final blog

What a fun trip this has been.  i have taken it with a colleague so the office discussion has been as valuable as the 23 things online.  We have tried many different things on the same journey  and shared our favorites. 
As a life long learner, I love this kind of opportunity.  It's fun to try new things, successful or not.  I've enjoyed stretching myself to try things I didn't think I'd like.  I have found a few things I really love Library Thing, Zoho, some image generators.  I found that I'm not ready for Twitter or daily blogging.  But I have been glad to have the chance to try these things within a framework that had its own support group. 
I would do something like this again in a heartbeat.  It had been fun and just the right length of time to stay fun.  If I didn't like the thing of the week the next week's was available to try to keep the momentum going.  It was easy to stay caught up even with the holidays in the middle.
Thanks for the opportunity to have fun and learn something new.

podcast blog

Podcasts are great for travel, they replace cassette tapes of books or radio shows I used to tape for long car rides.  Now I down a podcast or two to my MP3 player and listen in the car with headphones or the cassette player insert that connects to my player.  I can have the NPR shows I like whenever and wherever I want. 
In our school the students podcast as a part of the curriculum.  They have done advertisements they have written and history reports.  They enjoy the writing, recording and editing of their group's work and the presentation. 
I found a podcast, Storynory, that has stories for children.  It would be a good listening center activity as well as entertainment in the car.  I found lots of podcasts I'd enjoy myself if I had the time.  My 5 minute commute isn't conducive to much listening, but I would use podcasts on a longer commute.
I actually think podcasts are one of the more useful gizmos we've tried.  They are available on so many topics and are reasonably easy to create making them a useful tool to disseminate information on a website.

2.0 award winners

I tried Zillow, Community Walk and Picnik.  The kids at my school love Picnik after they shoot photos.  I think some of these 2.0 award winners are fun, I did find one with a broken link to it's education features(dotdocstoc).  Not very useful if you can't there from here.  It's nice to see what is out there.  I'm already using some of the winners daily, Picasa, IGoogle, etc. 
I liked Community Walk - it would prove useful in creating evacuation plans, safe walks to school or field trip routes for a school.  It was easy to use and the maps were from Google so they were familiar.  I just wish they showed neighborhood trails too.  I did map out a walk to school for myself.  I had some trouble undoing things, I need and edit/ undo button for correcting misplaced path markers.
Picnik was a fun tool to play with photos.  It would make it fun to label my Birthday Book Club photos next year.  I make a bulliten board for the school showing all the members of the club.  I could put their names on the photos easily.

first try

I have used Google docs to create documents ans spreadsheets before so I thought I would try ZOHO.  I like the layout of the site.  It is very user friendly and not hard to use at all.  Since my Word has been updated to Office 2007 I almost feel lmore comfortable in Google docs or ZOHO.  I can find all the things I need to create a document.  It is intuitive for me.  If I bought a Linux based notebook I would use either one for word processing.

Wiki-ing

I enjoy the wiki process and see a great use for it in education. It's a great way to work collaboratively on a project from anywhere. I can see a committee using it to eliminate some meetings. The members could share information from home, at work and on the road. It's like a conference call for your laptop.