Not sure what the teaching & learning value of this is but just have to give an example of how I've used some technology to get out of a spot of bother.

Here's the scene. Big lunch party organised at great expenses and effort by some colleagues which I have to attend. Then I discover, two days away, that I'm going to have to look after three children and take them along. I had, therefore, to contact the restaurant pronto to see whther they could be persuaded to find a table near enough the main one for me to make sure they didn't feel dumped but far enough away to avoid either their or my colleagues behaviour / language causing trouble. Now that would have been easy apart from one crucial detail. I didn't have the name of the restaurant, nor its number or address or anything.

I had, though, been there once before and it was sufficiently off the beaten track for me to use Google maps to find it at the time. That was, though, best part of a year ago and I'd used a laptop at work to do that bit.

This is where it gets good. Google Desktop stores all sorts of stuff and is dead quick. when I typed Google Maps into the search panel up came '425 pages stored on your desktop'. In nice date order it was easy to find the date I'd used it at about the right time and there was a little picture of the map I'd used. Click on that and up came the original page itself!

On the left was a panel with the local restaurants etc and there was the telephone number I needed. Brilliant.

What really made this particularly wonderful was the fact that Firefox has a great little Add-on that synchronises my bookmarks across the two machines I use and it was one from another machine that the list displayed which I wouldn't have seen with Internet Explorer.

There you go. I'll put a link to this into the FireFox and Google Desktop pages. Maybe that's a good teaching tool - something covers several topics and this is a nice way to link them together.