I find that bloglines is a great place to find news that is personal and to ones own liking. The site allows for easy access of various sites, news feeds, and various other information. This is easily accessed through a free account and the site van even give suggestions for news feeds. Sites all over the web also have a button that when clicked sets up a new feed in your bloglines feed. This can very useful in physical education as studies in physical performance and athletics are always changing/advancing. My bloglines account is set to public so feel free to check out my personal feeds for suggestions for your own or just maybe an interesting read.....

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Zack4386

Plaxo/LinkedIn vs Myspace/Facebook

Plaxo and linkedin are some very good social networking sites and I can see the similarities when it comes to facebook and myspace. The biggest differences I see are the kind of people they draw. I find that plaxo and linkedin cam attract an older and more professional demographic. Possibly something that you would like to give yor coworker. While faebook and myspace are more geared to the college age ppl and true friends. Information shared can be quite similar while plaxo and linkedin get a little more personal and almost have a feel of a resume or portfolio with interaction.

Google docs

Google docs is a very useful and easy tool to use on the web. It give peopele the chance to interact and share different types of documents. This is very useful in the education field becuase students and teachers can use this to communicate with eachother Nd five feedback before the assinment is actually submitted to the instructor. I also find that this makes it easy to share documents over the web. On my comprehensive technology use project I use google docs as a sharing tool for another web 2.0 site (PEERtrainer). Google docs is a very useful tool and I am excitedto see it used in many ways in my future

Plaxo v. LinkedIn v. Google Sites

Building a professional portfolio can be a very time consuming task yet somewhat fun to do. The process is filled with excitement and pride. I have recently set up three. The first is using Plaxo. This site was helpful and easy to fill out taking about 30 minutes for the necessities. This site was easy to enter in other websites and connect them. This was a big plus as i have been all over the internet signing up for various sites over the past 6 weeks. What first turned out to be a big plus later turned into a huge problem. Once the site was set up with facebook it ended up looking like a facebook page with little extra information. The people who i am connected with take over the home page and it no longer looks like my site. I feel this is a good networking site, but i would not choose it to present a professional portfolio.

The second site used was LinkedIn. This is a great site and i liked it much more than Plaxo for the professional portfolio project. It was easy to set up and i felt more "invited" (if that makes any sense). I spent a little bit more time setting up this account but most of this is becuase of the technical problems with the site. Many times i tried filling in various sections and was given an error message with an apology. As i write this the entire site is down and it is very frustrating. In the end i like this site, and would prefer it over Plaxo for the professional portfolio. But without it working or being able to finish filling out neccessary information, it does me no good. Especially if i am going to count on this to get my personal information to possible employers! What if they cannot access the site? There goes my 6 figure job!

Finally, I used Google Sites. This is a great place to set up a professional portfolio and takes the lead easily. This site is a little bit difficult to work with and one needs a good amount of computer savy to get things done on it. But there is a plenty of easily accessible tutorials and videos to help you. Being able to create the home page and then add additional pages that all have the personal touch is extremely important to anyone wanting to stand out and get noticed by potential employers. This site facilitates creativity and breads inspiration. The sky is the limit! The negative to this site would be the amount of time it takes to create. I have spent over 3 hours figuring this out and have not even finished. Once again adequate computer skills are required and much time, but overall, Google Sites takes the gold. Check it out... http://sites.google.com/site/zackariapeters/

Library Thing

I feel that library thing is very interesting and was fun to play with for a few minutes but serves little purpose beyond this. I enjoyed searching for books and looking at "similar libraries" of other members. The site also had a huge amount of space provided for reviews, references, descriptions, and even recommendations. These were very useful for some books and gave the site the 2.0 feel. Although most of the books from my selection had little to no information. I understand this site is only meant to be a catalog and it does a great job at it. I think i just had my hopes up and was thinking maybe one could read books, or at least parts of books. As stated in the first sentence i feel this site was very interesting but i believe i could find just as much information on amazon.com while having more options regarding the book (buy, read excerpts, etc.)

eViL mOnKeY!!

So this is a picture of my family (excluding my brother) after a tabor football game my senior year. I added the evil monkey from family guy as i thought it looked a little funny. I got this from FotoTrix.com and it was very easy. I was able to change the size of the added cut out of the evil monkey and place it. I hope you enjoy.

Podcasts

Having looked at http://podcast.com/ and http://www.podcastalley.com/ i can now see a better picture of the usefulness of podcasts. These search engines create a very easy to way to find information that directly relates to whatever it is you are interested in. Podcasts can be very useful in the classroom because it is not uncommon to have students who would rather not read. These "articles" give the listener an easy and fast way to get the information needed without having to sit down with a book. One could easily download the podcast and listen while driving to work or school. Podcasts make it quick and easy to get the needed information and the search engines provide make the whole process that much better.