As a new teacher, I did a lot of work at home. If that wasn\u2019t painful enough, I can remember several days where I got to school and realized that the handout I spent too much time perfecting had been left at home on my printer.\u00a0 Or, I had intentions of emailing documents to my school account or grabbing my flash drive, but being easily distracted, that often didn\u2019t pan out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a few days of improvising lessons and trying to keep my students busy despite my unpreparedness, I quickly realized I needed a solution for this problem. And after trying out several strategies, here\u2019s what I\u2019ve found to be best: Dropbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dropbox is great! Basically, you can set it up on your home computer. Choose a folder, and everything you save in that folder gets transferred to Dropbox\u2019s servers. So, it\u2019s a great backup for when my computer inevitably crashes. Install Dropbox on my school computer, and the folder with all my files is magically downloaded. Make a change or add a file at school or home, and it replicates to the other location (unless my school district\u2019s draconian filtering policies get in the way\u2026). As an added bonus, I can actually get to my files through any internet-connected computer by going to the Dropbox website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other benefits: I can share a folder to make it available to others.\u00a0 When I get an email from a colleague asking for lesson ideas about stoichiometry, I can attach a few files from my Dropbox folder and contribute.\u00a0 Likewise, when I get a great idea, lab, or lesson from a colleague, it goes in the appropriate folder within my Dropbox folder. Oh, and of course up to 2GB of storage is\u00a0completely free<\/strong>!!! And, you can invite friends or do other simple tasks to earn more free space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, no more emailing files to myself. No more forgetting or losing my flash drive. My files are available to me virtually anywhere. I recommend this to my colleagues and students\u2014I\u2019ve had more than one instance where a student\u2019s flash drive stopped working or got lost, and I always point them to Dropbox so it doesn\u2019t happen again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our school network\/IT department decided to block Dropbox, so I had to resort to my old-school methods for a while. However, when my laptop was stolen over the summer, having Dropbox was wonderful, as I lost almost none of my school work as it was all backed up on Dropbox’s servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s been a while, so let me catch you up: our district network policies went back and forth for a while as to whether Dropbox was blocked or allowed. By around 2013, it was blocked for good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, I had discovered Google Drive<\/a>, which synced files between school and home the same way Dropbox did, providing a generous amount of storage with a free account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around 2015 or 2016, my district adopted Google Apps for Education, and I finally got an official school-sanctioned Google account (with unlimited<\/em> storage!). Google Backup & Sync<\/a> (or whatever they decided to call it now) has been my go-to for keeping files backed-up and synced between school and home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a new teacher, I did a lot of work at home. If that wasn\u2019t painful enough, I can remember several days where I got to school and realized that the handout I spent too…<\/p>\nUPDATE September 4, 2011:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
UPDATE July 10, 2020:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n