My Twenty-Percent Project: Part 2 (Updated)

I am training to be a Ninja... Well, training to be a Gmail ninja at least, but that's besides the point :)

Part two of my twenty-percent project involves diving into the awesomeness that is Gmail. There is sooooo much to learn about gmail besides the basic creating & sending of email! So much so that the tutorial is estimated to take about three hours to complete, not counting the webinar from the Google Apps for Education Professional Development series, which in about an hour long by itself.

I'm not going to lie, this second section is taking much longer to work through than I had anticipated (especially when compared to the relatively short part 1 Introduction section I wrote about). There are eight different chapters to read through and as of now I have only made it through four of them. There's a fair amount of information that I am already familiar with since I use Gmail as my primary email address, but there are a lot of little nuances to each of the parts that I either hadn't used or hadn't even heard about before. I am taking notes along the way so that I'll hopefully remember it all when it comes down to taking the test *fingers crossed*.

I'm still enjoying this adventure and learning new, helpful tips but I'm realizing that I will probably not finish all six of the modules before the semester is over--actually I can almost guarantee that I won't considering that the Docs training is estimated at eight hours by itself(!). I am quite determined to work my way through this though and will keep you posted along the way!  :)

****UPDATE****

I AM a Gmail Ninja :)

I got stubborn after writing my post and decided to plow through as many of the other four chapters as I could stand... only to find out that the last four were significantly shorter than the first--figures! Some of the learning highlights were the group chat option in gchat, color-coding message labels (didn't know you could do that!), and learning what the task function is really capable of (hint: it's great for the list makers out there). Overall, pretty cool stuff! I plan on keeping my notes and showing some of the highlights to the class in a few weeks so we can all benefit from it--but for now I will revel in my ninja status and get myself a well-deserved cookie ;)