I like to listen to audiobooks on my iPod while driving around on errands. I can play the sound in the car with a cheap wire from Wal-mart that connects to a fake cassette that fits into the car cassette player. I can keep it charged with another cord that fits into the lighter socket and has a USB port that keeps energy flowing into the iPod. A Classic costs $250 at Wal-mart and had 160 gigs of disc space. A Nano costs about half that and has about 8 gigs of space. Either will hold plenty of music but fewer audio books, which can be downloaded from Audible.com, now a branch of Amazon.com. The downloading software for music from Amazon and from Audible.com for audio books are free and both can make use of the iTunes database from Apple for maintaining and loading the iPod.
A savvy friend just updated me on additional web sites and services that seem useful and interesting.
At Prezi, I guess you can make online presentations. That sounds like something a teacher or professor would want but I learned long ago that thousands of presentations are made everyday in business, schools, and most human organizations. In fact, I heard of a couple of children who made a PowerPoint presentation to try to persuade their parents to give them a bigger allowance. I haven't used the site but it sounds intriguing. I heard from my favorite gadget guru that he has given a presentation about Prezi and I know he wouldn't do that unless he felt it was pretty good. I also heard that a Boston high school teacher showed the site to a group of seniors who were graduating in 4 days and 70% of them made a presentation before graduating. Several critics complain about the more or less static presentation of slides, often with too much text per slide, and too much droning on by the presenter while a single slide sits and sits and sits in front of the audience. This page shows the Prezi services available for free and with payment for annual licenses.
I guess similar things and maybe some interactive games and such can be made at MIT's Scratch. The site says that well over a million projects have been completed on Scratch. It is available free but donations are appreciated.
An added note: Google recently added the ability to draw to its free documents service and they have had Sketch, a free 3D model drawing service for quite a while.
