It's all about organization... well isn't it? There is a proverb "A place for everything and everything in its place..." Day 1 is all about the various ways that you can get your arms wrapped around information, the flow of information, searching for information, and hopefully getting away from hunting for information and having it come to you.

Here is a bit of information about some of the concepts that we will be discussing during Day 1 and some of the tools that we will be highlighting:

Working "In the Cloud": This term typically means that the resources you typically use on a PC you can access online at any time any where through a web browser. Zoho - Zoho is a company that is making tremendous strides to bring the desktop experience to the web. They have an entire "suite" of office productivity tools that you can leverage to do everything from word processing and spreadsheets to create and share a digital notebook, online databases and applications, collaborative wikis, and much... much... more. We will be highlighting (and requiring) Zoho Notebook for you to take (and hopefully share) online digital notes of this class.

Digital Notebooks We all face a personal challenge any time that we interact with large amounts of information... How do we gather the information, catalog it, organize it, and store it for fast access, recall, and manipulation. Digital Notebooks can provide students, teachers, and administrators the way to overcome this challenge successfully. Develop a familiarity with four of the major digital notebook applications: Zoho Notebook, and Evernote. (We'll touch on Microsoft OneNote).


Information Control
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a tremendous way to simplify your processes in searching and gathering information. In short, once a "feed" is setup, information comes to you as opposed to you hunting for it. My choice of RSS Reader is NewsGator. With NewsGator is pull in news stories from around the world as well as educational and instructional blogs. Additionally, most magazine type services (and all search engines) have RSS feeds embeded into their sites that you can tap into. This type is resource allows you to become a "grazer" of information as opposed to a hunter of information. One of my main criteria for an RSS aggregator was that it would function both online and via a mobile device. The majority of time I access NewsGator through my Motorola Q Global via NewsGator Go!. Additionally, NewsGator allows me to "Clip" a post or piece of information that I find valuable and save it permanently. More information on RSS here: http://snipurl.com/2nflb and here: http://snipurl.com/2nfny

Bookmarking
The idea of social bookmarking is not new (we have all shared bookmarks and links with friends in the paper world… Preferably a bookmarking tool that has a social aspect to it where you can share the websites and information you have found with others and you can benefit from research others have one on topics in which YOU are interested.

First a couple of definitions:

• Bookmarking - This is the process of saving "links" to websites and research so you can return to them easily at a future date.
• Bookmarking - This is the same as saving "Links", "favorites", "websites" etc.
• Social Bookmarking - This refers to groups of people "Sharing" their bookmarks through an online service. Often this "sharing" also includes comments or additional information about the site which will help others by providing more details about what can be found on the site, the capabilities of the site, or usage information.

Search , Advanced Search and Much Much more...
We have all heard of the 900lb gorilla Google, and all of our students and well us as well uses Google in its primary role as a search engine. But there is so much more. Did you know that you can explore the earth (the the sky for that matter). Did you know that you can search groups of experts for advice and information? Did you know the you couple take your documents, spreadsheets, and powerpoints online? Did you know that you could search scholarly journals? Did you know that you could do 3D modeling and then overlay that information onto the world? We will be opening our eyes to a world of Google that has been under our noses the whole time!

Online Storage on YOUR terms...
We are all familiar with moving files online so that people can access them... your students can access them... anyone can access them... Do we always want that? Let's look at taking control of your online documents with drop.io