Dropbox is Easy Sync & Backup

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I love Dropbox.

Now that that’s done, allow me to elaborate.  Put simply, Dropbox is a program that automatically backs up your files online to the web, as well as to any other computer where you have Dropbox installed.  There are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even iPhone.  With a basic free account (which is what I use) you get 2 GB of online storage for your files, although you can increase that to up to 5 GB with referrals or even pay for more storage if you need it.  For just backing up documents, though, the free version should be more than enough for most people.

Online Backup of Your Files

Once you install Dropbox on your computer, it will create a folder called “My Dropbox” that looks nearly identical to other folders on your computer.  Any files that you place in this folder automatically get synced and backed-up to the web.  If you log on to the dropbox website from another computer, all of your files will be there for you.  If something ever happens you your computer, you have an automatic, free, online backup of your files!  That’s the basics.

Super Easy File Syncing

The next real advantage is that you can install Dropbox on more than one computer at a time, and it will sync your files seamlessly between each computer.  For example, let’s say you have a school computer and a home computer.  Install Dropbox on both of them.  Then, if you edit a lesson plan or Powerpoint on your home computer, as long as that file is in your Dropbox folder, it automatically gets sent to your school computer’s Dropbox folder.  No more emailing files to yourself or copying files via a thumbdrive to get that work to school.  It happens automatically.  It’s almost as if you’re accessing the same folder in both places.  I use this to keep all of my work files synchronized between my school laptop and my home computer.

Instant Online Photo Albums

Want to share those photos of some cool project that you did in class or school event that you orchestrated?  In your “My Dropbox” folder, there’s a “Photos” folder.  When you create sub-folders in it, they instantly become online photo albums for any photo that you drop in there.  Instead of emailing all those photos, just copy them into your Dropbox Photos folder, right click on the folder, select “Copy Public Gallery Link”, and email that link to whomever you want.  It will take them to a nicely formatted online photo gallery of all the photos you put into that folder on your computer.

Share Any File with Anybody

Finally, there’s file sharing.  Your “My Dropbox” folder has a “Public” folder in it.  You can put a file into the Public folder, right click on it, and get a web link to that file that you can email to other people, put on your class website, or whatever you need!  Remember how annoying it is when someone emails you a huge file attachment?  (It eats up your email space and takes forever to download, grrr!)  Instead of being that annoying-attachment guy, you just copy the file into your Public Dropbox folder and email the link.  I’ve also used this feature to email my lesson plans as a link to my substitute teacher.  Now, I know Google Docs can be used in this way, too, but it is limited to document-type files only; Dropbox can share any type of file!

Dropbox also has a second type of file-sharing, although I haven’t tried it personally.  If you know someone else with a Dropbox account, you can share entire folders with each other, and they get synced to each of your My Dropbox folders.  In this way, you can collaborate with your colleagues.  Again, Google Docs does this very nicely for docs, spreadsheets, and presentations, with the advantage of not having to install anything, but Dropbox allows you to share any file type, including pictures, videos, programs, or whatever you want!

As a final note, remember that I said you can increase your Dropbox storage for free using referrals?  If you sign up using my Dropbox referral link, then we both get an extra 250 MB of storage space.  Sorry if that sounds a bit solicitous, but if you’re going to try it, you might as well get some extra space, right?

If you are already using Dropbox, or want to get a better idea of how powerful it is, Lifehacker has a lot of articles on additional uses for Dropbox.

So, in conclusion: I love Dropbox, and so should you.

The Many Uses of Google Docs

Google Docs is, at first glance, basically an online version of Microsoft Office.  It has the trinity of office apps: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presenter.  If you were to try to compare it as a true apples-to-apples competitor to Office, it would lose out.  Each of the Google Docs online apps has fewer features than its Office counterpart.  It also requires an Internet connection to function, and as a result can get frustrating to use if your connection is not solid.  (As a side note, Microsoft is also making its own version of an online office suite: Office Live)

However, I would argue that Google Docs is actually an orange to Microsoft Office’s apple.  Despite the fact that it lacks all of the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office as an office suite, it’s networked nature makes it a different beast altogether, with many useful advantages that Microsoft doesn’t have.  I want to outline some of those features here, and explain how you might use them as a teacher.

Price and Ease-of-Use

First and foremost, price: Google Docs is free!  All you have to do is sign up for a Google account (if you don’t already have one).  This is especially good for students; you can recommend Google Docs to them if they can’t afford Microsoft Office, or even if they don’t have a computer (they can use Google Docs on the public library or school computers).  Second, you don’t even need to install it on your computer: you just need a web browser.  Third, the lack of features is, to some, actually a blessing in disguise: less features makes it easier to learn and use.

