Google Docs

I love Google Docs. It's such a simple way to collaborate, store, access documents that I have created for school. Particularly when you are collaborating with another teacher in another school, Google docs is a perfect way to share and collaborate when planning and creating units of work. Today I created some class lists with students email addresses and once complete it was only a matter of sharing with the other teachers who teach these students via an email to let them know that they can access and edit the document whenever they need to.
Even better when checking out Jane's eLearning tip of the day, I've discovered a cool little addon that will work with Firefox and Flock that places my Google Docs in a sidebar. With this bar I can drag and drop files that I have already created and stored on my hard drive into a section of the sidebar and they are automatically loaded into my Google Docs account. How cool is that?

Podcasts and Cool things on Firefox

I listen to a few podcasts driving to and from work and it's often where I get a few good ideas. Commonly it's where I often hear of ways to use the Web or Web 2.0 applications. They are not always about education although many are. I find it's a good use of time as I'm driving along the Calder Highway to and from work
Besides some of the great podcasts that are done by educators such as Chris Betcher who produces The Virtual Staffroom podcast and Dan Schmidt who produces the KidCast podcast, there are also other more general podcasts that inform about more general things.
The one I have found really useful for just finding out about new things coming out on the web is one called Inside the Net. These podcasts have introduced me to things like Delicious, Flickr, wikis, Bloglines and RSS. Each week they seem to come up with something new on the web to talk about. All of which have added a new dimension to my teaching practice.
Another great thing was the introduction to Firefox (which I use as my browser all the time now) and all the cool add ons that you can get from Mozilla.

One that I heard about the other day is a little add on called Googlepedia. When you search for something in Google, the add on will also search for the equivalent in Wikipedia and produce it in a split screen. You can click on links within the wikipedia article to create a new Google search as well.
Really cool.