Thing 13. Online Productivity Tools

I checked out each of the home page options. I have had an iGoogle page for about a year now. I like it for getting quick access to the news I want, but I don't like how it slows down my page loads at home. At school with a faster connection, it's no problem, but at home, it can drag. I thought the Yahoo option had some nice features. If I were a Yahoo mail person, I'd like the quick link on the page. There were a lot of quick, easy to follow links on the right as well. PageFlakes was the most interesting to me, however. I loved the NPR iPod feature to listen to their podcasts. It was fast and easy. There was no buffering delay, and by putting in my town and zip upon login, it gave me local news automatically! I got to read about our swim team winning a state relay and the hockey team qualifying for state. That was awesome.

I just got done looking at the calendards, specifically the Google calendar. That led me to lose about two hours. I kept letting myself be led into more parts, like the link to my Google Reader, which led me to a neat candidate survey I forwarded to my social studies teachers. It's a cool tool that is more user friendly than our current GroupWise calendar. My concern would be how to get all staff to use it. Also, if our internet connection went down, so would our calendar.

Remember the milk is a neat tool. We have a task list tool in our current Groupwise calendar. I like that the milk tool can be added to Google calendar. That was smart on their part. It's nice to have appointments and to do ideas on the same page.

The pdf converters were nice to have. We recently purchased the Adobe Production Suite which allows for this with Adobe Professional, but the suite seems to slow our computers down and requires 1GB ram, something not all of our machines have. This will be a nice alternative for converting documents that will be posted to the web.

I love ZamZar. We run into conversion problems a lot. Just last Thursday, a student made a video on her Mac at home for our TV broadcast, but when we brought it into Pinnacle, it wasn't compatible enough in the mp4 format she used. I would have loved to have been able to convert it to wmv. That would have saved a lot of stress. Now we can do it. Sweet.

Overall, there are a lot of products here. I think cutepdf is a must for my teacher workstations.