I’ve been looking at a few online desktops over the past few weeks. One of the reasons is that I’d like to see if these could provide our students with an alternate way to work and save their work. Right now, students cannot access their work from anywhere but the school. What I’d like to try is to have them work with an online desktop so that they can access their work from any computer. I’d also like to have them build up some RSS feeds and have a place to keep a calendar and other things. I figure that an online desktop would be the easy way to go. So, I’ve been looking at a few of them.
Desktoptwo – this desktop has all the things that I’ve been looking for in an online version. The nice thing is that students can save here, go home, download the work or, if they wish, work online. There is an RSS reader, notepad, calendar and many other utilities. It’s free and it looks like it could have some tools that students might be able to use for things unrelated to school. I’m going to be giving this one a complete workout because the others aren’t quite as developed.
eyeOS – I like this except it lacks productivity apps. The writer is okay but there is no spreadsheet. I like the games that come with it – better than solitaire! I’m getting pretty good at the tubing one! There is RSS and email.
Zimbra -This one I came across recently. It looks promising with it’s online/offline functions. I’m having a bit of trouble with the setup but once done, I’ll let you know how I like it.
Zoho – I like each of the apps. I’m waiting to use the desktop version. If it works as well as the apps, it will definitely give desktoptwo a run. I like their wiki page!
Google desktop – I’ve loaded it but it’s not what I was expecting. I haven’t tried any of the other Google productivity apps yet. I use Google Reader and have set up a Google page and I’m going to give Google Notebook a try.
What does this mean? Well, I’m going to be linking to the different blogs and using the different apps to see how they function in real time. So, if you see my blog with a link to another, it’s my way of trying out some of these different things. This link to my desktoptwo blog is my first attempt to use one of them. I wrote a little article to see how it worked.
2 responses so far ↓
I love google desktop but then again I am not familar with dome of the other applications you mentioned. To make Google desktop show you its worth you have to check out all the widgets. My suggestions would be the reader widget, calendar, to do list, bookmarks and some of the productivity apps to get started
I think Google notebook is one of the best tools I’ve seen for students or anyone doing research and trying to take notes. Before I was using it I would read good quotes and then lose them in the myriad of rss feeds ect. You can have multiple notebooks organized by topic, the quote is at your finger tips as is the link to the original source all with one click of a button.
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