Thing 12 - Productivity Anywhere

Like a moth to the flame I visited Remember the Milk faster than I could click the mouse. My house is filled with "to do" lists. Although I love the focus and organization a "to do" list offers, rarely do I finish everything. Left-over lists reside all over the place. I can't throw them away until I compile the tasks onto a new list. I can't always remember where I put my list. I do not always work from a computer list because the file isn't portable unless I print it (and then I probably leave it somewhere). It is an imprecise solution. Remember the Milk is a pretty handy way to organize, reference, and refer to a perpetual but single list. It has subcategories for different types of tasks: work, study, personal, etc. It has calendar and priority elements. It connects to my gmail account. I am happy to continue using this site as it seems to give me a central location for the things that I need to do. One more habit to pull into my routine that should be a shortcut from my current practices.

After playing with this for a while, it seemed to fill more of a personal need than a professional one. I visited all of the other blogs in our 23 Things class and liked what I read about bubbl.us so I created an account there as well. This has more immediate uses in my classroom and marries very well to the new textbook that we are adopting. I have used Inspiration software before for mind-mapping activities but it is definitely a single user piece of software and I've had difficulty formatting the printing to ensure a single page student document. I have had limited practice with Inspiration but find many of the features that I like are on the bubbl.us mapping tool. The sidebar that explains the symbols in each box is very helpful, the color coding is attractive, and the ease of organization is good. I liked that I could invite friends to collaborate. I have not tried printing yet but hope to see how that looks soon. As I stated this is a useful supplement to my new textbook. Each chapter's assessment speaking and writing activities encourage the students to start with a mind map in order to organize their ideas. This is a handy tool to assist in identifying that they have included all of the elements required by their rubric. I need to investigate more how easy it is to set up accounts for the students; my guess is as simple as it was for me. This could be a strong addition to the classroom for grammar summaries, creating thematic vocab units, and culture/country brainstorming images. If the export is manageable this could be a nice supplement to the wiki pages we create.

Questions:
1. On the bubbl.us site I clicked on the beta 2.0 version. What does beta mean?
2. It requested that I allow it to store 1 MB of content on my computer. Do users allow this? I have never seen that message before.