(Apr. 7) Although I already have numerous e-mail accounts with Yahoo (3), Hotmail (1), Netscape (1), plus my schoolmail, I decided to open two more with Gmail. One of these is what I use in corresponding with my students. And I love its speed and label features, which is better than folders, because it allows me to assign more than one label (or tag) to an e-mail. For example, the Business class is organized in groups to work on their business plans. So I can review all mail from this class or retrieve only the e-mail from a specific group or team. Then when pollen allergy forced me to stay indoors and miss two weeks of school, I was able to chat with some students. It’s better than Yahoo or MSN Messenger because the chat box is in the same window as my e-mail Inbox.
For the Computer Application class I had the students customize their iGoogle pages to include bookmarks relevant to whatever app we’re working on, eg. PhotoShop tutorials, Google Sketchup, etc.
When YouTube was banned in Thailand and Pakistan I was also able to post some videos on Google Videos.
My music teacher husband likes the Page Creator, because he has no time to learn HTML but can post assignments, media files, and handouts to his choir students through our Googlepages.
More power to Google!
