Personal Productivity Tools

Tinyurl: makes annoying, incredibly long url's into short ones. You go to the website, copy a long url into the white bar, then it makes a short one that you can paste into an email or document. I've shared a tiny url that leads to a video/article about music education and the national funding crisis: http://tinyurl.com/78vm4u6

Dropbox: you have to download this one, but it prevents you from carrying a flashdrive or emailing documents to yourself to access from different computers. Once downloaded, login with your email, save documents in your dropbox folder and access it on getdropbox.com from any computer.

Teamviewer: this is another one you have to download, but is free. If two or more people are logged in to teamviewer, you can share a document that you can all work on at the same time as if you were right next to each other. So, if you are working on a group presentation and can't meet up, you can all log in to teamviewer and do it wherever you'd like.

Each of these could greatly enhance teaching and learning methods. Tinyurl makes sharing websites that much easier. It saves time and space when copying and pasting, and there is less likely of a chance that something will be left out of the long url when sharing website information. Dropbox makes it easy for teachers and students to work on homework, lesson plans, presentations etc. from anywhere without wondering where your flash drive is or worrying about emailing yourself. But, I think teamviewer increases productivity the most. This way, you can assign group presentations or activities without having to worry about how students will meet up to work on it. It also allows you (the teacher) to help them when you are not able to physically be with them. With each of these programs, we are not only teaching students to utilize technology in a positive way, but we are encouraging the sharing of knowledge.