Gmail, Google Calendar, and Igoogle

Gmail is truly astounding! I love the features that it provides especially the labels and the sorting abilities. For someone who has two jobs and personal emails and school emails all coming to the same email address on outlook right now, the capabilities of separating mail into folders and clearing my inbox was truly a great find! I can't believe how much time I could save by switching to gmail on a more permanent basis than just for the purpose of this class. Also, gmail's ability to customize was very cool. I feel that it truly personalizes everything. The organization of the whole email program makes it so incredibly attractive and useful to me. Also, the gmail features for educators such as the ones we are researching in class and using makes it completely worth setting up an account on top of the other awesome features.

Google calendar is another great tool that I had no idea existed. I love writing in my personal planner and making to do lists. I especially love being able to cross tasks off my to do list, but thats another story. Anyways google calendar offers amazing features at no cost! The first feature that I especially loved was the get your calendar on the go. The fact that my google calendar can sync to my mobile phone and send me notifications or I can have alarm messages come directly to my phone makes it so useful to me. I lead a very busy life and to keep all my responsibilities straight I do use a planner on a daily basis so a mobile calendar like this would be very useful to me. Another feature I really liked was the Tasks list. As I stated before, I love making lists to keep track of everything I must do in a day. I constantly use post its at work making lists upon lists of things I need to accomplish by 5:00 before I leave to come to class. Then when I come to class I make lists of things I must accomplish by the due date or the beginning of the next day. This tool is seriously invaluable to me now. I can't imagine how much more useful it will be when I am a full time classroom teacher and I have 5 classes with 30 students and different lesson plans and pacing to keep track of.

Igoogle seems very interesting and useful. I have to say I am sad I will only be able to use it for another year or so. It seems very similar to the Aol and Msn home pages except that it is customized to me! This is great because a lot of times I would love to read the top stories on CNN and look at the new movies coming our or see the artist of the day, but I don't have time to search. I google brings all of this to me by me simply opening my browser. I love it! The quote of the day feature is especially drawing to me as a literature person who loves words and the science of putting words together. I believe quotes can sometimes be the most beautiful or ugly statements language has to offer. Therefore, I of course have a quote of the day on my I google. I also added BBC and Facebook to my page which are things I could never get on a home page of any other sort. I really love the tool of I google and could see it being really useful in a current events course because of the many different news agencies listed for access. Also, the word of the day feature could be used in my language arts classroom as a way to incorporate English with technology.

Overall, these features made by google are fascinating. I wish that I google was going to be available for a longer period of time but perhaps I can use it for student teaching this spring. The other two, gmail and calendar, will definitely be in use for a long time :)