Google Upgrade: Take Two

This week marked a momentous moment in the L household…for my birthday my wonderful husband got me an iPod Touch.  I’ve been resisting the iPod movement for years (claiming, I don’t need that, I have my CDs!), but I was SOOO excited when I opened it up on Thursday.

How does this have to do anything with SBC or Google?  Simple–part of the allure of the iPod Touch, or iPhone, or Blackberry is accessibility.  Through accessibility comes connectivity.   It was soooo simple to get my work/former student e-mail and calendars on this new toy because of how easy and accessible Gmail, Google Calendar and the like are. While I know it took hours upon hours on our tech support’s part to make this conversation a reality, for the rest of us this has been a smooth and easy transition (Thanks, Computer Services and everyone who made this possible!!).  This one change will allow us to be more productive, accessible, and more importantly, available to you.

So thank you Google, iPod, and SBC for making this journey to the 21st century a little easier, and a little more exciting

(although now that I have this new technology, there’s no excuses for not starting to run again…I plodded along with day three this morning, and we’ll see how far along I can get!)

Totally Awesome

I am a Google Convert.  I set up an account for my personal stuff earlier this year, downloaded Google Chrome as my web browser, and I have haven’t looked back once.  I’m Googlefied, and I’m happy.

Today, as my Facebook status says, Thanksgiving came a little bit early for us at the Briar, and I am ever so grateful–our campus got Googled!  We have Google Apps now as our mail server, and will soon be transitioning over to using Google Calendar as our official online calendar of choice.  As soon as the e-mail came in, I converted.

This is really going to change, I think, how we do business with each other on campus.  Everything is integrated, everything is (in my mind) user-friendly, and it will allow many of us to “think smarter, not harder.”  Prime example?  Google Docs.  I’d totally recommend reading Prof. Bragaw’s blog about this phenomenon, because I have not had the opportunity to work with it much yet, but what I do know is incredible–you can collaborate and make edits on a document on-line, students can submit papers to professors using it, you don’t have to junk up e-mail space by sending docs back and forth, and can you imagine the thousands of pages of paper we can save by utilizing this technology?

There’s a random tree in a random forest right now saying, “Thank you, Google Docs, thank you.”

Tomorrow we have our first Social Media Lunch, and I’m very excited to a) report back how it goes, and b) see how Google might chance how we look at a few things.

I LOVE TECHNOLOGY!!!