My Choice: Exploring Some New Tools

For this post I am going to share with you all that I have learned while exploring the ISB CoETaIL Wiki, my Google Reader, and iGoogle. I have spent the last few hours "playing" with the before mentioned tools to try and better understand what I am doing and to try and make everything more manageable. I started with exploring the Wiki like Kim asked us to in her Instructor Reflections. I was glad to find out that I could indeed still find all of the information that I needed for the course. I especially like the Course Assignment page. I also read Thoughts from Jeff at the bottom of the Feb. 2-8 page and decided to go back and add links to my previous posts. As you can see from this post I quickly figured out how to add links and I like doing it (I also like the color it adds). I'll save labels for another time. Next I moved on to my Google Reader, where a post on the blog Langwitches caught my eye. The post was links for 2009-02-05 and what caught my eye was SimplyBox - Think Inside the Box which is tool that can be used to capture, share, and organize things found on the web. I watched the SimplyBox video and decided to give it a try. So now I am the proud owner of a SimplyBox account, where I have already created a box for this course. It was easy to do and I'm looking forward to playing with it some more in my "free time". Also in that post was a link titled Facebook for Parents. I haven't had a chance to really look at it yet but I did add the page to one of my SimplyBox boxes where it will be waiting for me! My final stop on my exploration was iGoogle. I created my iGoogle page at the last face-to-face but I didn't get to make it my own. Well it is definitely my own now. I added several gadgets to my home page and now I can see my Gmail account, my Google Reader, updates to the CoETaIL Wiki, and my current blog posts all in one place. I also managed to add a link to my Google Docs but I can't get the documents shared but owned by others to show-up. Any ideas? Again a project for my "free time". In addition to the items that I need to see to organize myself for this course I also added a few extra gadgets like: World Time Server Clocks; a Sticky Note; My ToDo List; and two games just for fun - Flood-it! and Trio. I had a great time and now understand Chrissy's complete disbelief that anyone could go with No Google for a Week. I know that I couldn't and get through this course. ;-)