Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Thing 12 Google Tools

After looking at each of Google tools, I chose to explore the picasa album and alert tools. I already use Picasa to store/organize photos on my PC at home, but I understand that the software cannot be saved on macs. I saved a few pics on the online Picasa site for sharing. I think this is a great place to share photos of family events (our upcoming 4th of July bbq) with my sister who lives in Calif. who misses a lot of family gatherings. I LOVE the slideshow feature. It could be used to share pics of students at work in class to share with parents. Lots of fun uses. Again, as with Flickr, this could be a helpful tool to create an online gallery of student artwork. It could also be used for my advanced students to collect reference images for them to use in their artwork or research on artstyles or artists. I also explored and created some google alerts for myself and my kids. I chose "mesquite isd", and "whitmore manufacturing", which is my husband's employer. I also chose a couple of my kids' favorite celebrities. I think this could have a variety of uses at school, such as keeping me up to date on favorite contemporary artists, and exhibits at area art musueums or galleries.

After exploring the google calendar and notebook, I can see uses for these as well. I want to see how well they work on my mac at school (with all the filters) before I set up anything extensive.

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