Thing 10

Zoho

I tried out Zoho. It seems okay. If I didn't have Google Drive, it would be great. But I do have Google drive and I would gladly give my unborn children up to use it. Luckily, I don't have to.

What I liked about Zoho

I like that it is organized well. I liked the way that the home page. It also has a more complicated tools and controls such as mail merge. The formatting is straight forward. You can't do as much of that stuff on Google.  It's good for what it is; a place to write and keep documents, spread sheets, presentations, whatever. This is a handout I made for my class tomorrow on Zoho.

What I didn't like about Zoho

I don't like it.  What I am more interested in is using things on multiple devices and having it be compatible. I didn't find any good apps for my iPad or iPhone, or if there are, they are a lot of work which detered me from the get go. It also kind of feels like an Office rip off at times. It has more than the basics, but in the end, if you have a simple online productivity tool, you then use something like Office to do the more complicated things. Maybe I am being too harsh but it feels like it isn't doing anything that isn't done as well, or better, by other programs.

Summary

Online productivity tools are great. There is no doubt about that. The only thing is that I can have an online productivity tool linked into Google. It's just very convenient to have email, documents, blogs, sites, calender, and search engine all in one. 

My Google Drive has everything I need organized on my computer at home to my iPhone, iPad, all the different computers I use at my two jobs (there are no individually designated computers for teachers), and the computer labs at HBU. Without it, I would lack a great deal of the productivity that I have now.

Thing 9

In the Sand Box

It was fun to make a quick little thing to do for a class. I did a poll and I do really like them. Sometimes if a class is being boring, I will do a quick Poll Everywhere survey to try and get some life back in them.

Professionally, as I said in my last entry, I would like it to communicate between people.  It might also be a fun exercise for student to make a wiki. I really enjoy some of those fake wiki pages. I think that could be a fun exercise for students.

Personally, it is hard to say what I would use it for.  It would be kind of fun to write an article about something I am an expert in, but I can't really say much in that. Maybe it would be fun to contribute to like a travel wiki or something. That way I could share what I have done and stuff.

Thing 8

Wikis

There is a bit of a taboo about using wikis in academia. I've always used them more for entertainment or settling an argument. It is interesting to see the specialized usage in Education.

Discovery

I saw some interesting wikis but I think I liked this one the most. I wasn't as interested in the content so much but the organization. I liked that it was a site for a school and anyone interested in using more technology in the classroom. It had some good examples of lesson plans. It was also organized nicely so that you could find things easily. I found a jeopardy Power Point that went over the vocabulary in the The Cask of Amontillado. If I kept looking, I could build a whole lesson plan around that theme then share it with the wiki.

Future

I could see a wiki at my work being a good idea. Not just to share lesson plans and stuff, but to go over course objectives and what they really mean. It could be a good way to get information about a class or grammar that you have never taught before. It might also be able to give the teachers a more holistic view of the what the school as a whole strives to do. A work wiki would be a really nice way to communicate between teachers.

Thing 7

Image Generators

WordSift

WordSift is a pretty cool little site. I've always liked word clouds like Wordle. They look interesting and you can do some good vocabulary building with it. But then WordSift goes one further and has the visual thesaurus and pictures and videos related to the word.  

Assignment

An assignment for me would be to introduce new vocabulary to a student. I would have the word list for a new reading or listening ready to go. They could then copy and paste the list and explore the words that they don't know on their devices or as homework before the class. The production would then to take the words that they didn't know and keep a personal dictionary, using a website that has the function, or even a spread sheet. They could even make flash cards. This could be an ongoing assignment.

Benefit

My ESL students are addicted to translators. As their teacher, I want to try to wean them of it. It is one thing to enforce it in class, but their language learning experience is outside of class as well. If they have tools like this or even a visual thesaurus, the hope is that they kick their dependency. A good dictionary resource that was discovered while doing this assignment was Snappy Words.  This could be a great alternative dictionary site.

Thing 6

RSS Feeds

My Net Vibes Page

Likes

I like the idea of RSS and newsreaders. Having all that specialized information at your finger tips in interesting. I could see it being useful for research or just getting a general idea about a topic. It might be interesting for lesson planning.

Work

For work, I could use this site to keep track of lesson plans or interesting ideas or new classrooms techniques. That could save time. My students are always looking for topics for papers and presentations, so keeping topical is a benefit.

Personally

For personal life, Net Vibes could cut down on my morning routine. Just open it up, get a quick blast of everything all at once, move on with my life. Though in actuality, it is probably just one more thing to obsess about and waste hours of my life browsing anything from new recipes to pictures of cats to music.

Libraries?

As I was looking at the tab feature, I was wishing that the library had an RSS feed to follow. But when I thought about it, the methods of looking up research material isn't really all that bad. There are a lot of tools out there (Diigo is one of my favorites in conjunction with the HBU library site). Might be neat to have a library do something like this but I feel like librarians would have their work cut out for them. Those would be a lot of RSS feeds. I think the technology is satisfactory at the moment so anything would need to be a vast improvement.