I’ve made a gmail account just for teaching, which is my preference. I use Chrome for interacting with the course site. Firefox is my default browser. For me, this makes for easier management.

There are several tools from Google used on the site, but also delicious, kwout (which I really like as a citation tool), and for the student blogs, posterous.

There is also a need to have private conversations with students around the grading of their work. So I still need an LMS for that. But I don’t need it for much anything else.

I’ve been asking myself whether a typical instructor would willingly go through the setup of something like this. I’m having fun making it (all but wondering about the width of the blog, which on a smaller screen might require horizontal scrolling, a definite no-no). I don’t know the answer to that.

I’m also wonder whether at this time some students will still want to print some of this out so they can hand mark up the content. My first reaction to that would be to suggest using a social bookmark tool instead. I may spend some class time on that. I’ve got no clue whether students use such tools themselves as a matter of course.