Tuesday, January 7, 2014

My Introduction to Dropbox!

One of my favorite non-teaching bloggers is Rachel Held Evans.  Her way with words is something that I envy (a lot), and most of her posts will make you either laugh or cry.  This post did both.  She is in the middle of writing a book and proceeded to spill a chai latte all over her computer.  She spent a long couple of days wondering if her entire manuscript was lost.  I cannot encourage you enough to read the post.  It really is excellent writing.

Now, I'm not writing a book.  (Definitely not!)  But, I do have LOTS of files on my computer that I would hate to lose.  While I do try to back up the ones on my school laptop on the server at school, that's not always possible.  And my school laptop is almost six years old, which is almost elderly when you're talking about technology.  As a result, it dies.  A lot.  And when it dies, it needs to be re-imaged, which means I get it back just like it came to me the first time.  Every single file that is saved on my C Drive is gone.  So my constant fear is that it will die during a long break like Christmas or Summer.  Then, everything I've worked on for school would be gone.  Kaput.  Lost in the netherworld forever.

As a result, I've thought about how to save my work so it's not lost forever in a disaster of fire, flood, or pestilence.  And I've found Dropbox!  I know this site may be familiar to most of you, but it's all new to me, and I think I'm in love!  It was so easy to install and add files to.  I have Chrome as my browser, so it's easy to get to Google Docs, but it's harder to upload files to that.  I'm probably going to save my stuff to both, because I don't want to lose anything.

If you don't have a quick and easy way to save all of those great activities you've been creating for your classroom, I would definitely recommend Dropbox!

And, I can't leave you without a picture.  This was our day today.  While we didn't have snow, we did have single digit temperatures which only happens every couple of decades here in metro Atlanta, so schools were closed.  This is my two oldest playing on their Kindles with the new apps they were able to buy with the Amazon gift cards their aunt gave them.  It made for a quiet afternoon.  I think, however, that we're all ready to get back to our regular routine.  If only I could get school to start every day at 10:00 am. . .


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