Week 7 Applications Reviews

I chose to check out ZOHO. I never realized this stuff existed until I saw a commercial for it on TV last week. This is so cool, as is everything else that we’re learning about in this class. I would definitely recommend this to my coworkers and my students. I think that this is a good way to organize things for meetings and what not. I really think that this could benefit my students though. Just last week, our last week of school, I had two seniors come to me with two different situations that this application could have fixed. The first student was working on a PowerPoint presentation at home. He stayed up all night long, finished the presentation, and didn’t have any way to save it. He left his flash drive at school and didn’t have a disk or a CD to save it to and couldn’t remember my email address. By the time that he got a hold of me at school he had figured something out. Had he had ZOHO, he could have done his presentation online and not had to worry about saving it to something. This would have saved him a lot of stress. The other student came in to my room on the last day of school with a letter typed and saved on her flash drive for me to print out. When I went to open it, it was in WordPad because that was all that she had on her computer. She had to spend another 10-15 minutes in class making adjustments in Word. If she would have had ZOHO, she wouldn’t have needed to spend the extra time on it.
I chose to look at Picnik for my Image Editing selection. I love pictures and, again, I didn’t know this was out there! I really should become more aware of this kind of stuff…good thing I’m taking all of these classes to teach me! There’s so much that you can do with your photos here. One thing that caught my attention right away is the fact that you don’t need an image editing program on your computer. Another cool feature is that you can get your photos from pretty much anywhere, your computer, facebook, myspace, etc. This application is very user friendly. A lot of the editing options can be just a one click thing, you can also get more detailed but when I’m trying to walk my parents through some “new technology” one clicks are great! I’m not seeing a whole lot right now that I could do in the classroom with this application at the moment, but I’m anxious to use it to enhance some pictures for scrapbooking! By the way, there is a digital scrapbooking feature as well.