Web 2.0 - Becomes Productive (Thing 13)

Seeing the web become productive, gives me a lot of hope for leveling the "playing" field for the students that we serve. However, when they are still unable to obtain high speed Internet access in their homes, I am not certain that it is possible to fully extend the use of these tools from the classroom to their daily use.

Even if we aren't able to level the playing field with these tools yet, I am excited about the prospects for myself or other staff members in my building.

Customized "Home" pages:
I have customized "home" pages for both Yahoo! and Google, but have not really found them to make me more "productive" in my use of the Internet. Bloglines has been much more useful for me in capturing the information and updates that I want at my fingertips.

Calendars:
I have struggled with balancing many different calendars personal activities, professional activities, activities taking place in the Media Center at work, equipment calendars (things I need to help set up), and the list goes on! This is complicated by the big push at work to use the Outlook Calendar. I really like the Outlook Calendar, but I can't carry it with me, and I don't always have a computer and Internet access at my fingertips. Some of these things require others to have access to the calendar, and some of these are private things. What to do??

One struggle with finding calendar tools that work for scheduling spaces at school is finding something that is flexible enough to represent a day that is run by bells and class periods, rather than regular 15 or 30 increments of time. So, with some modifications we created an MS Excel spreadsheet that serves as a calendar for scheduling Computer Labs and spaces. It has been a hit! Any staff member in the building can access these schedules with just a click. I thought that I would miss them visiting the Media Center to write in the calendar on our countertop. It was a time to catch them and talk with them about their upcoming projects. What I discovered is that my teachers would type more information into a small box in Excel than they ever wrote in my calendar on the counter. I had much more information to start these conversations!

As for the personal calendar...I just hope that I remember to transfer all my meeting requests accepted in Outlook into my personal calendar carried around with me. This is what really reflects my time and availability.

Lists
I like to write my lists. Crossing items off the list gives me a feeling of accomplishment. I have tried Outlook's "Task" list, it just isn't for me...

What does sound intriguing in this list of productivity tools?

Zamzar = less tears over assignments due today! We don't always use the same software at school that students have at home. This gives me hope to have them leave me with a smile of relief!

I have the software to easily create PDF documents on my work computer, but there are so many other times I am on a computer that does not have this capeability. I tried "PDF Converter" but it seemed to freeze up on me. I will try it later. The Cute PDF creater might be nice to as a free tool, but I would like to see more tools available without the download. I am taking a downloading break at the moment.

So, for now I am on the lookout for great productivity tools online, but for right now, I don't see them changing my life.