Gmail, Google Calendar, & iGoogle

I have used Gmail for a long time now, but I learned several new things about Gmail's features this evening from the Atomic Learning tutorial website.  For instance, I learned how to adjust my settings so that an automatic signature with my information will automatically appear at the bottom of all of my outgoing emails.  I also learned how to change my inbox setting from classic to show unread mail first.  The neatest think I learned tonight about Gmail was how to filter my inbox messages so that they automatically are labeled or marked as important.

I have some limited experience with Google Calendar, though I have always preferred my traditional pen and paper calendar planners.  Even after only a brief overview of Google Calendar, I can easily see its great potential in the classroom and in the workplace. Google Calendar has wonderful sharing features that could be utilized to share various calendars and schedules with colleagues, parents and students. I can imagine making a class calendar available for students and their parents where they could quickly reference homework assignments, exams, and field trips.  I really liked the options under Settings to dim past or future events, show or not show weekends, and set-up automatic notifications for events.  I also watched the four minute "Using Google Calendar for Lesson Planning" video on YouTube and was very inspired.  I liked how you can use the labs feature to enable document attachments to calendars.  I will almost certainly utilize Google Calendar in the future when planning curriculum units and lesson plans.

I officially love iGoogle and it is now my homepage on my MacBook.  I am so sad that Google is going to be doing away with iGoogle next year, and I am hoping that maybe they will change their minds. I set up my iGoogle homepage to display the weather, the time & date, news, the current moon phase, Gmail, Google Calendar, and a To-Do list.  As a language lover, I also added the quote-of-the-day, the word-of-the-day, and the Bible verse-of-the-day.  I am very excited about my new homepage, and I hope that it will contribute to my efficiency and productivity.

Altogether, I am very impressed with Gmail, Google Calendars, and iGoogle, and I would recommend these programs for anyone who uses the Internet (in other words, pretty much everyone!).