Cloud Computing

So much tools for students and teachers, isn't it awesome?

I already experienced couple of those Google Applications:

The iGoogle is basically setting your own "homepage" . You can personalize it and they offer a whole range of "ornaments" you can add on: pictures, games, calendar, fake aquarium, reminders, time, news, weather etc. A whole load of "stuff" to let your personality printed on the homepage.

I used iGoogle for lets say 3 months or so, after that too busy to go and check on it. Also I like to have Yahoo as my homepage just because my primary email box is on it. The only I really liked was the scheduler. Really helpful when you forget all your appointments and also you can get to see your friends' schedule if they give you permission to do so.

iGoogle is really for a personal use, it is not shared between people, it is basically to make your main page "lookable" and not so boring. Some people might have some fun with it.

I've also experienced Google Groups and that was really useful especially when teachers posts assignment on it, grades, notes etc. People from a same group can communicate really easily just by sending internal messages. The privacy system is not so bad because you have to be invited in the group in order to join and benefit from it. The only drawback I could think of is when the group is to be terminated, I think they actually don't tell the users so that we do not really know if all the "stuff" on it was completely erased. But I could be wrong.

Google Documents is basically a place where you can share files with people you invite. It has already the "excel" type format so it is easy and convenient to work with. It also keeps tract of any change made in a document and by whom.

I think having all these tools are great for sharing files between people with a certain extent of privacy control. I am going to say that actually I did not really understand the question for task 1 assignment...ha sorry about that. So I am just going to say that all the Google Application definitely gives good idea of how to organize an ePortfolio in a efficient way. It is almost complete: emails, pictures, documents, homepage, notepad, reader...