Happy New Year!

There's so much to learn and I feel as if I'll never catch up. We're expecting up to 15 cm of snow tonight and since I haven't been able to recover anything on my external hard drive, 2008 will really be a year of new beginnings! For some reason, Internet Explorer continually freezes on my laptop despite running disk cleanup and defrag. I've been working on ANGEL this week and wish some of my other colleagues in the pilot were online so we could compare notes. The quick guide is fairly useless so I'm basically clicking, editing and experimenting. I've added a Week 1 folder and am attempting to compartmentalize teaching ANGEL and its features, and teaching an introduction to real estate, in a seamless way. I want to make this as interactive as possible. To interest them right away, the first tasks are to practise navigating, edit their profile, upload an avatar and communicate with other classmates. They'll have fun with that I hope. It will be interesting for me to introduce new tools to them as I've learned in this course.

I logged on to KG today and posted a comment about Google Earth for Asra. I've read so many interesting articles recently about Facebook, the fastest growing social network - apparently one in four people are using it in Canada. Employers are using it and now universities are using it as a marketing tool to attract new students. It amazes me how people don't mind being exposed to the world. Privacy seems to not be as important as it was in the past.

It's time to remove the Christmas clock and find some other real time object to insert into my blog.

When I use Firefox, I've customized my toolbar to include de.licio.us for bookmarking websites and tiny.cc to create shorter links.. I prefer tiny.cc to tinyurl.org because it allows you to insert a keyword which helps to identify the link. And of course, I love the Twitbin.

I've been on Pownce but haven't used it as you need friends to be on it as well, which is by invitation only. On Twitter, I follow Lucy Gray (elemenous), who is a librarian from Chicago. Her blog and tweets are very informative. She belongs to several social networks - I just don't know how she has the time to keep up with all of them. Most likely she posts once and has it set to post on all of them. Something I'd like to experiment with. I do have my KG preferences set so that I am sent a notice by email of any changes. And I have asked the students to do the same with their ANGEL profile. I never read blogs until I started this course, and I'm so grateful I've been introduced to them as I wouldn't want to have missed Will Rich's "New Year's Eve Parable". "Be the change" - a great mantra for the New Year. Technolibrary couldn't have said it better on his most recent tweet: "Happy New Year to a great network of dedicated educators. You all are the answer." Best wishes for a wonderful 2008...Janet