To be honest, I have tried out superglu and remained unimpressed; however, Firefox never ceases to impress me.

Academic Search
Windows Live

One of the aspects of Web 2.0 I find the most interesting is the possibility to transfer my computerized life from a single machine to the Web, so it can be accessed from anywhere - at home, at work or on the road.
As most of you probably know, there…

I’ve been teaching with blogs for over a year now. My first class blog was for a grade 12 precalculus class here: http://pc40s.blogspot.com

The way I use blogs in the classroom has undergone dramtic growth. I blogged about here and it continues to morph into new and interesting applications.

These are the three class blogs I ran last semester:
Grade 10 precalculus: http://pc20s.blogspot.com
Grade 11 precalculus: http://pc30s.blogspot.com
AP Calculus AB: http://apcalc.blogspot.com

That last one is a full year course and the blog is still running. This semester I’ve also added language translation tools to all my blogs (the little flags at the bottom of each post) as our school is one of, of not the, most multicultural schools in the province of Manitoba. Over 50 languages are collectively spoken by the students in my school.

The new blogs added this semester are:
High School Calculus: http://cal45s.blogspot.com
Grade 12 Applied math: http://am40s.blogspot.com
Grade 12 precalculus: http://pc4sw06.blogspot.com

The students are using del.icio.us much more now as I’ve incorporated their del.icio.us use into my assessment. You suggestions for blummy will come in handy as I encouage them to vet the sites they bookmark carefully.

Thanks for the link to Zoho — more to explore.

Thank you for your thank you!

iRows does seem to work reliably- you may like to check out the beta release of Zoho sheets (http://zohosheet.com/open.do?fname=329). If you are familiar, you may already know Zoho is developing a very nice suite of online services, with quite friendly usage arrangements.

My original interest in Blummy was simply to remove the clutter from the bookmarks toolbar. Now, I value it much more as a teaching tool to support three services that Stephen Downes pointed out in his blog a) Whois- Gives you information about the owner of the domain of the current site b) linked Sites- Shows all linked Sites on new Site (also resized) c) who’s linking?- Links to current page. I do recommend trying these out, as together and seperately these services provide information critical to students’ evaluations of web sources.

Please let us know when you may publish your class site integrating the services you’ve mentioned

Your mention of Firefox Portable as a way to extend accessibility is particularly useful for anyone who works across any number of different machines on a daily basis- I am thinking students in particular. The portable version also appears to fully support extensions which addvery useful functionality to the example described here. You have convinced me to finally do something about student take up Firefox Portable, thank you!

I have also tried a few of the other startpages you mention at your Online Research Toolkit and I think it is the simplicity of the Suprglu/Firefox solution that has encourages me to continue devleloping it- now I cannot quite imagine working without it. Thank you kindly for the link back.

An aside- your site theme is very eye catching!

I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now and the name “nomadic desktop” is beautifully descriptive. I teach high school math. All my classes have blogs where students collectively author “the textbook” for the course. We also aggregate links to supplemental material from across the web in a side bar box using the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool and I’m planing on incorporating the use of a wiki into the suite of tools the class makes use of.

In a few weeks we begin a spreadsheet intensive uint where I had planned to have them use the thinkfree office suite of tools and writely for their word processing needs. But I think that iRows might operate more smoothly. Thanks for the tip.

I notice your reference to the blummy bookmarklet tool. In what ways do you use it to support your teaching? How do you orchestrate your students use of that tool?

Thanks again for a wonderful presentation!

Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) is one of a growing number of Online Desktops. These services are meant to aggregate as much of your online life as possible onto one private page. You can link (and sometimes view) your email, create notes, to do li…

You can also be truly nomadic if you install Portable Firefox on a USB drive, so you can work even if the computer doesn’t have Firefox.

I make sure to link back to you next week when I talk about more of these tools! I didn’t include the online desktops, mostly because I haven’t found one that really works for me yet.