Kindle Fire
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is an example of affordable mobile technology that might be utilized to assist educators and students at the college level. I have had a Kindle Fire for almost a year now and seriously, I have not had time to do more than look at it a few minutes here and there. Now that I am looking at it and using it, I realize I should be using it more often as I really like the Kindle Fire. It has a nice interface, small, slim, portable, and a long battery life. Yet it is big enough to use the touch pad easily and has a high enough resolution that it is easy to watch a movie on Netflix or as I just learned- the History Channel. I like the fact that it was just $200.00 new on Amazon, although the price has just dropped to $159.00 due to the release of Kindle Fire HD which sells for 199.00 – 299.00 (Amazon, 2012).
With the Kindle Fire you can search the web anywhere wireless technology is available. If your course is using social networking such as Twitter or Facebook, it is easy to log on and check for updates and news. I have Twitter, Facebook and the icons for You Tube, Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, IMDB.com, LinkedIn and Craigslist on my web home page. I just used Google to find my blog, logged in and am looking at my edublog as I type this.
I just logged onto my Google account and into my Google reader; I can see my subscriptions for all my colleagues education and technology blogs. Now, this is exciting, I can see how this would be really helpful for students and educators and for me right now. I am a little exhausted, I’m at 14 hours nonstop work and study today and I do not feel like I can sit up at my PC and do any more reading or studying. However, I am not mentally tired, so I could grab my kindle Fire, lay on the couch, put my feet up and do a little catching up on my blog reading. I can see students using Kindle Fire to keep up with classes and assignments while they are in a coffee shop, waiting at the bus station, in between classes, or just a few minutes between class and work, or their work break. Instructors can use Kindle Fire in the same way and keep up to date or post tweets and status updates and important classroom reminders.
Google Bookmarks
Educators, students or anyone who conducts a lot of on line research can benefit from anyone of the many sites for storing and saving bookmarks that they can access from a mobile device. My favorites bar on my computer has about a zillion links, I have to scroll down forever to find anything and there’s absolutely no real organization in there. This computer is 5 years old and even though I have a good backup system, I would probably not want to recreate the chaos of my current favorites on a new PC.
This is where sites like Google Bookmarks (Google, 2012) can save educators and students time, stress, not to mention paper and printer ink. Imagine the benefits of saving and collecting all your research for a specific paper or project in one place and then be able to return and retrieve the results of your research- no more lost sources, or printing an article that was not really helpful. Google Bookmarks lets you save the shortcuts and links from your favorite web sites or recent research and you are able to return or navigate them in seconds. Google bookmarks are stored in your Google Account, you can access them from any computer’s Toolbar or from the Google Bookmarks homepage (Google, 2012).
Other great features of Google Bookmarks are that you can access the bookmarks from any computer or mobile device by signing into your Google account. You can also create and name categories to store your bookmarks; all my bookmarks for my research on education and technology are stored in a file with that name, I have another folder for my emerging technologies proposal. I would encourage students to use Google Bookmarks as they conduct library and internet research for their courses. I have known about other bookmarking sites and just never took the time to use them. It may take a few minutes to get your Google Bookmarks set up, but the time saved later will make it worthwhile. I love the idea that I will no longer have to store research sources on a WORD document,; this will save me time, lots of time and I like that I will not lose important research.
References
Amazon.com (2012). Retrieved on Nov. 19, 2012 from http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0083Q04IQ/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=15258864564&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=16477779654441174&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&ref=pd_sl_7tcliwwieu_b
Google Bookmarks (2012) Retrieved on Nov. 20, 2012 from https://www.google.com/bookmarks/?hl=en
I have been using my smart phone a lot for internet usage. I have been making good use of the google bookmarks. They allow you to return to your chosen webpage with no problem. I see this a being useful in the adult learning setting. I think whenever you are using an envogue tool such as the Kindle Fire, I believe you can always get your students attention.
I really like the two devices you wrote about. I really want to get the Kindle Fire for my graduation from this program. It does seem to give so much to the user and it is ahead of the game for those products. I also work with teachers who are very stressed and book marks are so helpful in so many ways. It does make their lives easier and so much better to work from sites they have. Thanks for helping me learn more.