Thing 6-I know I am out of order

My Things--First I decided to try Evernote-I had been dying to set this up ever since Angela Strong shared her so wonderfully organized recipe collection at a CapReg BOCES SLS mtg..  It took all my willpower not to start setting up an account right then and there on my iPad.  Well I got bogged down with author visits, school plays, and a plague bestowed upon me by a hacking first-grader, and I just got around to creating an account.  My first clip was Jacque Torres' chocolate chip cookie recipe.  I took a look the Buffy Hamilton piece about using Evernote with students.  I only have K-8 students and I feel the tool is better suited for high school.  However, I would definitely pilot this tool with my gifted group-both as tool to organize their notes, and to use as shared forum for notes, articles, and digital ephemera.  As for teachers, librarians, etc, what a great way to share and organize.

My other tool I decided to use was DropBox.  I signed up for this years ago and never used it.  So I finally added my school files from my laptop to a dropbox folder.  I am anxious to get the files I have created on my work accounts into drop box.  I am not nearly as neat and organized on my work computer and now I can organize and access my work documents at home.  Now while Dropbox is a great tool, I am a an apple devotee and really do prefer iCloud.  While I have an older operating system on my laptop and cannot upgrade to Lion, I do manually add my stuff to iCloud (Lion does it for you).  In addition I love the opportunities available with iTunes, and the photo backup.  I know this can all be done with Dropbox...but Apple is Apple.

Thing 4-RSS

Thing 4: RSS...I have been a loyal iGoogle page user for many years.  I love the ease of just hopping on the computer and with a quick glance can see what my favorite bloggers have been up to (or haven't been up to).  Because I love iGoogle (and it is hard to top), I decided to try a Netvibes.  I like the concept and that you can create tabs--however, I feel it has a ways to go before it can top iGoogle.

I created a Netvibes page for our school library.  My goal was to provide a source for current events, book suggestions, and useful blogs for teachers.  I added a few items to each, and will add more as I come across useful resources.  My feelings are as such-not a bad tool, but I also don love it.  Upon initial setup of the dashboard, which included the naming, it automatically pulled pictures from our school site and my library website.  I selected a picture from my site, but when the dashboard appeared, it was a different picture and I cannot seem to figure out how to change that.  Also, making the site public must be done upon initial set-up -again, cannot figure out how to change that after creation.

All-in-all not a bad site, but it definitely could use some tweaking!