I'm taking a few deep breaths because I just spoke with a student from last years Master and who worked on the same group project as me (creating an Alumni Network).
The said alum said gmail is horrible and she never understood it.
Then she said Access and databases were terrible and she never understood them either and Excel was much better especially for looking up info (!!!!!!)
For those of you who don't realize just how terribly wrong those two statements are, believe me, they are.
True, Gmail isn't organized exactly like most other email clients, but I don't understand these French students who can't figure it out AT ALL. As in "Oh, I'm just really lost with Gmail. How does it work? I don't understand how to send an email?" (direct quote from a girl in my group)
And while Excel is maybe slightly easier to use/create with than Access or another database, the data manipulation possible with a database far outweighs any inconveniences. You can search for Alums who live in IDF and are in public relations with a database, but not with a spreadsheet.
Anyway, the real reason for my post was to ask if anybody knows of a web based database program. Google has Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations, but I haven't found any database application.
I found this article which reviews some software coming out, but I don't know if any of them will be free. That's the other problem: we don't specifically have a budget to buy an expensive program.
I need something that's easy to use, which is why Blist looks good. My fellow students aren't exactly tech savy... Our other problem is that with 6 of us working on the project but the files on one computer, we're really slowed down. We need to all be able to modify the data.
I'll go back to my work now....
1 comment:
I'm actually really interested in using databases for vocabulary teaching/curriculum development and maybe even learning in the classroom... I'm still learning how to use Access and all the things I could do with it, but I'm hoping it will help us organize all the words (and their vowels) for the Phonetics labs. We want to integrate the vocabulary from the Language et Communication class into the labs so the students practice the pronunciation twice. We'd like to easily pull out all the words with short vowels that don't exist in French, for example. Anyway, yeah that girl who said databases were terrible is a stupid-head.
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