Old Dog and New Tricks

Now I'm not a dog and neither am I old but I wanted to put a post up about workflows.

Workflows is a boring concept- how you work through a task rom A to B.  But on school computers it usually goes something like this:

Log On- find the program you wanted isn't on this PC.  Log Out.

Log On 2nd PC. Realise your pendrive is up in class. Walk to class to get pendrive. Chat to students and staff on way, come back and someone has logged you out.

Log on 3rd PC. Open up your planning document.  Realise all the bookmarks you saved in that mammoth resource hunting session are saved onto the first PC and you can't remember half of them now. Try to log into that account passworded website like TES- realise you've forgotten your password.  Send email password reminder to yourself. Realise the reminder will go to your work email which can't be logged onto on this PC. Log Out.

Log onto 4th PC.  Open up email, and so on and so on until your PPA is over and you've done nothing.

I'm forever jumping from safari to word to publisher to websites I have accounts with to the school main hard drive to dropbox to my pen drive and back again.

What the digital leaders taught me was to try to stick to one thing- and that was Google Chrome, Google Mail and Google Drive with Pearltrees stuck onto it.

The best things- once you've logged onto one computer it remembers your login details for all those fiddly sites like TES and dropbox- so you go straight there without logging in.  It goes straight into your email, straight to your Google drive.  And after today and having a Google Hang Out it logs you into that straight away too- so you don't have to log into Skype for instance.

I'm getting there slowly and I'm finding it is speeding things up- even if initially you have to log into your Google account on new PC's and of course your work email is still on Outlook.

Time isn't so much about money in our job more about effectiveness and teaching our students in the best way we can - which is more important.

So I'm changing my decades old practice and hopefully logging on just the once.......