Here I am again. This 3rd post in the challenge is to be a review post. What to review posed a challenge in itself. My first thought was to review school based PD offerings but that needs a much fuller treatment than I can do today. I have been reading and researching a fair bit about PD’s and plan to write about it in more detail at a later date. A book review would serve the purpose but which one? There are so many.
One of the suggestions given, which will suit many, is to review a tool that you use regularly. I couldn’t think of one that would be useful to all of you at first but then I remembered a conversation Judy and I had recently. Judy lives in Warwick, Queensland and I am in Melbourne so our discussions are mostly virtual. We have been using Google Drive for a while as it means we can both be looking at the same document while we are discussing it. It really is a great tool, and best of all it is free. However there were still some issues in saving things in Drive from the desktop.
I had been using mostly Firefox as my default browser and it would not allow me to copy things across to Drive. Then somewhere I read that Chrome makes things a whole lot easier. And it does. It is fantastic. You can highlight whole blocks of items, or move entire folders from the desktop into Drive by simply dragging and dropping. You can’t do that with Firefox.
So even in the middle of a conversation I can drag something easily from my desktop into Drive so Judy can see it. The time saving has been considerable.
I generally have both browsers open now. The graphics software we use works better on Chrome as well, but Firefox has been with me for a while and most of my many bookmarks are there so I won’t be abandoning it anytime soon.
A word of caution though, don’t try to drag a large folder (it may have been 3.4 gig!) across in one hit. It took many, many hours and would stop if the computer went to sleep, which it did several times. Not something I will do again.
Most school departments have a designated drive that teachers can save to. Often though you have designed units or resources at home and going through the transferring and saving process can be a bit of a drag. (Pardon the pun.) With Chrome and Drive files on any computer can simply be dragged and dropped into the appropriate location. Very Efficient.
Do you have a favourite EdTech tool that makes your job easier. Pop on over to the Facebook page and share it. We can all use the reviews.
That is all for today. Until next time
Teach Well
Carolyn
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