Personal Productivity Tools

TinyURL, DropBox, and Teamviewer are three great tools that can be utilized in a classroom.  Each have their own functions that can benefit teachers and students.  I will go on to describe each one individually.  At the end of each description I have inserted a video I found helpful on how to use each tool.

TinyURL:  How often have you found a news article, picture, or video online that you have told your friends about?  And, when your friends ask you where to find it you have to describe where to find it because the link was just too long.  I feel like this happens to me almost every day.  For example, here is the URL to a jacket I like.  If I was telling a friend about where to find this jacket I could not tell them this URL http://store.liverpoolfc.tv/products/mens/menstops/red-fantic-jacket/pid-35473.  If I wanted to make it easy, I’d just have to go to the TinyURL website.  In just a few seconds I could transform this URL http://store.liverpoolfc.tv/products/mens/menstops/red-fantic-jacket/pid-35473 to http://tinyurl.com/favjacket.  I could easily remember that URL and my friends could easily remember it as well.  This can help in the classroom as well.  Instead of having the students copy down a long url for a news article or video to read/watch at home, they could just copy down a quick and easy url that I created on tinyurl.com.  This small easy url also can make a blog look better by not having an extremely long url taking up most of the post.  Instead, just a small quick and easy url could be shared in the blog post.

Dropbox: Dropbox is an online storage device.  To put it simply, whatever you save in a Dropbox folder, you can retrieve from any other computer, tablet, or smartphone.  This is very helpful in many ways.  One way it helped me over the summer was when I went travelling.  I had a bunch of travel guide information saved as pdf files.  I could not view pdf files on my iPad.  With Dropbox, I was able to open the file on my iPad and view the pdf files that I had saved on my computer.  This can be helpful for students who are working on a writing assignment at home and need extra time at school to work on it.  This works vice versa as well, if they start an assignment at school and need time at home to finish it.  If they save it into their Dropbox, when they get to school it can easily be retrieved.  Also, if you save a file into your Dropbox but then your computer crashes, then your Dropbox has a saved copy of that file.  Students no longer have the excuse of losing their work due to a computer crash.  Students could also have a group Dropbox account, they could individually work on group assignments that could be saved into a group folder from many different computers.  Or, the group could all share a folder that they put assignments into that they have worked on.


Teamviewer:  Teamviewer allows someone else from a different location to access another person’s computer.  It allows them to see the other person’s screen, open folders and files, open web browsers, or show what someone is doing wrong when working on a particular project.  For example, maybe a student is having problems creating an animation within PowerPoint, that student could call his/her friend for help.  Those students could log into Teamviewer and the other student could help and show the other what he/she was doing wrong.  Or, maybe a couple students need to work on the PowerPoint presentation together but cannot make it to each other’s house to work together.  They can simply log onto Teamviewer and work on the project together.

The possibilities to use these tools together are also viable.  A student could show another student how to share folders in Dropbox through Teamviewer.  Students could use easy Tinyurls to share photos, videos, music, or assignments.  As time passes, updates to these tools will be available, people will draw up new ideas how to use these tools, and these tools will evolve to make the process of sharing, transporting work, helping and working with each other much easier and more efficient.