Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Last One (well, second to last one)!

Wow! Alicia isn’t kidding when she said that there are so many Web 2.0 tools out there. It was very difficult to find just 3-4 tools to write about. After looking through several, I finally chose my 4.

1. Justin.tv; category: Photo & Video
2. Remember the Milk; category: Productivity
3. Meebo; category: Social & Publishing
4. TripIt; category: Location-based Services

The one I chose to research more about was TripIt. Why? I love to travel. Anywhere. Literally, anywhere.

Well, I signed up for an account. If I want to get the “Pro” version, it is free for the first 30 days; afterward is $69 a year. I decided to go with the scaled-down FREE version.

What is pretty cool about this is that when I registered, it pulled up a list of my email contacts from my Google account. It then asked me if I wanted to send any information to these people…good way to share my travel itinerary.

I then inputted information for my next “imaginary” trip. I say “imaginary” because I will not be traveling this spring break. Like I said before, I can share this information or make it private. I chose private.

So, what’s pretty neat about this is that after you set up your trip, it takes you to a “home” screen that has Google maps of your destination location, weather, calendar integration (to go along with your Outlook calendar), and plans (hotel, travel, activities, etc.).

This is very cool, especially when travelling to Europe. The itinerary is VERY specific. You can list who you booked your walking tour reservation with, the confirmation number, contact information, hours of tour, location to pick up the tour and even a jpg image.

This information can be accessed on your smart phone or as an app on your Iphone.

You can even merge trips; so if you make two separate trips, let’s say your first one is in Budapest and your second destination is Prague, you can set them up as individual trips and then merge them together. Merging them allows you to coordinate your travel arrangements between the two cities.

This is really a great tool for those that travel. For me, I know it would help with organizing lists of papers for different confirmations and travel accommodations. My husband and I do a lot of copying and pasting from our emails and do our best to organize our information on a document; but this would eliminate a lot of time-waste and help us to be more efficient.

We missed one major attraction in Paris last time we went. We wanted to see Rodin’s THE KISS. We got to the museum 15 minutes too late. We thought we had the right hours of operation listed on our sheet, but the information was on a different page and we didn’t number our pages, and our pages were shuffled. So, this is one example as to how this application could have helped us organize our site-seeings a little better.

Also, we take a lot of public transportation wherever we go. With this tool, you can add a rail or bus schedule to your itinerary, and even a map of the routes. This would be fantastic for large cities like San Francisco, Prague and Paris.

As far as educational applications…I can see that this would be a great tool for students in world language and social science classes. Really, any class doing a project on traveling could benefit from this tool. Also, for those teachers taking students on overnight trips…parents can access their son’s/daugher’s itineraries through this app.

Rating: A
Reason: Easy to navigate, organizes your trip in every aspect, and you are able to share your information with whomever you wish.

I am looking forward to using this on our next big trip.

No comments:

Post a Comment