Thunder

If at present your school doesn’t have email or calendar functionality for all its staff and students then you might be interested in Google’s latest offering ‘Google Apps‘:

With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (Gmail, GoogleTalk and Google Calendar), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

It’s sounds good to me, I have been pleased with both their Gmail and Calendar services for the short while I have played with them.

Last month I posted about Sir Ken Robinson’s talk for TED, over the last couple of days I revisted their TEDtalks blog and was pleased to see many more interesting talks. I will try and find some time after I return from holiday to download and listen to more of these, including Richard Baraniuk, Jimmy Wales (founder of wikipedia), Ross Lovegrove and Jeff Han.

MSN Messenger will soon display a ‘report abuse’ button on their software making it a lot easier for users to report inappropriate sexual contact. Further details can be found on the BBC News site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5279164.stm

Maybe the introduction of the icon might allay some teachers fears and concerns about using messenger in the classroom.

It looks like Sony are going to launch a camera and GPS receiver unit for the PSP at the Tokyo Game Show starting on September 22nd.  It will be interesting to see the cost of these units and then to try and have a go at using them for geotagging.

I still haven’t been able to get a gmail account, so if anyone has any spare invites left I would really like one (beg, plead)

If you have can you get in touch either by comment or email.
Cheers

UPDATE: Thanks to Mark Kuchel I now have a Gmail account

I was reading Ewans post about computer games and girls earlier this afternoon, which quoted a BBC report that said that only 40% of girls play PC or console games compared to 90% of boys. I wonder if it actually matters that only 40% of girls play PC or console games, what are they doing instead - it might be better than playing games Maybe that is why girls are getting better exam results than boys? What would the figures be for boys/girls playing football or rugby, or what about teenage boys/girls reading books?

Just looking at the top 10 games for the Xbox 360:

1. Prey
2. Lord of the Rings - The battle for Middle Earth II
3. Chromehounds
4. Hitman: Blood Money
5. Over G Fighters
6. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
7. Rockstar Games Presents: Table Tennis
8. Project Gotham Racing 3
9. Dynasty Warriors 5
10. Lara Croft Tomb Raider - Legend

How many of those titles would appeal to girls? Is that the issue, the industry needs to make more games that might appeal to a wider audience, for example SIMS?

I have now come across a post on Gizmodo which talks about Sony releasing a pink PSP and a pink PS2. I wonder if the fact that the device is pink will make more girls play them or is it just a good advertising gimic, what do you think?

Last week I decided to pay the £40 subscription for Xbox Live, which allows me to play multiplayer games across the net against other Xbox 360 owners.  It is a very social and highly collaborative activity, definitely what game playing is all about.

This afternoon I played UNO with 2 chaps from Germany and I thought what a great opportunity to listen and talk to people who speak German to develop your own German.  What do you reckon Joe or Ewan, something we could do something about?

Update: Tonight, again while playing UNO, I was playing against a couple of French speakers who were telling each other what colours to play as they didn’t think the 2 English speakers would understand them.  How cool it would have been to have been able to respond to them, I guess I was lucky I knew the French for red, blue, yellow and green so I was able to change the colour to stop them winning Would you class their actions as unsportsmanlike or just using their initiative?

Last month I posted that Writely had opened up for new registrants but unfortunately that was not the case, but I can now tell you that it is open for new registrants so pop over and sign up for an account you will not regret it.

My earlier post can be found here.

This free offer has to be claimed today (Thursday 17th August).

Every Thursday of August, Skype are giving away 20 free minutes of calls to ordinary landlines in 30 countries worldwide. Call your friends from your computer today.Follow this link to claim your FREE minutes

These two posts on Mike’s blog caught my eye:

1. Jelly Sensor for earthquakes - a fun application but requires Yahoo Widgets.
2. Subtangent numeracy maths resources - Countdown - after visiting the link contained in the post what I really liked was the educational version with additional controls.  You can also download the program as a flash file for use offline.  While at the subtangent website I found stack loads of useful maths resources and programs, I think it will take some time to go through them all.