BP2_iGooglePLE

Oh my goodness!  Where have I been?  No more entering URL's for FB, FSO, Twitter, To-Do Lists and a calendar every time I get online.  All in one place?  This is life-changing!  Seriously, I am overwhelmed at how much time I've spent hopping from place to place - having it all in one place is so satisfying (might I even say stress-reducing, because now I'm not having to remember all those darn URL addresses)!  I love having FB updates so handy and it makes keeping up on Twitter actually feasible.  I also added local weather and a date/time gadget just to keep up with "life" these days.  Finally, who wouldn't smile every time they looked at the adorable faces of these Golden Retriever puppies.  It's amazing that I can have so much information at my fingertips and amazing that I've lived so long NOT having it at my fingertips!

The resources tab is chock full of information that I will access on a daily basis.  I foresee myself using the Blog link, the Lynda.com link & the Educators Studio link the most often.  In fact, if I were not fulfilling the requirements of this assignment, I would have those links on my homepage and not on a separate tab.  Call it what you will, but I like having references all in one place, even one click away can annoy me sometimes!  However, since I want all of my points for this assignment, I'm putting the links where they are supposed to go. (But being the rebellious person I am, I will move them back to the Home Page shortly thereafter!)  :)  I added links to resources I used to "google" on a regular basis, including a dictionary, word-of-the-day, and thesaurus.  

My AR tab includes links to the FSO sign-in, Google docs (another newly discovered treasure), and Wordpress.  Perhaps my favorite link on this page is the Google calendar.  How nice to have a calendar that is easy to use, easy to access, and loaded with reminders!  (I'm a wanna-be calendar user, more often than not relying on my increasingly depleted memory bank, and more often than I want to admit, having it fail me.)  This is another that will soon be located on my Home tab, just for a "visual" reminder to rely on it.  At this stage in the game, I need all the reminders I can get - from every source possible! I also included a translator gadget on this tab (and it might get transferred to the Home tab also, but we won't tell anyone, right?) because that is a tool I often have to "google" to find (I've never been much of a bookmarker, so this is truly saving me loads of "google-time" and I LOVE it!) when translators don't show up for conferences or when I want to send a quick note home with my Spanish (and Serbian) speaking students.  

So while I was hesitant to establish a new "routine" I will be the first to admit that you can teach an old(er) dog new tricks - and have success with it!  Like most everything else so far in the EMDT program, I am finding that technology is my friend, not just something "techies" use, but something that really benefits me, too!