Thing 13-Productivity tools

• Which start page did you choose? Why did that one appeal to you? Will you make it your permanent home page?
• Did you find a tool that has some uses for you at the library or at home? Which tool(s) would you recommend to others?
• How can the online calendars be useful to you?
• What about the to-do lists—helpful, too much work…?
• Did you try out Backpack? What did you think?
• Did you try any of the other tools in the list? Any good ones we should all try?

I'm at a point where I want to make things as easy as possible. I'm feeling comfortable with Google applications, so I think I will stick with them. I need to help my husband with the idea of a home page on our home computer. I'm very open to figuring out a homepage on my school computer-if that is even possible. I can see the value of using some of these tools with a group of teachers from the same grade level or school. I would need someone to help me organize it all.

I use the outlook calendar at school and have added a Google calendar to our grade level Google web page. I think I could easily use the Google calendar for school stuff to be published on the website and then another one for my school stuff and personal stuff. It's obvious that a homepage where I could access those calendars easily would be helpful.

Backpack looks very comprehensive-I'm sure there are many people who could find a use for it. I feel like I could do it if someone said, "Let's do backpack" and then would help me figure out my part of it.

The to-do lists look very useful. I make to-do lists and then usually lose them in the shuffle. So having it available on my computer would be nice. I assume I can access that from my new homepage or maybe add it to my delicious page. I can see now that I am going to have to have a way to organize all my tools-which I guess is why I need my homepage. I have a feeling someone will have to hold my hand through setting it up and then I'll be ready to roll. I think I will go back to this Thing at a later time when I can spend some time figuring out a to-do list site and a homepage. iGoogle looks pretty easy to deal with. I'll give it a try.

Ok...I just set up my iGoogle page with a nature header and weather gadgets for both cities my kids live in as well as Burnsville and Minneapolis. I added the Discovery First grade calendar and my own. So we'll see how it all works.