Saturday, September 6, 2008

Thing 13 - Online Productivity Tools

Well, my new iGoogle page is full of wonderful widgets. Truly, time must be forgotten while one prepares to be productive using online tools. The options are limitless! My new Google Calendar is prominently displayed on my iGoogle home page with a ToDo List, LabPixies Calculator, local weather, Mapquest and Yellow Pages. I have fussed over tabs for Minneapolis, News, Cooking, Technology, Entertainment and Books, adding and removing a variety of options on each page. I am delighted with the ease with which one can add a new topic and have a wide selection of choices immediately. Though i thought the to-do lists were over the top, a convenient list of the top priorities on homepage doesn't seem like such an imposition. The Google Calendar went together with ease. I started with a family calendar to coordinate the lives of my college student and work-wandering husband. It seems like this would be a great calendar to use for sharing our library volunteer schedule.

I chose to use Google products for this Thing; one less account and login to establish, as well as program compatibility. I have heard very good things about the Google suite of products and had planned to explore them further.

I was also pleased to learn about the online file converter, Zamzar. I look forward to sharing this with student who prepare documents at home in Works, just to get to school and discover they can't open them. I ahve a file converter on my computer with which to convert files: teaching them to convert files online will be much better.

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