Research Guides: Technological Resources for Faculty: File Sharing and Lesson Plans

Shared Files and Lesson Plans

Dropbox and Evernote are wonderful places to store your lesson plans. Drag your class folder into the Dropbox, for example, and then you will be able to open your lesson plan on your iPad or iPhone! Go completely paperless. Make edits to those lessons from anywhere, and they will always be up-to-date! Picture files with text become readable and searchable in any of the applications listed on this page... so after you take a picture of an old lesson plan, you can search the text!

Dropbox
Cost: FREE (multiple platforms)
Download Dropbox to your computer, iPad, iPhone, or Android device - or all of them! Access and edit the same documents from any device, anywhere. Dropbox is an excellent place to keep and share large files (like high resolution photos or even videos) so you don’t have to email them. A great place for group collaboration.

Pros: Create folders to share with colleagues, friends, classes, or independent study students. Documents are updated from any device or platform, and are always up to date. Can also sync between computers, so if you have documents saved on your personal computer that must be shared with a work computer or that of your spouse, all documents are synchronized everywhere!

Cons: No live editing. If you and a friend are editing the same document it creates multiple versions.

Available online, in the App Store and Google Play
Evernote
Cost: FREE (multiple platforms)
A great tool for saving notes, pictures, lesson plans, research, videos, webpages, and more! Search for any term anywhere in your notes - even the text in a photo will become “readable” by this app! Share and sync everything between all devices. Take a photo on your smartphone - it’s instantly in Evernote on your computer... just as if you’d scanned it on a scanner. You can also email anything to Evernote, and it will be there for you. More here: http://evernote.com/teachers/

Pros: Allows you to save and remember all of those articles, websites, images, and notes to use in your courses. Powerful search tool and use of tags makes finding things easy. Also great for meeting notes and forms you need saved. Share an entire notebook (think, class!) with a colleag

Document Sharing with Built-in Editors

You can also use Google Docs or OneDrive to store and share documents, including lesson plans! Both of these systems are wonderful for collaboration, as they have built-in document editors. This means you and a colleague or student can edit the same document at the same time, and you will be able to see edits as they happen! Deleted files are kept intact for 30 days before being permanently deleted (this is also true for Dropbox).

Google Drive
Cost: FREE (multiple platforms)
Create and share your work online and access your documents from anywhere. Manage documents, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys, and more all in one place.

Pros: Live editing of all kinds of documents, including PDFs. Tell the program to convert uploaded files and PDFs to Google Docs format, and they will be instantly editable. You can then download those same documents as a PDF or Word document. Google Drive allows you to disable automatic deletion of old versions which means you can keep all file revisions as long as you want although doing this maxes out your storage space quickly.

Cons: In order to use it you must get a gmail account, if you don't already have one.

Available online, in the App Store and Google Play
OneDrive
Cost: FREE (multiple platforms)
Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

Pros: The only service (between Dropbox and Google Drive) that has their own app for Windows phone. You can edit Excel and PowerPoint documents in SkyDrive's web apps. Installing the SkyDrive desktop application allows you to access every file on that PC it is installed in; so as long as your PC is turned on, connected to the internet with SkyDrive running, you’ll be able to access all your files through the SkyDrive website.

Available online, in the App Store and Google Play