iSean

this isn’t really ed tech, but it’s geeky enough that i had to point it out. i have been using a custom google page as my starting point on the internet. on this page, i have Digg headlines; NY TImes headlines; Wired News; Stock Market; Weather; Sports Illustrated; Inside Higher Ed; my Gmail account; etc. on this front page. i have a 23″ display so it all fits nicely. i have thought about adding more, but stuff that falls below the main screen tends to get ignored as i don’t like scrolling.

well, Google has added a new feature borrowed from tabbed browsing. they added the ability to use tabs on this customized page. i just added a new tab that i titled “ed tech” — obviously, i placed ed tech feeds on this page. the Google pages make it easy to add RSS feeds as content on the custom pages. i added, “Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 2.0” which contains hundreds of various ed tech blogs. i added a bunch of other RSS feeds as well. pretty nifty to have it all on one page. sure, i get it all using NetNewsWire (an RSS / Atom news reader that’s really good), but that’s a completely different application and sometimes i get stuck in the web browser.

just quickly, since i am touting something from Google, i figured i’d explain how i use my gmail account . . . my university uses Groupwise (no link; it’s crummy). i use a few different computers (my laptop and desktop). well, my sent mail often gets lost. if i send something on my desktop, i rarely can find it on my laptop even though all machines are using IMAP with everything stored on the server. well, with Thunderbird you can have every email you send also automatically blind carbon copied to any email address you choose. i do this to my gmail account and then use a filter to have every email from me labeled as such and removed from the main inbox into it’s own little hideaway. anytime i want to see my sent mail from any computer, it’s easily accessible.

Technorati Tags: Google, NetNewsWire, email, Thunderbird, RSS