As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have always been an advocate for Google and use Gmail as my primary email service. I utilize the Calendar tool daily. It is extremely convenient and allows you to share appointments, dates, and invites with other people within your circles. Google Calendar also enables me to sink my agendas to my mobile phone calendar, which greatly simplifies my life. The feature I like the most about Google Calendar is that I can share my appointments and class schedules with people in my household and vice-versa. As you share schedules of more than one person on one calendar, you can customize tasks by color coding agendas with different people. Our lives are so busy and fast paced that it helps to keep the other up-to-date with everything as simple as needing extra time a certain night because of a big assignment due, to doctor's appointments, or children's recitals. It honestly has become an efficient form of communication and has limited the amount of misinterpreted or misunderstood information within my household!
Since I already use the Calendar tool, I chose to explore the Google Alerts and iGoogle. Both were fairly easy to set up. Google Alerts is very interesting as it allows you to pick a topic that you want to be notified by Google about. This is a great tool to become more knowledgeable about a current event or even a popular celebrity! The best thing about it is that the information is "googled" for you and sent directly to your email, for your convenience and reading enjoyment. I chose to make an alert about Clarksville Montgomery County School System. Although I am not yet a teacher, I find it beneficial to be aware of what employment environment I will be going into, as well as important current events that are happening in my educational community. The nice thing about Google Alerts is that I can also decide HOW MUCH and HOW OFTEN I want to receive my selected information, which is a very nice mail filtering feature.
My iGoogle has been fun to organize. It allows you to set up your "home search page" on your computer with a background and different "gadgets". As you create your homepage, you have easy tutorials that you can click on to help you navigate through simple features of the program. I found it interesting that I could incorporate the Google Translate feature as one of my gadgets on my page. I also chose to have the weather, date and calendar, travel destinations, to-do list, and other helpful tools loaded on my homepage for easy viewing purposes. All of these Google web tools can be incredibly beneficial to any educator, by promoting easily accessible information. Teachers can also use Google Calendar to stay organized and even have one specifically for the itinerary of homework and class activities that parents and students can access.
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