Thing 4

Thing 4 - Going Deeper: Online Productivity Tools"

Wow, who would have thought about a calendar with the ability to show real people's faces looking up, down, to the side, etc. No wonder Jeannie D. or "Information Woman" chose this for her calendar. Up until this year, just jotting down a grocery list, list of cards to purchase, etc & stuffing it in my purse or pocket was fine with me. Well now everyone can have their own customized home page. I personally liked igoogle best simply because I use Google all the time almost exclusively for everything I do even though Netvibes is the most popular while Pageflakes is the main competition of Netvibes. I used to use Yahoo most frequently, but gave that up some time ago. I haven't decided yet if I will make igoogle my permanent home page. My current home page is the MPS one. At school as I mentioned previously, the HIA web page is the home page. I do like to see the current temp and weather forecast. The current daily world news is also very interesting as we teachers never get to listen to the news. I could see myself using the calendar although my experience with the online calendar at HCL has been less successful. We have to go through an entire time consuming process to check the availability of a date for the meeting room whereas b/f we could quickly flip open a schedule book to check. None of us like it; it's not working for us. Our new head librarian has taken to printing out the weekly schedule to make it more manageable for us to use! I think the County should look into another online calendar that would make for sense for our needs. Come to think of it, an online calendar that could be color coded for both schools & the HCL job would be ideal. Back in the day when each of our 3 children had 2 summer sports I would hand write out the color coded calendar. That was quite a feat, I only delivered the oranges to the wrong playing field once! At this point in my life w/o an ipod I think the "To do Lists" would be too much work. I could very easily revisit this "Thing" at a later date. I think students would really do well with online assignment calculators. Having a pop up message about an upcoming due date would not only help the student be better organized & more prepared, it would assist the teacher's planning & not being a nag. Paper assignments can be lost or misplaced; some of my students claimed to have lost their entire folder whereas a student can always go back and look up the assignment on the computer. Students could quickly check their "to do" lists b/f class just as they do with their gradebook.