Thing Seventeen! Delicious Tagging

I had a little trouble getting this to work the way I wanted it to, but I finally got there.   I can see how it could be a great tool.  All you have to do is type in the topic that you want to know about and everything tagged with that topic will come up.  You can also tag sites yourself so that they are all right there.  For teachers this could be a great tool for resources for lessons, and a way to find resources for students to use!  

Pinterest is around the same idea, but to me, much easier to use!  You can see pictures of what you are looking for, and there are so many unique ideas that I would have never thought of otherwise!  

I love how I am gaining all of these tools that I would have probably never known about otherwise! 

Thing Sixteen! A Helping Hand

I chose iGoogle as my startup page.  I chose iGoogle because I use Google all the time, and it is a tool that I am familiar with.  I really like how you can remove widgets that you don't want, and move them around in the order that you want them.  I love customizing everything, so I loved how I could put a picture at the top of my iGoogle page!  I have made my iGoogle my permanent homepage.

Online calendars can be useful, not only for keeping events in organized and making reminders, but an online calendar can be more safe from being erased than one made into a computer.  If your computer crashes, you lose the calendar that was on the computer.  If you have an online calendar, your information is still there, and you can access it from any computer.

Online to-do lists, to me, are more work than they are worth.  I would much rather write my to-do list down so I can feel the satisfaction of physically crossing items off.

I would recommend iGoogle to everyone!  You can have all of the information that is important to you in one place, and it can pop up as soon as you hit your internet browser!  This can be useful at home and in the classroom!  You can use the news provided by iGoogle to discuss current events with your students.

Thing Fifteen! Wiki What?!

I liked the Wiki Sandbox a lot!  I think it would be a great tool for students and parents to communicate and work together to make the classroom a better place.  It was very easy to navigate and to edit pages and add images.  I like how creative you can be with it as far as changing the font color and adding photos.  I like the idea of having something like this where students and parents can express creativity and ideas, and it is yet another way to keep the lines of communication open, and to keep the great ideas flowing!

Thing Fourteen! Go With the Flow!

Flow charts are a great way to show the flow of events to students.  The tools on the 23 Things page would all be great to use! I chose Gliffy and bubbl.us.

Gliffy was an easy tool  to use to create flow charts.  It gave you a template and you could just fill in the information that you wanted.  You could move things around if you wanted to to make the chart look the way you wanted.

bubbl.us was my favorite of the two!  I had never heard of a mind map before, but I like them a lot!  The mind map was more fun to create than the flow chart.  You could connect ideas together and make it look the way that you want it to.  I thought that the mind map was more fun and more simple to create.

Thing Thirteen! Zoho & Google Docs

When trying to use Zoho I was a bit confused.  It seemed a lot more complicated than Google Docs.  I used Google Docs in my high school government class, and I thought it was a very useful tool!  We used it to turn in papers, and the teacher was able to put comments on our work for us to see so that we could improve our writing.  I was not a fan of Zoho at all.

I would definitely use Google Docs in my classroom!  Students can create a free account and create all kinds of projects, and be able to share them with myself, or fellow classmates so that they can collaborate on their work. Google Docs would be great when the students write a story or a paper, because they can see the feedback that they get, whether it be from me or another student. Google Docs is fairly straightforward, where I thought Zoho required more experimentation to figure out what to do. Given the choice, I would choose Google Docs over Zoho.
Google Docs Document

Thing Twelve! There is More to Google!

I set up an iGoogle and a Google Calendar.  iGoogle was so great!  I liked how I could pick what I wanted to show up on my iGoogle homepage!  I chose entertainment and news, two things that I love to keep up on!  I like that when I get on my computer, that will pop up so I can get caught up on the latest, and also not having a bunch of random things that I don't care about taking up room on my homepage.

Google Calendar is a great tool!  I can add events to make sure that I remember them, and I can set up reminders for a certain time before the event takes place.  This is great for me because I am a very forgetful person!  If I don't write it down, I more than likely won't remember it.  This would be great for keeping up with classroom and school events and making reminders for when I need to have different things done.

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?tab=wc
http://www.google.com/ig

Thing Eleven! Searching for Blogs

It is important for teachers to be able to get to information as easy as possible.  I found that the Google Blogs search was much easier than all of the others, and I just prefer Google anyway.  I didn't like the Technorati search very much.  It just seemed like it was more difficult to use to me.  I really only found blogs explaining the 23 things and what you're supposed to do to complete them.  I found one blog that was about a Web 2.0 conference and the author of the blog was presenting there, which was pretty cool!