Back in March, I recorded and shared an interview with my mother in which she discussed her experiences reading a variety of different blogs over the past few years: Powerful and Meaningful Connections from Blogging International Students, MilBloggers, and Others (An interview with Angie Fryer.) At that time, I also introduced her to social bookmarking with del.icio.us.
It was great to hear her praise del.icio.us today as we discussed various Internet and technology topics with a friend. She’s finding social bookmarking has enabled her to stop writing down information about websites and recipes she finds online in the “stickies program,” since now all the info she wants to save is included in her social bookmarks tags and item descriptions. By clicking on one of her tags, she can readily find any of her saved recipe websites or other bookmarks.
Today we discussed backup issues as well as concerns about possibly migrating her computer to a newer operating system, or purchasing an entirely new computer. I ended up helping her migrate a small inventory database she’d been managing on Filemaker Pro to Google Documents as a spreadsheet. Because she owns an older version of Filemaker, when she moves to a newer operating system she would have to pay for an upgrade to Filemaker software to continue using it. Since spreadsheet functionality will work well for the data she’s managing (there’s only about six fields/columns) a better solution was moving the data into a Google Spreadsheet. In addition to not needing to pay for a software upgrade, she’s able to share the document online with others and rest assured it is securely backed up offsite.
I showed her Lee Lefever’s excellent “Google Documents in Plain English” video after helping her create a Google Mail account and importing her data from an Excel spreadsheet. (We created it after exporting her data as a delimited file from Filemaker. For some reason a direct import of a csv file to Google Docs didn’t work.) Yeah for Google Documents!
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google, database, spreadsheet, googledocs
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- 10 Things I Learned Teaching A Full Day iPad Workshop - 2015
- Thanks OKeducationTruths (Rick Cobb) For Your Courage & Leadership - 2015
- Documenting the 2014 Trapper's Rendezvous with iPhone Video - 2014
- Lessons Learned Using Puppet Pals on iPads in an After School Program - 2012
- What's So Common About Common Core? - 2012
- Classroom Management, Effective Instruction, and Student Motivation by Mark Mcleod - 2012
- A Call to Increase the Volume of our Profession in Educational Politics - 2012
- The Best Political Spin Money Can Buy - 2012
- Averting USB Famines - 2011
- A reminder to address and stop cyberbullying - RE: Cry of the Dolphins - 2010
