Thing 16

The first thing tried to explore was pageflakes because it had a catchy name. But I dont think this site exists anymore because got a message that said "DNS service for this domain has expired with DNS Made Easy". So I then chose igoogle because was already a little familiar with Google. I liked the layout of this page but there was a message that said that igoogle would no longer be available after November 2013. Even though that gives me a year, I imagine I wont use this much. I think as the year progresses the site plans to take features off. I did like this page though. It was familiar and looked a lot like my msn home page. What I really liked though was that on this you could delete things you did not use. For example, I do not use gmail, so I could remove this part off of the page. I liked that feature. Although I do not use one currently, I like the calendar that Google offers. It was very easy to use and very easy to add events. I really like how I get reminders sent right to my phone letting me know about upcoming events. I don't even have to go to my calender to keep up with it! My daughter's 3rd grade teacher uses a calender of event on her shutterfly account. She will add things to the calendar about upcoming spelling tests, or field trips, parent/teacher conferences, etc. I also get reminders 2 nights before on my phone. I think this is great and I am sure I will use something like this in my classroom to communicate and remind parents of important dates. The next thing I explored was Rmember the milk. I have a friend that has this app, and I know she likes it. I saw a barcode and I used my phone to scan it and now I have the app on my phone. I am still amazed that I can use my phone to scan bar codes and that automatically gives me the app! I played around with the online remember the milk. It was easy to navigate, but I am not sure I will use it. I prefer the calendar to the to do lists. Maybe after spending more time with it, I will change my miind. But as for now, I like the google calender by Google. I liked bloglines. It allows you to be alerted if there have been any updates/changes to a blog you follow. I have already noticed that there are a lot of great blogs on goolgeblogger that teachers use to share lessonplans. This would be a great way to be alerted about updates. Although I guess my RSS feeder does this too. I also really liked gliffy. I love flowcharts and diagrams and can certainly see myself using something like this when assigning research/writing projects. I like that we are being exposed to web 2.0 that are designed to save us time. But it sure it taking a long time learning about them:)