umbc underground

Some of you may remember a few weeks ago when I posted about the potential for student orgs to publish public Google Calendars.  Well, I want to share some of the other ways Google’s converted me from my usual online tools.  I really wish I knew about these a long time ago - hopefully it’ll help some people out there.

Gmail

Most people I know have created an account, and for good reason.  Gmail accounts have ridiculous amount of space (I’ve had my account since 2004 and am only using 12%), easy to use search (that actually works), convenient labeling (keep emails organized), embedded chat feature with other contacts (gmail had it first, facebook), a solid spam blocker, and I’ve never had a problem with getting my mail when WebMail is acting funky.  That list is short, but possibly most important for students is a Gmail account won’t dry up on you post graduation (if I’m wrong about this, if alumni keep their accounts forever, someone please correct me).  I understand many times you have to give your umbc email for school things - just forward your umbc mail to Gmail.

Gmail Tour

Calendar

Access everywhere, really convenient “quick add” feature (type in something like, econ final monday 1-3, and it will create the event for you), potential to add other public calendars, share calendars with those who need to know what you’re doing.  Freaking sweet.

Google Calendar Tour

Google Reader

Just discovered this one a few weeks ago.  It’s an RSS feed gatherer.  So… instead of going to check for updates from the 10 sites you check frequently, Reader just gathers new posts for you.  Everything in one place = max convenience.  ALSO, you can quickly email posts to people using your Gmail contacts, or “share” something which means others can see it.  The getting all your feeds in one place is the best though.  So many times there’s a website I’ll find that I think is cool, but am not going to remember to check back periodically.  Now I don’t have to remember.

Google Reader Tour

Google Notebook

Wow, I wish I had known about this when I wasn’t so far in school.  I used this tool a lot for researching for final papers these past two weeks.  You basically create a folder for small snippets of info you want to keep together.  So, when I was going through a ton of PDF’s to find quotes for research papers, I would just highlight the text I wanted to hold onto and “clip” it in the notebook.  That would be created as a new entry where you’d have the text, where it was from, and a link to get back to the source.  You could also add comments to the text (or image or whatever) and sort it by labels.  There’s a handy Firefox Addon that can sit on the bottom status bar for easy access, too.

Google Notebook Tour

Google Bookmarks

So, until recently, I’d been loyal to del.icio.us to organize my bookmarks, but I’m diggin’ Google’s bookmarks.  There’s a convenient star button on Google’s Firefox Toolbar addon (not unlike del.icio.us’ add on buttons), but Google’s Web History pushed me over the edge.  Web History is a tool that will keep track of the sites you visit when you’re logged into Google.  Not a huge deal if you’re using the same computer for everything, but has been great when I’ve found something at work or in the library that I forgot to save and wanted later. It’s really easy to save these pages as bookmarks from Web History, and to sort clippings in Notebook to certain Bookmark folders, too. It’s also really easy to import bookmarks from your browser — and probably from other places like delicious (didn’t try that though).

Google Bookmarks

Remember the Milk - for Gmail

I’ve been a RTM user for a while.  It’s got a clean layout, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and has offline accessibility.  I was really surprised (and thrilled, of course) to learn that there was the possibility to embed RTM into Gmail.  I’m not even going to try to explain all the features this has, or why it could be a great tool for anyone with a lot to juggle (college students, anyone?), so just check out this screencast - it explains almost everything.

Google Docs

I gotta jet in a sec, so here’s a quick run down of why Google Docs is awesome and should be used more.

• Keep your docs with you, no matter where you are.  Flash drives are nice, but it’s nice to not have to worry about them, too.
• No more worrying about sending docs back and forth through email, worrying about the most recent copy.  Just share a document with someone else, then you can both edit it and Google will keep a revision record so you can go back if you need to.  Much less confusing.  I wish professors would use this instead of Blackboard or emailing documents.
• You can open .doc files, .ppt files, and excel files IN Docs, making it easy to just save it online instead of downloading it to your HD and putting it on a flash drive or emailing it to yourself or whatever.

Google Docs Tour

There were other things I wanted to mention, but I gotta run.  Google Scholar is great for researching, Blogger is pretty solid, Desktop is handy, and Picassa for organizing photos online.  Here’s a full list.

I think a lot of this stuff could be very useful for student groups and individual students, and hopefully was at least informative.  As always, comments welcome.  Gotta go, peace out everyone.