Knol

Knol is a tool from Google that allows individual authors to create a page on any given topic. I thought it would be a great resource in a writing course. You can have students publish their papers on Knol. This would give them experience with publishing and encourage them to write on various subjects.

iGoogle

iGoogle is a good choice for a personalized home page, especially if you prefer to use Google as your search engine. If you have used Google, you know that there is a lot of empty space on the main Google page under the search box. What iGoogle does is allow you to fill that space with handy little gadgets like a calender, a clock, or your favorite news feed. It can even bring up your local TV listing and Movie showtimes. It's easy to use and there are so many gadgets you can really personalize it and make it your own.

The gadgets in this application can help to keep me uptodate on information from a variety of sources. Likewise the application links to your Google calendar and has a to-do list to help someone keep on track. Beyond this I don't know how I would use the application in the classroom.

Picasa

Picasa is a free photo organization and editing tool from Google, and for a free program, it really has a lot to offer. Picasa is desktop software that runs on Windows, and it can be downloaded from the web. After you install Picasa, it asks you if you'd like to scan your entire computer or if you'd like to scan just the desktop, my photos, and my documents folders. I'd really suggest restricting your search to just those folders, unless you've got more than one hard drive or you've been storing photos in odd locations. You can also import photos directly from a digital camera, which is a handy way to keep them organized from the start. Overall, the effects are pretty advanced for a free software program. You don't get as much control as you would in an advanced photo-editing package like Adobe Photoshop, of course, but the options and controls for photo editing are still really nice.

I'm really impressed with the newest version of Picasa. I've used Picasa for years and the earlier versions often were slow and took up a lot of vitual memory. The newest version runs a great deal faster.

I plan to use Picasa in the classroom, using the album options to show in graphic form the characters, settings, and contexts of books students are reading.

Google Caldendar

The Google Calendar is a free Internet calendar that lets you keep track of your own events and share your calendars with others. It's the ideal tool for managing personal and professional schedules. It is both simple to use and very powerful. You can register for a free Google Calendar account. One of the problems with an Internet calendar is that it's on the Web, and you may be too busy to check. Google Calendar can send you reminders of events. You can get reminders as emails or even as text messages to your cell phone. If you have a compatible cell phone, you can view calendars and even add events from your cell phone. This means you don't have to carry a separate organizer to events that will be within cell-phone range. Many people with Blackberrys use this tool to keep up-to-date on their schedules.

The only thing that's really missing from Google Calendar is a to-do list. It would be nice to see tasks that are not necessarily scheduled for a certain time, and it would be nice to be able to send or receive them like calendar events.

The Google Calendar would be great to help organize the busy schedule of an educator, and publish to students and parents available times for meetings and office hours.

Wikis and Wikipedia

A wiki is a website where every page can be edited in a web browser, by whomever happens to be reading it. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects.

Wikipedia has enjoyed a charmed life, however, I would not allow it as a resource in my classroom. The site contains articles which are an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts. Wikipedia aspires to be a reference work, but falls soundly short. In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing, a collaborative site of information. However, without someone checking the citations and the information it is inconsistent and not a valid resource. One of the ways I would suggest students using the site would be by having them use links from the reference/citation section at the bottom of every article. By doing this they can go back to the original source and get accurate, unbiased information.

I created a PBwiki, but to be perfectly honest don't completely understand how this wiki site is different form a blog. I created a wiki classroom page and uploaded a report from my Race in America course on Angela Davis, I thought this would be relevant since she is speaking tonight at Ritsche Auditorium and because its a good example of a sample research paper for my students.