Educational Discourse

I’ve spent part of this Friday evening browsing several of the finds from the GO2WEB20.net . I’ll do a commentary on some of the apps I found there in a later post. However, I cant try them all, there are just too many and some of them I don’t need right now. Earlier today I was trying out online desktops. Now, Google office has just been launched and I will give that a try as soon as I get my own site. I did give the following three a test drive this afternoon:

desktoptwo – in beta version. Has everything you could want from RSS reader to blog. It has a nice look and runs okay. I did find the word processor (OpenOffice) was a bit sluggish in opening and performing but I find that it is sluggish on my laptop.

EyeOS - is a cool desktop. I found it work very smoothly. It handled all the forms and pages fairly quickly and I was able to easily navigate around the page. Also, it had some very good skins that are different from the “usual” skins you usually find in a desktop. I still have it open now and I’ve been running it for about 5 hours. It hasn’t caused the browser to freeze and it has a couple fun games, for those who like that sort of stuff! It doesn’t have the wiki or blog option of ZOHO but what is available is very good. I think I’ll definitely give this a full test drive over the next few weeks.

Zoho – a very good desktop with a blog and wiki option. I really liked the way that this worked. I tried it for about the same amount of time as the eyeOS although I didn’t do as much work. I liked the writer and the look of the wiki. I will give it a better look tomorrow. There aren’t as many background skins as the eyeOS either, if that is important to you.

ThinkFree - it was okay. It did freeze up the browser once but after that it worked fine. I tried to install the blog plugin but the directions were not as clear as they could have been. I’ll give it a go later in the weekend. The documents work well but on a busy day it would take a fair amount of time to upload saved documents from the server. That is where the magic of the “geekstick” comes in. Just plug your USB Stick or device in and away you go.

Why am I looking at these? Well, I’m having trouble with my Mac:Office and I’m tired of it. I am trying OpenOffice and NeoOffice but I’m not really happy with them. I like using Appleworks for simple things but it doesn’t always do a great job as it lacks “tools”. I like using Pages but I only have it for another 3 days. Besides, I’m doing all this work online so I figured I’d give these a try.

As I said, I will give Google Office a try and I have some other desktops that I’m going to check out but for now I’m definitely looking at eithr Zoho or eyeOS. We’ll see how things work during the middle of the work week when there’s all kinds of stuff happening. I’ve also wondered what will happen if I’m not connected – but that is where the NeoOffice and OpenOffice will work. It’s really too bad that they are so slow. I like the OpenOffice format better and it seems to load and work better than the NeoOffice. Actually, I wish Apple would just upgrade the AppleWorks to be compatible with .doc documents and then we’d all be happy.

Book club note – things are going ahead. I believe my copy of Dan Pink’s Whole New Mind will be here Monday or Tuesday. We will then get busy figuring out what we’re going to do. I’m looking forward to getting started on this. I keep visiting the wiki to see if anyone has added anything.
If you’re wondering how I get this all done – well I’m having a bit of a sleeping problem – I can’t. So, instead of lying in bed waiting for morning, I get up and do some reading and work. It’s been 4 days now and I’ve been able to keep up with the Google Reader, get some reading done, do some planning and write to my blog. I’m not having fun