Online Storage

The next big advantage is that any document that you create or edit in Google Docs gets stored online.  You can access your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, from any computer with Internet access.  If you have existing documents, you can upload them to Google Docs, and they will be saved there as well.  If you ever need to have an offline copy, it’s easy to export a copy to your computer.  You can, for example, store your lesson plans in Google Docs, and edit or view them from anywhere.  No more carrying around a thumbdrive with your files on it, or emailing your files to yourself so you can have them at school.

Online Publishing

I use this feature all the time: you can instantly “publish” any of your documents as a webpage to share with your students.  Put your syllabus on Google Docs, publish it as a web page, and then link it on your class website.  Put a Powerpoint presentation on Google Docs, publish it as a webpage, and it students can view it online as a presentation.  The greatest benefit of this is that, once you’ve done this, any change you make to the original document is automatically reflected in the public version.  This is great for fixing mistakes in documents or updating them to reflect changes in your classes from year-to-year.  Instead of having to edit both the document and your website, you just edit the document and you’re done.  Here’s an example of a presentation that I use to introduce one of my projects.

Online Collaboration

This is the real power of Google Docs: you can share and collaborate on documents with your colleagues very easily.  Put your lab stockroom inventory in a spreadsheet and share it with all of the science department.  Any time one person makes an edit to the file, everyone sees the change.  There’s no more need to email documents back and forth with various revisions (Google Docs also keeps track of revision history, who changed what).  Doing a collaborative project with another teacher?  Put your project documents on Google Docs, share them with each other, and you each see the changes that the other made.  You can even make custom web forms to easily enter information into a Google docs spreadsheet.

Organize and Access Your Lesson Plans Anywhere

Have you ever written and taught a great lesson plan, only to lose it by the following year?  Or perhaps you wrote it in a Word document on your home computer and forgot to bring the file to school with you on the day of the lesson?  Or maybe you’re stuck at the in-laws for the weekend, but you need to update your lessons for next week and you forgot your laptop?

One possible solution is to sync your written lesson plans to the “cloud”, which is the cool kids’ way of saying the Internet.  That way, you can access your lesson plans from anywhere you have Internet access.  A big plus is that this doubles as online backup of your files, too.  So how can we do this?  Well, there are quite a few options, but I’ll mention a few here.

Taskstream ($49/yr or cheaper for multi-year subscriptions)

Taskstream is a web service that is designed specifically for educators to solve our exact dilemma.  You can develop lessons, insert standards into those lessons, organize the lessons into cohesive units, share and copy lessons from others, attach files, develop rubrics, and even download an archive of all your work as a local backup.  The interface is simple and intuitive.  It’s not free, but for what it does it’s a very nice solution.  I’m guessing you could use the teacher tax deduction and claim this as a classroom software expense, though.  My teacher intern program provided a free license for me to taskstream, and I found it to be such a useful tool that I was really sad when I had completed the intern program and that license expired.

Dropbox or Skydrive (free)

If you prefer to write your lesson plans in Microsoft Word or something similar, then you can still make those files web-accessible.  Skydrive is 25Gb of free online storage.  So you just upload your lesson plan files to Skydrive and you can download them from anywhere.  Dropbox only offers 2Gb, but has the added benefit of automatic syncing.  In other words, if you change one of your lesson plans on your home computer, that change is automatically synced to the cloud (the Internet) as well as any other computers that you have Dropbox installed on (like your school computer).  Both services allow you to share any of those files with others.  For example, if you need to send your sub the day’s lesson plans, you can just email them the link you the appropriate file in Dropbox or Skydrive.  Really, unless you’re including videos, 2Gb is plenty of storage for both lesson plans and associated files for most people; so, Dropbox is my preferred choice.

Evernote (free, with paid upgrades for more storage)

Evernote is a web service that also has desktop and mobile clients (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, etc).  It is meant to be a universal receptacle for all of your notes, including pictures, web links, and even files.  However, we teachers can turn this around to make it be our universal receptacle for our lesson plans.  You can organize these notes (lesson plans) into virtual folders, give them searchable tags, embed images and files, and much more.  The best part is that Evernote indexes all of your notes so that they are easily searchable (it even searches text contained in images and does handwriting recognition)!  If you have handwritten lesson plans, you can scan them in and Evernote will allow you to search for words in your handwriting.  You can share notes with others (like a sub), too.  I’ve just started using Evernote, but so far I really like the features.  The desktop and mobile program versions sync with the cloud so your notes are accessible from anywhere.  Rather than a total storage limit, the free version of Evernote limits you to 40 Mb of uploads per month.

Screenshot of the Windows Evernote program.