Daily Spotlight on Education 09/22/2008

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RSS your family: Rapidly Synchronize Sanity

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OK. The verdict is in, my husband and I both rate the Airset calendaring service a 10! We have used its powerful features and RSS to Rapidly Synchronize our Sanity ! Everyone loves it, from the 9 year old to the 39 year old! We have three children, ourselves, a plethora of community activities, and an extended family to keep up with. I was updating calendars and reprinting them every second and they were still outdated. Three weeks a go, I'd had it! My sitter is moving to greener (or saner) pastures and I was so overwhelmed! I spent about three hours researching family planning tools and looked at Trumba , Remember the Milk , 30 boxes , MyHomePoint , and Airset . I tried and set up calendars in a few. Here is what got me excited about Airset: RSS feeds - All of them have this ability. I have my children starting up on a simple Google start up page which shows them their g-mail account and blogs of note (some I write just for them). Using RSS, my children now see their ...
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122 For You: Cool Cat Teacher's Favorite Apps, Software, and Sites

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These are my favorite apps, software, and sites for managing my life, home, classroom, and more.  Hope you enjoy and hope you share yours in the comments. Calendaring 1. Google Calendar Google Calendar is now and has been my calendar of choice for about a year and a half. I have a personal calendar for me that is set up to send me a text message at certain times before I have to be somewhere because I always forget what time it is!  My family and each child has a calendar (I set the kids appointments to automatically show up on the family calendar), and I use Google cal for my classes .   Each class and major project such as netgened has a calendar and I embed these calendars in all of the Nings, blogs, and wikis as needed to keep people apprised of what is happening. I print these calendars out for my classes and for the refrigerator! The greatest addition to the calendar is that now I keep my 5 most important calendars on my Apple iPod touch 16 GB (2nd Gene...
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Wikis, Blogs, and Podcasts this week

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I have learned so much this week. Today, I have been in a collaborative teaching workshop which has just confirmed many of the tools that we're using in the classroom. I was so dissapointed that none of the teachers had blogs and weren't using wikis. I think we'll begin to see that changing. Here's the synopsis of my learning experience this week: 1) Podcasting using Odeo I worked out the kinks with my children at home, but I'm planning a switch to Odeo for recording and making podcasts for simple things. I recorded two ways with my nine year old. You can hear our rough but final product: Cool Cat Kidcast #1 - Gmail Cool Cat Kidcast #2 - Airset for keeping the family calendar The first one we recorded by calling a phone number. It was very easy. I can easily see how in the future, students will phone in oral reports from home for homework and they will be sent to the teacher for a listen. What a great things for auditory learners! The second podcast we reco...
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