How Do YOU Spell Relief?

I have to admit that I'm thrilled we had two weeks to get through the "to-do's" this week. I finally felt like I had a real chance to absorb the material and create thoughtful responses to what we're learning. The sections on online word processors and search engines were very revealing for me. I really had never thought much about search engines nor the search process and had simply moved to Google because it was the thing to do and it always gave me the answers I needed. Now, however, I'm thinking twice about how I search for information, and I do try to navigate to the search engine I think might offer me the information I need. I have to admit, however, that searching correctly still has me a bit baffled. Like many things, it's too overwhelming for me - too much information to get straight. The word processing programs, on the other hand, are a great asset for my classroom. I can't wait to have the students give them a try and compare them to see which they prefer. As I mentioned in the Forum section, I have really, really struggled with our server and all the glitches that we've been experiencing with Word 2000. I have had students create and save documents, for example, only to open them later and find the page completely blank. I have also had students creat documents at home on 2007 and then discover they can't open them with 2000 at school. And then I've had the endless problem of students creating documents in 2000 and having no way to take their documents home because they've either forgotten their flash drives or they don't know how to email (my very young students). Finally, we've had another saving issue with our mobile lab of 25 laptops all of which have Word 2007 but are not networked. The students are not allowed to save on them, so the students are forced to finish their work during class time. The suggested online word processing sites will offer my young students a great alternative.