Tech Tools For Traveling Teachers
Three useful tips to simplify your life as a school teacher
Are you a teacher that has to move from room to room or school to school due to the requirements of the classes that you teach? Are you tired of having to deal with mult
In every school district there are teachers who travel on a daily basis either between rooms or between buildings in the course of their duties. Traveling teachers often have problems keeping all of their important information with them as they move from place to place. This article provides you with several tools to help traveling teachers stay organized and be more productive with less effort.
The Mini-Travel Drive With Portable Applications:
Many teachers now carry around small portable hard drives, also known as thumb drives or flash drives, to move assignments and other documents from school to home and back. With the advent of large capacity thumb drives of up to two gigabytes in size, you can now load free, portable applications onto the drive itself, allowing you to always have your favorite applications and software available without having to install them on the physical machine.
Using applications from a web site called PortableApps.com, you can install dozens of useful software programs onto the drive which then will run on any computer without the need to have the IT person install it for you. You can also configure the drive to run your chosen programs the second that you plug the drive into the computer. Thus, you can have Firefox, an email client, and other useful applications available no matter where you are. Security software is also available for these drives to encrypt your data to prevent others from accessing it if you happen to leave it in the computer when you leave for the day.
Google Documents:
An alternative to the portable flash drive is to use the new Google Documents service. Basically, Google Docs is a free on-line word processor and spreadsheet system that imports and exports files in a variety of file formats. Google has also made a training site dedicated to giving teachers ideas of ways to use the service in their own classrooms as well. Google Docs is intended as a free substitute to the costly purchase of office software such as Microsoft Word and Excel. The only problem? If your Internet connection goes down your documents go with it, so keep important documents backed up to your thumb drive or a floppy disk.
Online Calendars:
Using the free services provided by Google or Yahoo you can keep track of your daily appointment schedule using an easy to use interface. Events that you place into the calendar system are available from any computer, simply by signing in to the service. You can also add free email accounts to which you can forward all of your various email accounts from school, home, and other places. Gmail (Google's free email utility) offers more storage space than you will ever need, and allows you to send email to other people using your school or home email address.
