It's building momentum!

Well here's my second post, and so much has happened! We've been on camping weekends, built fuel-efficient stoves out of clay, slept with a pregnant pig and the website's on its way. More about that now!

The website structure is finished, so now we're all filling it with content. There are going to be sections on how to plan and organise your own expedition, a massive education section that has resources for schools to learn about the important environmental aspects such as climate change and deforestation, as well as maps of Borneo, information on the cultures of indigenous people of the Kalimantan, and lots, lots more.
It will all be going on www.expeditionborneo.org when it's ready, but until then we're using another temporary domain name - www.rangersmith.co.uk.
The blog will still be the main site, and we'll link heavily into the educational website from www.fxpedition2010.com.

The audio slideshows are coming along nicely, we've found some great games and activities that we're hoping we can embed, and I've already spoken to a fair few teachers who have some great ideas.

One of which was getting together a simple pack to send to schools.
If we want to encourage schools to have fun, non-uniform days to try and raise a few pounds for the cause, we could run a competition on the website and send a prize to the school with the best jungle fancy dress or face painting.

There could be other competitions to create artwork, and the best examples get shown on the website. What about if we allow the children who will use the site to design some of the graphics to go within their pages? We should definitely have downloadable posters to advertise non-uniform days and competitions so that we're doing the time-consuming parts of organising such things as we know how busy teachers are nowadays.

The prizes for school participation could be incredibly special - like going to do a talk for the kids about our expedition, either before or after (or both?), plus phonecalls from the jungle, videos sent directly from our base camp, and I'm hoping that we can have some video conferences but we'll see about that one.

It all depends on the equipment we can afford to take, the airtime we can afford to buy and the speeds we can get from the environment we'll be in - but if we can get 100 schools to raise £500 each, then that would definitely mean that we can take some serious kit, create some amazing content and have live jungle interaction with countless schools, showing them the amazing environment we're going to be exploring. How exciting!!