the search engine, access to forums software but this discussion must happen on a case by case basis with your system administrator and/or support staff.

In general, we recommend the following for the faculty or the administrator:

• HTML editor (Dreamweaver, BBEdit or similar) to quickly edit and correct content pages.
• FTP program (Fetch or similar) to upload pages to the server.
• Image editor (Photoshop or similar) to work on the images.