Google calender is an excellent way for friends and family member to organize and follow one anothers schedule. My wife and I can co-ordinate the girls schedules easily on the calender and that calender is visible to both our parents. This allows us to both put on information without constanly communicating on the phone. This would be nice to use in the classroom so you can present lecture concepts and assignment due dates in real time. This way both the students and their parents could feasibly have an access to your classroom calender whenever they have access to the internet. I am not sure that I would use the Picaso application, due to the fact that I seldom take pictures, but pictures of classroom activities of field trips could be uploaded for parents to view. Google sure has a lot of useful applications for free. Thanks GOOGLE

While checking out the ELM resources on the District 742 site, I was brought back to my high school days. One part of a social studies class I took was called CURRENT EVENTS. At that time we really had a limited number of resources to search through to write our daily journal entries. St Cloud Daily Times, Star Tribune, Time, US News and World Report, and USA Today were about our only options. Wow, ProQuest would have been awesome to have for that class. You could have even found a current event topic that would have interested you. You possibly could have found a current event and monitored the different viewpoints with the numerous options at your fingertips. One negative thing was the search feature. It seemed to have found some articles that really did not fit the search. Although, that could just be the non-techy operating the search engine.

Just started a wiki on PBWIKI. It actually was really simple. I find it very interesting that collaboration for a group project/outing/party/meeting would be really simple using a wiki. Information can be passed very easily by everyone. I can truly see why teachers ban the use of wiki's. Where is the validation of the sources? Who to say that the information was valid at one point and then changed at another point by someone else. I editing the golf club page on wikipedia encyclopedia to state that private clubs require members to spend minimums on food and beverages monthly.

Software Application

Well, an application I have used and become more familiar with over the past semester and a half is Microsoft Office Suite. For the last 10-15 years, while continuing my knowledge of the turfgrass industry through conferences and seminars, I always wondered how intense the Power Point presentations were to put together. After having to put a few together and just getting the hang of the program, it is a rather simple process, thanks to Microsoft. In fact, those presentations actually seem boring now. I graduated from high school in 1989 and at that time schools were hardly even using computers. Computer software applications have certainly made some of the education processes easier, yet it also can be said that some of students uniqueness came from using different software to create their own unique presentations.

While working in our groups, it became evident that Moodle, Blackboard and D2L essentially offer some of the same types of applications. My experience at SCSU lets me give my opinion on the D2L system. Upon returning to higher education, after about a 15 year abscence, I was slightly overwhelmed with how advances in tech had changed the educational system. It took a while to get familiar with D2L, but it seemed fairly user friendly. Now, just after a semester, navagiation throughout site and communication flow between student and facilitator has become second hand and I pose this question? HOW DID WE DO IT WITHOUT AN APPLICATION LIKE D2L?

ZOHO and GOOGLEDOC Applications

I am really suprised that these applications are available for everybody to use at no cost. They both provide most of the same features as a Microsoft product. I found myself partial to the GOOGLEDOCS application, I already am using the GOOGLE calender for collarboration with my family. It is so nice that we can all edit dates and events on the calender without even having to communicate them. One of the best features of these applications is their ability to let numerous people work on a document without having to send the document back and forth through an e-mail, mail, fax or other, they can edit it on their own time and everybody else can see those changes in real time. I believe that GOOGLEDOC's feature surrounding this concept works better than ZOHO because in ZOHO you have to be invited in order to edit documents. I am sure that Microsoft Office has some programs and features that out perform these two applications, but I am sold that ZOHO and GOOLEDOC would work just fine for most of the people who use a word processing or spreadsheet program.

The RSS feed would be a great way to keep up-to-date with local and national news stories. I am going to teach in the field of biology and an RSS feed on my site that would reveal all the new and upcoming news events or discoveries within that field. This would be a great way to come up with new things to discuss in the classroom.