Thunder

It’s the final month of Microsoft’s collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the ninemillion.org campaign.

You can support the Click4theCause campaign whereby each time a user conducts an online search through the special http://click4thecause.live.com/ page, Microsoft will donate money to ninemillion.org to help the estimated 9 million refugee children and youth around the world.

Blogs could help spread the word about raising as much money as possible before the final date of March 31st 2007 by posting about the ‘Click4theCause’ scheme. One suggestion is that some blogs are designating ‘Click4theCause’ days where they encourage readers to search for an entire day with Click4theCause to boost donations. However it’s up to you, if you’d like to participate, how you’d try and get people doing it.

To drive donations to the ninemillion campaign you would need to direct people to search at the specially set-up http://click4thecause.live.com/

If you want to find out more about the ninemillion.org campaign please go to http://www.ninemillion.org/

Individuals can also donate money by going to http://nine-million.spaces.live.com/

If you require any further information or would like images then please contact me:

Best Wishes

Darika Ahrens
Shiny Red
darika@shinymedia.com
www.shinyred.tv

I have been trying to find an efficient way to export my calendar from Entourage so that people can view where I am (most of the time).  I think I have now found the solution Spanning Sync (http://www.spanningsync.com/).  This application will synchronise iCal (which I automatically sync with Entourage) with Google Calendar, I have then got a link on my blog to my Google calendar.  At the moment it all appears to be working well, has anyone else got any neat solutions for exporting a calendar from Entourage?

I am after a couple of new gadgets so I thought I would try and get the opinions of people who read my blog prior to me purchasing anything.

I received a Video iPod for Christmas and am in the market for a microphone and a fm transmitter for the car (possibly with a charger). After scowering the market there appears to be a several options for the transmitter:

• Belkin TuneBase FM
• Belkin TuneCast II
• Kensington RDS transmitter
• Griffin RoadTrip
• Griffin iTrip

The microphones I have found include:

• Griffin iTalk
• Belkin TuneTalk

The last thing I am contemplating purchasing is a graphics tablet for my MacBook Pro, the Wacom Graphire4 seems to be the one that gets teh best reviews.

If anyone owns any of the above or knows someone who does I would be really pleased to hear your thoughts.

Cheers

If you are off to BETT and fancy getting your hands on a free bottle of wine then visit Roar Educate and take the flier that can be downloaded from their website with you.

I have just been tagged by Theo in the blog tag game, so here are 5 things that you may not know about me:

1. While at Aberystwyth University I played American Football for the university and for Great Britain in 1993 and 1995. I was predominantly a running back, but also played reciever and kick returner, I hold the records for most yeards rushed in a game, season and career, most touchdowns in a game, season and career for Tarannau. The university team was called Tarannau Aberystwyth (hence the name for my blog). I was named ’sports personality’ of the university in 1995. Since leaving the university I was admitted to the teams Hall of Fame.
2. I never wanted to be a teacher, while at Aber I was looking for a course to do so that I could play American Football for a further year and was offered a place on a PGCE. A year later I was offered a job at Llanfyllin High School in Mid Wales.
3. I am married to Steph and have a 2 year old son called Jack and a 4 week old daughter called Jessica.
4. I play rugby on the wing for Whitchurch Rugby Club 2nd XV. We are currently in first position in the league and are yet to be knocked out of the cup.
5. To balance out this healthy lifestyle I spend far too much time playing on my xbox 360, my xbox even has its own blog.  At present I am wasting too much of my life on Gears of War, Lego Star Wars II, Rainbow 6 Las Vegas and will soon be trying out Call of Duty 3.

I will now tag:

Tim
Dale
Derek
Nova
David

Happy New Year - all the best for 2007.

Just to let you all know that Jessica Ffion was born on Sunday at 1:37pm, she weighs 7lb 7oz.

Steph and Jessica are now at home and are both doing well, Jack is really happy to have a sister and has reacted well to her.  Photos of Jessica can be viewed on my Flickr account.

After a lot of looking and discussions with Dale I have now got a new theme on my blog, the theme I have chosen is Freshy 1.0

This theme allows a lot of customisation by individual users so I would recommend it to all ethink users, a couple of the key changes you can make include:

• Change the overall colour scheme
• Change the colour of individual elements
• Change the header image

The theme is widget enabled allowing you to customise the whole of the sidebar components, including inserting html code and rss feeds.

So what do you think?

At the end of November I am giving a keynote in Derbyshire on ‘using web2.0 in the classroom’, it is a 45minute slot and I have decided that I will not be using powerpoint or keynote, I will run the presentation from either this blog or from my del.icio.us account. Given that I have 45minutes I thought I would spend 5 minutes looking at 8 different technologies, so my first question is which 8.

At present this is my list:

1 - Blogs
2 - RSS feeds and aggregators, including NewsGator and Bloglines
3 - Del.icio.us
4 - Wikis, inlcuding Google Docs and Wikispaces
5 - Flickr
6 - Technorati
7 - Podcasts
8 - Skype

I know they are not all web2.0 technologies, I guess I am moving towards social and collaborative technologies in general. Anyone have any thoughts on this list, anything you think should be included and if so what gets the boot?

When Ewan first visited last April he said that I should get my own blog so that I can share what I am doing with a wider audience, he obviously thought what I was saying was worth sharing.

So I took on his advice and that is when this blog surfaced properly, previously I had just used it to work out how to use a wordpress blog so that I could support schools/pupils wanting to set one up.

I now feel very much like the person in this cartoon, whenever someone tells me something interesting, something that I think the wider audience would like to hear about I say ‘have you put it on your blog?’. This seems strange as previous to me maintaining my blog I maintained part of a website, but I never said to people ‘have you put it on your website?’. Is it the medium that has made the difference or my philosophy that we should share and publish more and more.