OCL Tech Challenge Thing #6

I tried using the Power Search features. I've just finished putting together a PowerPoint for Beginners class for use at the Brick Branch of the Ocean County Library System and I'm working on the final touches for an Excel for Beginners class. I wanted to see what I could find on Excel in ppt. I found a presentation with great content about Excel but which broke all of the rules for use of color and background that I had emphasized in my PPT presentation! How ironic. But the Excel presentation is worth knowing about as an example I can show to folks in the PowerPoint class of how badly selecting a busy background and colors that are not visible to color-blind folks and which are only too visible to everybody else can be. (Whew - need to edit that sentence! But you know what I mean.)

It seems to me that Power Search is so simple, I'm surprised everyone doesn't know how to use it. I think librarians would find it to be particularly effective if they were teaching a Google class to middle school or high school students - that's the audience I think would find this most valuable!

Tech Challenge Thing #5 - Read article by Pogue and try new Google applications

I sort of got off track while doing this. First, I read the article and I liked it so much, I decided to share it on Facebook. Then I went to Google Labs but on the way there, I stopped to change the number of folks I could see on the Chat list because I thought I'd want to see more people since I thought I would use SMS text messaging in Google Chat with my two sons who are texters not talkers. As long as I was going down the list of Google Aps, I decided to fix it so that next time I go on vacation, my away message will have a start date and an end date that I set before I even go so that I don't have to in and turn the away message off. It really puzzled people that I said I was away from my desk for a while because my desk is in my family room. I do a lot of work there but not much of it is related to my job(s) which actually are in fixed physical locations outside of my house. But I'm Old School and my away message reflects that, I guess. So then I thought I'd enter some things in Google Calendar. I entered everything for next week and a couple of things for the following week. I enabled pictures in Chat by I noticed that there are only two people on my Chat list who actually have pictures that they've enabled. No matter, the rest of the world will either do that or they won't. I also wanted to be able to have Google Search immediately handy while I'm reading my email and I wanted to be able to see YouTube previews in email. I haven't gotten to Google Sketchup which I really wanted to try. I have had the experience of using Google voice - I called my older son on my cell phone at his Google Voice number. I don't know if it was my phone or his computer, but I could hear my voice coming out of the microphone on his MAC and it seemed harder to carry on a conversation when I could hear myself with a little delay. I also didn't get to Google.org/flutrends which I was interested in because I saw on the news at noon that a lot of the nation's school districts are practically shut down with the flu. At any rate, everything I tried worked great. I'm not sure I'll keep up with Google Calendar because I have a paper calendar at home and one in my purse and it is hard enough to keep them in sync without adding a third :)