The two of these sites are great for saving your online “favorites” or “bookmarks”. Google Notebook does require that you sign in and create an account so it can save them in your account. You can create within the Notebook different categories for your sites. If you are planning a research project for your students, you can create sub categories within a Notebook for the topics, populate the categories with sites, and then print & distribute copies of the research sites for your students. You can also publish your Notebook to your webpage for students to access.
I like Del.icio.us myself! This is what’s termed a “social network of bookmarks”. In other words, as I bookmark my favorite sites, Del.icio.us will check to see how many other people have bookmarked the same site and link us together so I can view their sites. Its pretty amazing to see how many people are sharing similar interests by the sites they pick. I can also see other sites in the same interest that they may recommend and add those to my favorites as well.
Both Del.icio.us and Notebook have the option to install a piece of software to your computer that attaches to your IE or Mozilla browser so you can click it on any site you find and it automatically adds the site to your favorites. Pretty cool!
This is another of Carolyn’s blogs posted on her Not So Distant Blog:
Thanks for the great workshop Joel! We had several questions about the personalized Google Home page that we talked about a few weeks ago, so I wanted to post some specific instructions.
Go to Google.com. In the top right corner, you’ll notice a link to Sign in.
If you don’t have a Google account, look on the bottom right where it says: Don’t have a Google Account? Create an account now
Create your account. I recommend using your school email so that you can have email alerts, etc, sent to you on campus. (You can also create two different accounts, one for home, one for here.)
Go back to the main Google page. In the top right corner, it now has a link to “Personalized home.” Click there and you will see a new home page for Google with links, calendars, etc, on it. To modify that page, use the link that says “Add stuff” which is on the right side of the screen. You can select the items you want to display.
The Google account also allows you to use features like the Calendar, email alerts, Google Docs, Google Notebook, etc. If you scroll down this blog to the previous posts here and here, I have links to all of those features.
If you think all this is too much, try Exalead, which is a new search site. You can edit which websites show up on your search page and it takes about five seconds!
I wanted you to know that you should create a personalized account through Google so you can access all of these tools and manipulate your own settings. With Google Alerts, you can setup a directory of news items you wish to subscribe to. As these article subjects appear in the global news network, you will be emailed concerning the newest items. So now your topics of interest are emailed to you as soon as they are reported. Great tool for kids doing current events research.
Go to Google.com and to the right of the search box, click on Advanced Tools, then on Books. This new search tools allows you to access the tremendous database that Google has been compiling of books, articles, newspapers, etc. You can search books by keyword, author, title, etc. You can pick a book or play and even search within it for keywords. Then you can search for the book in your local libraries all from the Google site.
Very cool stuff! Let us know if you tried to use this and what results you have found.
Google has a free online collaboration tool called Documents and Spreadsheets – http://docs.google.com that allows users to create online documents or spreadsheets which can be shared and worked on by multiple people at the same time. You can collaborate on the documents, you can upload documents, and you can see the revision history of the documents should something be deleted that you didn’t want deleted. Afterwards, you can publish the document in a variety of formats including xls, doc, pdf, rtf, etc. to send to someone else or print.
Have you used this tool before? If so, how did it work and what did you use it for? If you attended this session, what did you think?
We started out with the title “Brown Bag Wednesday”. Ugh! We wanted excitement. Carolyn and I were already watching Bravo’s Project Runway and we loved Tim Gunn’s expressions of “Carry on!” and “Make it work!”. So, we decided to call our Wednesday showcase Project: Technology using the same type of logos they use for the show. Our campus flyers have Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn on them and we use the phrases to make it fun.
Our staff may not watch the show so sometimes we start lessons with a brief Google or YouTube clip of the show just to open it up a bit. I have added the promo for season 3 that wrapped up this year for you to see on this post.
Our presentations aren’t training. We just showcase some tools that we have seen in action at conferences, on blogs, read on wikis, or viewed in pod/vodcasts. We use this to just whet the appetite for teachers to see some cool stuff out there, get them talking about it, and if they want to pursue more – get them some individual training and support.
So, make it work people! Let us know new ideas to add or your comments on what we’ve done!
