iGoogle

Today I personalized my own iGoogle page! But what does that really mean??? Instead of going to www.google.com and seeing the boring white backdrop with the little search box I now see a beautiful beach setting background and have live bookmarks to pages that I visit often (Facebook, MSU Webmail, etc). I also have a calendar that I can add events/assignments to-once again eliminating the need for a paper-pencil trail, and I have my own weather updates to give me current weather conditions for East Lansing. Once I finished my homepage for iGoogle I set up 3 more tabs, or different windows. Two of the tabs are for the classes that I am taking this summer session (CEP 416 and CEP 240) and the last tab is a Games tab! I found my favorites-Packman and Hangman-and I can play them anytime I want without having to go through Yahoo! and finding the games link and searching through a list until I find what I want to play :)
For my CEP 416 tab I found it most convenient to pull Google Reader onto the page so that I can get a daily updated post of the changes to my classmates' blogs, rather than go through the process of locating each one individually. Now I get the latest updates from everyone sent directly to me in a nice, condensed format that allows me to only view the most recently added material, as opposed to me teasing out the updates :)
Lastly, I set up a Google Alert for daily added material for anything related to Michigan History for Kids (MHK). MHK is a magazine produced along with Michigan History Magazine right out of Lansing, MI. The magazine itself is a great resource for teachers as it is similar to TIME for Kids in a Michigan focused layout.