Ditch your old Voicemail for free Youmail!

If you have a cellphone (if you don't, you probably aren't reading this blog either, are you?) and you are still using the Voicemail provided by your carrier, stop. Immediately. I just started using a service called Youmail that works seamlessly with my carrier (Verizon) and brings much more power and convenience to my Voicemail. Best of all, it is completely free!

Signing up for Youmail is simple. You register with the site, then enter your phone number. They will send you a text message to verify you actually own that phone. You use the pin from the text message to begin the setup. They walk you through forwarding your voice messages to the Youmail server rather than your carrier. For me, the process took less than 5 minutes. From there the features are very exciting and easy to use:

1. Check and listen to your voicemail from your email.
   For me, the best feature and reason enough to sign up. Someone called me today at 3:00 when I was sitting in a faculty meeting. When I got back to my computer I had an email telling who the message was from and giving me a link to hear it online. You can also set up Youmail to send MP3 or Wav attachments.
   
2. Share your Voicemail.
   Once someone leaves you a voicemail, you have some options. If the voicemail is important, funny, annoying, or otherwise noteworthy, you can forward it to anyone else with an email address.
   You can also embed the message in a Flashplayer on any blog or website (this might make your friends think twice before leaving you any more voicemails).
   
3. Custom Greetings:
   Do you sometimes feel that your voicemail greeting is too friendly for colleagues or too formal for friends and family? Youmail has this problem solved too. You can set up more than one greeting and forward callers depending on which category they fall into.
   
4. Ditch Caller:
   Another great feature is the ability to define numbers that you do not wish to grant voicemail access to. When these people call, they are given a custom message and promptly hung up on. Great for annoying telemarketers and anyone else you don't need leaving a 4 minute message for you to suffer through.

I've been using the service for a few days and I am very impressed. I wish I could replace my landline and school voicemail with Youmail (hopefully they will add this later). It is great to be able to manage email and voicemail all from one computer screen.

**Prediction: this seems like the kind of company Google might snatch up. You heard it here first.**

Welcome to the Blog....

This blog was created with the intention of helping teachers to make sense of all the technology available to us. After giving an in-service not long ago, I realized that most teachers have no idea how easy and how available these tools are.

I think that technology is becoming more and more crucial to giving our students a full and rewarding education. In our fast paced world with so much information, our students must be trained to find and understand this information and the tools for using and managing it. I find and hear and read about so many different websites, software titles, and pieces of hardware that can be used in the educational setting. I hope that this blog will serve as a tool to spread the word about these educational tools and also give me an avenue for learning about new ones.

When I come across something useful, I will talk about it here. I hope that other teachers will find it useful.