Work Smarter, Not Harder

In today’s digital age, there are literally thousands of tools to make life easier. In my experience working with teachers, many of them are working harder, not smarter when it comes to the use of technology to make their life, and teaching, easier. I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite tools to not only use with students, but to use as a teacher to organize thinking and be able to easily share documents and resources with others.

Here are a few of my favorites:
➢ Dropbox (www.dropbox.com): Dropbox is a cloud computing service that saves all your documents in the “cloud.” This means that you can access all of your documents anywhere, including your smartphone or tablet, and gives you up to 18 GB of free storage for all your documents with the option to purchase more space. You can also share folders with others and work collaboratively. In addition, Dropbox will create a link for each document so that you can easily share a specific document with others through social media, email, etc.

 ➢ Evernote (www.evernote.com): There’s no need to carry around a notebook with Evernote. Evernote is an amazing tool for saving all of your notes to the “cloud.” It works similarly to Dropbox in that you can download Evernote to all of your devices and access your notes from anywhere. You can also “clip” webpages and share notes collaboratively. I even put my grocery list in Evernote and pull it up once I get the store.

➢ Delicious (www.delicious.com): Teachers come across many websites they want to save and access at a later point. I see many teachers, however, bookmarking websites by using the bookmarking feature on their computer. This is fine, however, you can’t access these bookmarks on other computers. In addition, if your computer crashes, you’ve lost all your bookmarks. Delicious allows you to save and access your bookmarks from anywhere. In addition, you can annotate and highlight whatever you bookmark.

➢ Google Apps (http://docs.google.com): Google apps offer endless possibilities. You can create and work on documents collaboratively. You can save work in Google Drive and access and share documents at anytime. Google apps also allow you to create presentations, surveys, spreadsheets, etc. All of these apps are free and easy to use.

 ➢ Twitter (www.twitter.com): This might sound like a strange tool to include on this list, but Twitter is an amazing tool for collaboration. There are literally hundreds of chats and hashtags related to education. For example, every Monday night there is a social studies chat at 6 p.m. using #sschat. By participating in this chat I learn from my other educators and share my resources with others participating in the chat. I can also ask Bob Marzano a question and he will actually respond. My PLN (personal learning network) connects me to other educators around the United States and across the world.