Tonight we played a game with the parents :^), had another passport drawing, shared about the journal, verified information and watched two more presentations by Josh and Meena.Our next (and last) meeting will be on May 22nd.
On the left side of this window you will find two useful "gadgets" on the blog. The first is a currency calculator that you can set to convert dollars to euros or euros to dollars. This might come in handy when your child needs to make a withdrawal from the ATM. The second is a world clock. I will try to set the city when we travel (however, the time is the same for every city we will be visiting).
Also, there are a number of apps (or websites) that you can download for computers, ipads, iphones, etc that will also convert currency, give time, etc. On my ipad I also have the Weather Channel app installed (free) and I have all of the cities on our tour programmed in. That app gives weather forecasts up to 10 days, as well as hourly weather for the following 24 hours. Another app that you may be interested in is skype (or another like it), where you can video chat with your child overseas if they have internet access on their ipad, phone, etc and can also install the program on their device. We used this last year with my daughter. It worked alright, but had some video freezing issues and delay. Anyway, just a thought. If there are any other ideas for communication, or utility apps that may come in handy, feel free to comment so we can share with everyone. Think globally, act locally. :^)
I love, LOVE, to take pictures (like the one to the left from last year's trip). We will also be posting pictures (and an occasional video clip if I can figure out how to embed them here) nightly about the days' events along with a narrative to keep you up to date on what is going on in our tour of Europe. A short time after we return from our trip we will have photos on dvds for everyone who went on the trip (at least the ones from my camera). I end up taking so many that to upload them online would take forever. It would be nice too if we could get pictures from the students at some point to include in the dvds. We just haven't thought of a "smooth" system for gathering those. :^)
This blog can also serve as communication to us as well. If there is something that you wish we share with your child, you can post it online as a comment to the blog. Keep in mind that others who read the blog will be able to read your comments as well, so you might not want to communicate things about wearing clean underwear, how messy their room is, or that they forgot to feed what used to be fish before they left. :^) Please nothing embarrassing, and nothing that will bring the students "down." :^) We want this entire experience to be positive. :^)
