Assignment 1

Assignment 1, Ed Tech Kristin Shimek

As a technology/computer challenged person, I found the iGoogle sight really easy to create. I am now a YouTube junkie, and I wasted a lot of time playing with the sight. FYI I somehow found a link to igoogle templates for teachers that are free! Some are very interesting, and I think it would be a huge time saver. Note to self: after reading the PDF stuff I decided to download Adobe 9.0… it took 57minutes to download! I thought this sight provided a lot of educational material, and is a great way to stay current with world events.

The Furling sight did not open at my home computer, and after about 45 min on the phone with the “help line” THEY could not figure out why it wasn’t working. Also tried to open on a neighbors computer and could not open (similar problem with powerpoint demo). I am not sure if it was a problem with the sight or my computer, but everything else seemed to load without problems.

The VLIB sight I was surprised with the amount of info one must pay for, and the amount of advertisements used as articles on a subject. I thought it would be easier to find info than google, or at least more concise, but had a lot of trouble navigating to get valuable info.

Planet PDF was a great sight. I loved the FREE tab info and downloaded 2 books (as if I will have time to read them). Interestingly the sight says that it is even for people who don’t know what PDF stands for, and I could not find a definition…on this sight. I can see using this sight to be able to assign and “provide” books to students. I can see using this sight to customize a students reading assignments.

After doing this assignment and over 14 hours on the computer, I feel very overwhelmed with computer lingo, some of sights could have been in Japanese and I would have understood as much. But as a wise man once told me “just breathe”, and I still am. I hope this will get easier with practice and this class.