I set up a calendar, an iGoogle page, and played with some of the other tools.
The two tools I chose to explore more thoroughly were Google Notebook www.google.com/notebook/#b=BDQwUSwoQ6szrtp8k and Google Alert http://www.google.com/alerts. Since our students and faculty aren't allowed to set up their own desktops, this tool would be of best use to educators on a home address.
The notebook feature looked like a great way to keep notes while researching anything on the Net. What I do now, personally and with students, is to use vertical pages, with the Word doc open on one side and the Internet site next to it. The downside is that a lot of scrolling is involved, especially if the laptop has a smaller screen.
However, when I got ready to play with it, I got this: "Google recently stopped development on Notebook, which means it is no longer being improved upon or open to sign-ups by new users. If you're visiting notebook for the first time, instead try exploring other Google products that are still supported." I didn't think the Bookmarks tool, which was suggested in lieu, met the same need. Does anyone know of a similar tool developed by someone else?
To keep up with buzz that is going on (or not) about the books I have written, I made alerts for each of the series. However, I discovered when I was inundated with sites that the alert searches for each word separately! So I tried doing just a couple of alerts with the titles in quotation marks. No results to report yet, since they are only posted once a day.
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I followed your profile to your Website to look up the books you've written. I'll have to order them! Are you working on anything new?
ReplyDeleteYes, thanks for asking.
ReplyDeleteI continue to write monthly for LibrarySparks magazine. Today I finished a January 2010 article on humorous nonfiction. Albert Whitman is going to publish Squirrel's Resolution in Fall of 2010 with the same illustrator as Substitute Groundhog and many of the same characters. I have 3 other books making the rounds of publishers and generating a nice little stack of "no thank you" letters.
I hope you have the Stretchy Lesson Plan series. They have ideas for planning lessons and events and all those things they never taught us in library school!