Back to Thing #12

Well, I took the day off today - kind of...

Instead of completing Thing #19, I just spent the morning looking for responses to comments I left on other blogs. (Wow, that sentence is seriously flawed, but it is late and I must get ready for bed soon!) From this, I learned the value of two things: 1) having responses to your comments e-mailed to you (managed through the settings post of your dashboard) and 2) setting up a blog list. You will see mine at the right side of the page. I included those bloggers with whom I have chatted over the last couple of weeks. Now, when I want to see what they are up to, I can just click on their updated posts rather than going back to the learn2play page and trying to remember whose blog I visited! (Again, this is created through the settings tab on your dashboard - add element - blog list.) Somehow I didn't appreciate these features when completing Thing 12, but like the Google notebook that I wrote about earlier, it is only when the information is needed and valuable that learning actually occurs.

Also, in the spirit of creating community, I visited some quieter blogs and encouraged people to get out there and chat! I get the feeling that many of us are still writing for an audience of one...

Well, I'm off to Oklahoma for the 4th and am looking forward to replacing the electronic glare of the computer screen with the warmth of the sun; the clickety-clack of the keyboard with the popping of fireworks ; posted comments with live conversation. I wish you all the same blessings!

Happy Independence Day!

Thing 18 - Just how productive are these tools?

I have to give you a bit of personal information as the foundation for my response to Thing 18 - Online Productivity Tools. You see, I spent several (read two-and-a-half to three) hours on Sunday afternoon making invitations to a wedding day luncheon for my niece. Wow, you are probably thinking, that seems like an inordinate amount of time for a relatively simple process! No kidding! So, what was the problem? The word processing program installed on our new home computer - Microsoft Office 2007. What a mess!

How can it be that despite all of the hours spent creating my blog, playing around with different technology applications, etc., a simple word processing program derails me? Please! It was so bad that my husband, who approaches technology on a "need to know" basis, offered to help!

I ended up pulling out my old laptop, creating my document there, saving it to my travel drive, and then pulling it up and printing it from our new computer. I won't even trouble you with the sad story of printing the envelopes...

Anyhow, I tell you all of that so you will be able to appreciate the great relief I felt when I read Office Tools' advice: "Remember ..., you can save it (your document) in several different formats, including MS Word '98, 2000, and 2003." Could this be a way to circumvent future woes? I eagerly opened the link only to receive this message: "Your browser cannot display the site correctly - please ask your vendor for an update." Oh, the irony of it all...

Well, fortunately I had already registered on Google, so I just opened their tools instead. And, as we have all come to expect, things proceeded according to Hoyle. Lovely, lovely, lovely Google!
Since I am pretty adept (or so I thought) with word processing, I decided to play around with their publishing software and made a brief power-point instead. I'm not sure it is any easier than other applications I have used, but the idea that it can be saved online and accessed from any place - even offline, apparently, though I haven't tried it yet - is pretty amazing.

I think of my students who are always bemoaning their techno-glitches as an excuse for not having their homework. Wouldn't it be cool if they all had Google accounts and saved their documents online? That way, we could just pop over to my desk, log on, and print out their
assignments? No fuss, no muss! (Unless, of course, they haven't done the assignment and are just using technology as a scapegoat. No, surely not...)

I think of my own difficulties with those silly invitations and how I could have saved hours of frustration... Well, I guess that's why they call it learning!

By the way, I am going to try to include the work-in-progress-power-point below... I think it is kind of amusing... Hope you guys enjoy it!

(Hmmm - does anyone know how to do this? VWB are you out there?)