Office Suites and Image Editing

After looking at all of the options given to us this week and playing around with a couple of them I have decided I would recommend a couple from the Office Suites and One from the Image Editing section. I have possessed a Michigan Residential Builders License for 16 years. In the summer and any free time I have I run a small residential building company. If I were to use something from this group I would definitely recommend the Zoho site. This would be an outstanding site for a small business because of the links given and tools available through the site. There is a very nice introductory video that explains what they are all about on the site. They talk about creating a monster and having so many different soft wares and trying to run them or getting them to work together, and rarely are they all compatible. This is what you would call the one stop shop. This site has everything from online planners, chat spaces, web-conferencing, spreadsheets, Zoho wiki, and everything in between. This can all be accessed through your Zoho site, saved, anything you would need to run a small business, and as stated in the video it is all free.
If I were going to use one of these sites from a teaching standpoint, I would have to go with the ThinkFree. I think we have created a small monster with everything we have used so far this semester, but certainly a good monster. I really like the Thinkfree because of the handy links right there for you to use, such as converting documents, embedding, sharing documents, uploading, and searches. There are some links that I don’t think I would use, but that again is something you need to clean up as you use. You would use only those that are important to you.
From the Image Editing section I liked PicNic and FotoFlexer the best and I would chose FotoFlexer over PicNic if I had to. I think the photo editing options on FotoFlexer were easier to use, because I could find options that wanted easier. These two are very similar and I would think PicNic has these options as well, but I played with FotoFlexer more. The great thing about this is you can fetch photos from where you store them. I don’t have many photos on Facebook or MySpace, but I have many on my computer that send to my school computer. I really liked that option with both of these, but again I played with FotoFlexer more, therefore I would chose this one. After reading some of the posts from class, it appears many have used these types of devices and enjoy them. I have never used them, so I am curious to see what some of the other suggestions are.

Web site information and purpose

This would be a classroom web-site that I would use to keep students informed of progress and information about units we have covered to date. If I were to start this at the beginning of the year we would have multiple units entered. I would have a calender for the year and for each unit we were covering, but as things change and situations change, we would alter these calenders throughout the year.
Here is the website address: https://sites.google.com/site/mrgardnersscience/home