Reflect

I really enjoyed learning about the online tools. I think it would be nice for our system to decide on a few standard tools. Like which im program to use, a wiki provider, and maybe something like Zoho. If we knew that our colleagues were using the same services we could make use of some of these for work. But with everyone having different account on different services, we haven't tapped the potential of these.

This was a great series. I liked the pace and the size of each lesson was work appropriate. I would certainly choose to participate in something like this again. The weekly dosing with an e-mail reminder was vital to my steady progress. This felt well organized.

Mapping

I found Google Earth several months ago. My parents moved from Everett to Texas and this was very helpful in being able to demonstrate to my 5 year old daughter where Grandma and Grandpa were. They then later moved to Chile for church missionary work. I can zoom in close enough to see the street where they live. That is great fun to demonstrate how far away they are. When the volcano erupted in Chile last month, we were able to zoom in and determine they were out of any danger.

Gaming

I enjoyed the list of things kids learn while gaming. I do think this is true that there is value to games that translate to life. I am currently in the process of joing a Rotary club to increase my contacts in my community and feel that this is also alot like gaming. It reminds me of those quest games where you have to wander around a town or countryside and you have to click on people to ask them a question and see if they will reveial a clue. Each of these conversations have a goal and there are many steps along the way to fulfilling the quest.

Real Networks has a nice gaming portal as well. It looks and functions very similarly to the Yahoo one. PBSkids.com also has a very nice portal to online games for children.

Living in SL

I first became active in Second Life in 2006. In fact I attended some of the first in-world meetings to organize the library presence. Unfortunately, my computer at home has issues running Second Life and it caused frequent crashes so I have remained inactive now for some time.

The learning curve for SL is steep. But the experience is really like wandering around inside the internet. After my next upgrade, I should be ready to spend more in-world.

online office tools

I can't wait to figure out ways to incorporate this into my work. Managing files continues to be an ever growing burden as the number of years worth of work continues to mount on my server folders.

These do appear to include all of the primary functionality of Office products. It is too bad that the sharing benefits do not exist as conveniently inside of Office.

I was really blown away by the offerings at Zoho. Google Docs was impressive too.

compare search engines

I really haven't found much to make me feel like one is superior to the other. I think this seems to be one of those things like a car that is all about preference. You find something you like that gets you where you want to go and you stick with it. It is nice to tour the others occasionally and see if there is something better out there on occasion.

podcast

Learn Out Loud looks like a lot of fun. It has a lot of the same feeds I have seen from NPR and from ITunes but I also found some other stuff I haven't seen before.

I have been using podcasts for quite some time. I download to my palm pilot and to an MP3 player. My new truck has an input jack which allows me to listen to these in the car. I also listen at the gym which is better then having to listen to their usually crappy music.

image generators

Wow! Another new use for my webcam. Plenty to play with here.

Audio video downloads

I have used these services quite a bit. Although I am not much of an audio book listener, I have downloaded movies for my daughter. She is now enjoying listening to audio books while she does things like painting or other non-TV activities. PlayAways have also been successful.

social bookmarking

My del.icio.us feed


I am still unsure of how I might incorporate this into my personal online life. I have never used much of the favorites features on browsers. I did find that you can turn on a feature to make some bookmarks private. I like this idea. Facebook also has a del.icio.us application that looks more promising now that I understand social bookmarking more.