Thing #7 Google Tools

I've used Google calendar for about a year now and have loved it. I love that you can make several different calendars. Some that I have are: personal (dates for outings with friends, dinner plans etc.), birthdays & anniversaries, Work (staff development days, inservice, ect), and school (field trips, important classroom activities). It worked really well since you can set the privacy level of the calendars and share calendars with certain people. The School calendar I shared with my parents in the classroom. It was really easy to add a date for field trips and all of the relevant information for them. They could access the calendar anytime since it was a shared calendar--but since I didn't share my other calendars with them it kept my personal information private. However I could veiw all of the calendars at once (all color coded) and be able to see how busy or how much free time I would have on a day/week.

After looking at all of the tools I chose to further explore notebook, picasa web albums, and google docs.
Love the notebook since you can use it while looking at other web page--great for copying text, ideas from websites and much easier than copying it into a word doc or handwriting it down on paper. The best thing is that I can access it from any computer!
This was the same for google docs--still playing around with this one. Because there is so much that you can do with it I still feel a little overwhelmed by it. I'm going to go back and spend more time on this. But this would be great for working with your grade level team on documents. Especially since everyone can collaborate on the documents. Also a great way to store documents used everyday...always good to have more than one back up.
I went on and picked 3 tools to try out....so my 3rd was Picasa web albums. I use the picasa software to organize my pictures on my computer but haven't tried the web albums until now. It was fairly easy to use...especially since I already had my pictures organized with Picasa on my computer. However I don't think that I will really use it that much. Last November I had a break-in and my computer was stolen, which also meant all of the pictures that I hadn't backed up were lost :( After that happened I began using another website to store my pictures which I think works better for me since I can store them, share, and order the pictures from the site or have them sent to a store for pick up. It would just take too much time to move all of my pictures over to Picasa, but I still think it is great and love the software to download to the computer for organizing my pictures...really easy to use (and it's free!)