17 again! *thing 17*

Being able to access things that you have bookmarked from any computer makes researching and viewing certain topics really easy. This could help in the classroom when you have bookmarked a certain web page at your home computer and need access to it on your classroom computer. All you would have to do is pull up the delicious account and access your bookmarked pages and pull them up for your students or fellow teachers to view. I'm not real sure if I would use this personally, but the thought of it sounds good! I would be more prone to try and remember the specific site or just write it down. Having so many different accounts on so many different websites is too much of a hassle for me. This idea is great for all the people who love their internet access!

16 things and counting... *thing 16*

I choose to go ahead and reorganize and change colors and other things on my already made iGoogle homepage. I have been using this as my homepage since the previous thing that had iGoogle on it. I really enjoy it and use a lot of the features that are on it daily. The online calendar could be useful for always having access to your calendar instead of worrying about keeping up with it you can just log on to it on the internet. I probably wouldn't use it much because I already have a hard enough time keeping up with my calendar I use now. The online to-do list is a cool idea but I think its too much work for a simple task that only needs a pen and scratch piece of paper. Most to-do lists are good mainly for when you're going to the store or around the house and its way more convenient to have a piece of paper rather than logging on the internet. But some people do benefit from this things on the web, just not me.

15 shmififteen! *thing 15*

Before this exercise I didn't know that Wikipedia was a "wiki" and there were other features like this. Wikis give you another to share and exchange information on the internet without being stuck to something. Wikis are applications that allow users to change information or post new information. Things in the world change all the time and so should on the information on the internet, so the convenience of being able to change it yourself and also check past information without having to register with anything is pretty awesome. Wikis give schools and libraries different ways to share ideas and information. Making a wiki site would be a good idea for a teacher who had a lot going on the classroom. It would give the students other means of sharing notes and helpful information for whatever may be going on and the teacher can also add information to enhance the student's experience. The only disclaimer I would have with using wikis is that it could be hard to trust some information sometimes, especially if you are looking up something for a research paper or a crucial topic that has a lot of different heartfelt views. But other than that, I think wikis  are a good idea.

Quatorze! *thing 14*

Templates for mind maps and flow-charts are pretty nifty for anyone who can't get something started. A mind map can help when you are trying to brainstorm for either a project or a paper. These mind map websites give you an idea of how your ideas show flow. Flow-charts can be used for many things such as presentations and projects to present a flow of an idea or sequence of something. I explored Gliffy and Bubbl.us which were two good websites that can benefit me or anyone else with a project or presentation that they are having trouble getting started.

Bakers Dozen *thing 13*

I am totally amazed that there is basically "WORD" free on the internet. Zoho Writer is a pretty darn cool app that can be very useful to a lot of people. It makes me think of the students who don't have a computer so therefore they wouldn't have those Microsoft Office programs to use. Instead of using Word on the schools computer and saving it and possibly losing it, they can make a Zoho Writer account and never have to worry about being at a certain computer to access their work. The features on Zoho amazed me. I would never think that something that is so detailed would be free to everyone. It makes creating things and writing things super duper easy for anyone. You don't have to look spell check or word count, its right there on the toolbar for you to access. I think this app could be very beneficial to a lot of people.

the 12th man *thing 12*

I never knew that Google did anything more than search for everything in the world and give you access to an email account. Google tools gives you a lot of other things that you can do. iGoogle is really neat with all the gadgets and other tools that let you customize it to your liking. I ended up making iGoogle my homepage because I didn't have one and I added everything that I enjoy looking at on there. This could be used in the classroom for personal and/or student use to keep up to date with news topics or anything else we choose to look at daily. Google Translate is very convenient. Instead of having to "google" translator websites, you can just automatically go to Google Translate and translate anything you need. This tool could be used in the classroom for whenever there is an assignment or research that has something written in a different language. You could easily pull it up and translate the words in to English or vice versa. Picasa Web Albums is a site that lets you share your photos with others and also look at a ton of other peoples photos. When I first went to this tool, it pulled up all the photos that I had on my blog which was pretty cool but also kinda creepy because my face was just sitting there on a website that I had never been too! Google Calendar is a pretty nifty tool also. Its something I probably wouldn't use, because everything I do try and use an electronic calendar of some sort I always forget about.

seven ELEVEN *thing 11*

The search tools for finding blogs within a certain topic is pretty useful. When I first clicked on the Google Blog Search it wasn't very helpful for me probably just because I wasn't real sure what to search for or anything. I then went to the Topix blog search and it went straight to a local page of everything that is going around in town which caught my interest. It had a lot of useful tools on the page. It basically had everything you could think of from local news to shopping and coupons to sports and entertainment. I really enjoyed this and spent a lot of time on it when I should be working on other stuff! But the only thing was I couldn't figure out how to add it to my RSS or if I was supposed to choose a specific feed to look at but that seemed very limited. Oh well, I'm sure I'm doing it wrong but its alright!