Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are fine, but Google has a feature in their webmail that makes it much better to use. You can tag your email with labels, and then dump the emails all into one big folder. Don’t worry, because the search is fantastic. I can always find messages that I have saved.
And you can save a lot of them. Google gives you many megabytes to store your email messages. I even have Google go get my school email so I can access from anywhere.
Mozilla didn’t stop with Firefox, they also made a great email client. It is much easier to use than Outlook, especially when moving email messages from one computer to another. All of the email messages are stored as simple text files, in a standard format that almost any program can read, so you can export your emails to other programs if you want (but who would want?).
Email clients as software are a little old fashioned. Many students use web-based email programs, such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail from Google. Actually, among seven different ways to communication electronically, university students use email the least. More about the other ways to communicate with students in other tools.
When Netscape lost out to Internet Explorer in the Browser Wars, it didn’t die. It went to Mozilla Foundation, and changed into Firefox, a browser that is much better than Explorer, which shows in its growing market share (now up to about 25 %, and about 60% of heavy users, like me.)
The best thing about Firefox was the Tabbed Browsing, where you can load lots of pages at the same time, and look at one while others are loading. The tabs at the top of the window allow you to choose each page, instead of going to a completely different window. This feature was so good the Internet Explorer copied it.
The best thing about Firefox is that you can customize and extend it to do many different things, with thousands of free add-ons available from the web site. Play music? Find stock prices? Add a Delicious bookmark? Almost anything, and all for free. People write this software for free, too. More on that in another tool.
I convinced quite a few members of my family to subscribe to Flickr, and this is the best way to use it. This site organizes your pictures and shows them to people you know (and some you don’t know). Here’s my personal page.
By now you know about bookmarks and tags, and the best thing about Flickr is that you can tag your pictures for easy search. You can control who sees your pictures (ask me to upgrade you to Friend status to see some pictures of parties I have been to).
You can get a small “widget,” a piece of software, to insert onto your home page to put up pictures from your account. But you can also use the Flickr pictures to search for images that can help you in teaching. Try an experiment: search for the word frustrated, and see what kind of pictures come up.
Originally called del.icio.us, you can find this web site at delicious.com.
Using Delicious has several advantages over regular bookmarks (or favorites). First, the sites you save are saved to the delicious computer, so you can access from any computer. Once you save a bookmark, you can give it many different tags (for example, my web site here might have 3 ro 4 tags, such as teaching, learning, language, tokyo, kevinryan, japan, computers, and women. I can then search b any of these terms to find the web page I want.
By far the most important, though, is that you can share your bookmarks and tags with other people. You can find other people that are interested in the same kinds of things you are, and look at their bookmarks.
I often get all my students in my computer literacy class to sign up for delicious, and we make a small group to share bookmarks. When we do a research project, we can help each other find interesting sites. They are shared immediately and automatically. Very simple, very powerful.