Jennifer Barnett’s Blog: Reflect to Redirect

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I have found some wonderful tools that are very useful for a variety of tasks. Check out these “cool tools” and let me know what you think.OurStory is a great place for story telling. Record any milestone, event, moment or memory with photos and videos. You have unlimited space to organize it all. You decide who can see each story. Share by email to update family and friends. It’s a fun way to reconnect and reminisce. Write once. Live forever. Your stories and media are saved securely and permanently online, in books, and on DVDs.

Gliffy is an insanely fun place to play. Create diagrams, floorplans, flow charts, graphic organizers, flyers, (somewhat)technical drawings, and much more on this easy to use site. Your work can be embedded easily, printed or saved to view online at any time.

Quizlet is a site created by a 15 year old to make learning vocabulary and other materials easier. Join my group, Mrs. Barnett’s Wolves, to add quizlets to our practice sets. You’ll enjoy practicing test questions on these sets, which should help you improve your scores on tests!

Be sure to use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders. You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.

If you’ve ever struggled to keep track of different versions of spreadsheet or word processor files sent over email, Google Docs & Spreadsheets may be right for you. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a free web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers. You can, for example, coordinate your student group’s homework assignments, access your family to-do list from work or home, or collaborate with remote colleagues on a new business plan.

This site, Flickr, is a great photo sharing site.

Searching for something? Snap is a very different way of searching, one we suspect will take a bit of getting used to. As you can imagine, we’ve done a ton of usability testing in developing Snap and here’s what we’ve learned: while Snap isn’t complicated, it is a different way of searching in which a little bit of orientation goes a long way to increasing satisfaction.

What a neat place! xcellery is a cool place to create and share excel files. You can collaborate together creating them. Stop emailing and consolidating your spreadsheets! Xcellery lets several people modify the same Excel file at the same time. No installation required. It’s free!

The EditGrid site is a place for creating spreadsheets collaboratively. An online spreadsheet service with real-time-update and extensive collaboration features, and a good Web 2.0 counterpart of Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

The Wetpaint site is a free wiki service with some interesting tools for creating pages.

The folks at iloggo have decided to create an Internet gate through which each user will be able to easily and quickly access to all his frequently visited sites. Don’t be afraid of an unforeseen breakdown and loss of all gathered data. You can access them from any computer hooked up to the Internet.

A terrific office suite is at Zoho. Zoho writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Chat, and much more are available here. One user says, “Zoho Writer is by far the best browser based word processing software available (and I’ve tried them all). It features auto-save, email support and the one no one else has: a spell checker.”