A colleague asked me about online scheduling of parent-teacher conferences and I came upon this today.  Earlier this year I had looked at some pretty robust paid solutions, but it seems as if SkyLark Productions' SignUpGenius can handle most of what we were looking for...and it's free!

I only played around with it for a short while, but the interface is very intuitive and flexible.  You can choose how many people are "needed" for a particular slot and vary the dates and times of events.  You can also set up recurring events.  You do not need to force users to set up an account, but it is reccomended if you want them to receive a reminder.  One of the best options is one that allows users to switch time slots with each other, rather than needing to go through a central "list manager."

We'll see how it goes this first go around, but I am optimistic because I have been so impressed by both the simplicity and the depth of this tool.

Here are some solid, free journal/diary apps that I have come across so far.

Notes
The native "Notes" application that comes with the iPad is great for text, links, time stamping the note, and emailing the note(s) to yourself or others.

MomentDiary (free)
The interface and structure of this app takes a little getting used to, but once you play around with it you'll find that it has all the features of the built-in Notes application, plus the ability to add photos and geotagging (location).  You can email notes with or without photos.  There is a 140 character limit per note (ala Twitter). There is also a nice calendar view that lets you see your notes in both list and grid form. You can also add a separate number code lock protection just for this app.

My Secret Diary (free)
This app seems to have been designed for a younger audience (i.e. the pink binding and heart shaped lock you need to press to open it).  That being known, the interface for the note pages is very easy to use. You can add photos and caption them, add sticky notes to the journal page, and even play your music library from the app while composing an entry.  The only drawback is that you can't export or email the notes (yet?).  Like the app mentioned above, you can add a second level of password protection to this diary.

Use labels and the archive feature to keep your Inbox free of clutter. I had been getting tired at looking at "1-100 of 4387" in the top right of my Gmail Inbox.  I have been using the labels feature in order to have some semblance of structure in my Gmail inbox, but I really prefer to see only active conversations or unattended mail in the first view when I open my Gmail.  I just spent some time using the following two features to make things a little easier for me.

Labels

These are Gmail's version of mail folders.  You can create as many labels as you like in the left hand menu.  The nice thing about labels is that you can assign multiple labels to a single message.  Most mail clients allow you to move a message to a single folder or make multiple copies of the message, with the latter breaking up any possibilities of a threaded message discussion..

You can assign colors to the labels once they have been created.  You can also rename the labels or re-color them at any time.  To assign a label to a message you simply select the Label drop down menu at the top of the Gmail interface with the message(s) having been selected.

Archive
Messages that arrive in your Inbox are automatically assigned a hidden label called "Inbox." You will see this if you click on any of your label folders on the left menu.

When you are viewing your Inbox, you can select a message or multiple messages and click on the "Archive" button to remove the Inbox label from the message.  If you had already assigned a custom label to the message, it will still exist in that folder but will be out of your primary Inbox view. Nice and clean.

It might be a lot of work up front, especially if you have thousands of messages in your mailbox, but if you're like me and like to look at a clean and organized inbox, it's worth the effort.

A friend of mine shared with me last night a great free application for making concept maps (also commonly referred to as mind maps).  MindNode is a simple and elegant tool with an easy to interface.  Some might find that the inability to use shapes, images, arrows, and other design elements is a limitation, but I believe that it makes the presentation of the concept map ultimately more powerful.

The drag and drop interface is extremely intuitive. Once you start a new node from the master, the color automatically changes according to a very .  You can change the colors of the fonts of the text as well as the lines connecting items.  My friend suggested that a fun activity to do in order to learn the interface would be to try and recreate the NYC Subway map.

Unfortunately, MindNode is only available for Macs, but they do have an iPhone/iTouch/iPad compatible app for $5.99.  They also have a "pro" version that has some additional features that can be learned about here.