Thing 7

I do have an igoogle page already. I like it because I can customise it to me. I have quotes and puzzles as well as art and travel sections. I've played around with some of the tools but haven't found them very useful yet for teaching. I made a customized search engine but I haven't figured out how to allow students access to it without letting them go to my igoogle page. I also use the idocs but haven't got the knack for sharing yet. I've invited coworkers to work on a doc with me but they have trouble accessing it. I haven't tried it from the other side so I don't know what we are doing wrong.
I like idocs though because I am able to work on the same document at my different schools without emailing it to myself. The district has a shared space to save these things too but sometimes I get get bumped from the network and I can't get in. So it is great backup for when I need something and don't have access to the district server. I think this would be helpful for students who are working on a group project to be able to work together remotely.

I did use the google calendar for a while. It was very nice because last year I traveled between 3 schools so it was great to have a way to keep up with what I was doing at each campus without lugging a book around. I have a calendar on my phone now which I can set to alert which I use now because I don't have to worry about having access to a computer with it.

I think google alerts would be useful esp. as a current events device. I could see using it to track information for socials and science esp. I also want to play around with google Earth. I htink that would be a great resource for the elementary and middle school levels esp.