New Promethean Planet for Storage

When Promethean Planet recently upgraded their site and released the news they would be giving users 1 GB (yup, 1 GB!!) of storage space, I immediately thought of all the teachers I've known who've dealt with issues regarding how best to store their Activboard flipcharts.

Our district offers each teacher space on district servers, but teachers who are heavy users and develop and save flipcharts all year long often eventually max out that space.
I've seen teachers who have carried around several color-coded flashdrives each filled with flipcharts or purchased external hard drives to hold all their flipcharts. Of course issues arise when you don't have the equipment on hand or the hardware is misplaced or fails.

The best solution now may be to keep Activboard files on the Promethean Planet. I've expressed my love for cloud computing in the past, and I'm pleased to see Promethean is providing this service for Promethean Planet members. With 1 GB of space for flipcharts teachers can purge those "My Documents" and flashdrives and use Planet not just as a place to search for resources, but also a place to store files as well. Kind of a one-stop shop for Promethean-related files.

Teachers always need to be aware of the information they put online, but the vast majority of the flipcharts I own don't contain any specific user information, so I'll enjoy having my flipcharts in one spot.





The one drawback I can see in my plan is that I am at the mercy of my Internet connection and Promethean Planet's site, but the lure of 1 GB of storage is enough to get my attention. And as teachers who use Promethean Planet plan and prepare for the next school year, I'll encourage them to look into this free storage option.

Summertime Blogs

The summer can be a great time for reflection and planning for implementing new ideas for the upcoming school year. Teachers often use the summer months as the time to try out some new things and plan for how to integrate technology into their lessons. So as the school year begins to wind down for 2009-10, I'd like to suggest my Teacher's Top 3 Blogs for Summer Reading.

These are all blogs I've been following that I feel provide easy ways to incorporate technology into your classroom, whatever grade you teach.

• I've mentioned Richard Byrne's www.freetech4teachers.com before as a great blog to follow for reviews of tech tools and ways they can be used in the classroom. His blog posts are concise and often don't just discuss the tool but also ways it can be used for educators.
• Kelly Tenkely's http://ilearntechnology.com/ blog is another blog worth following. I think Kelly's Promethean Quick Tips should be required reading for teachers in our district who have activboards. But her audience is not just teachers with activboards. Her blog often highlights a site or tool that any classroom could use.
• Vanessa Cassie's blog moved this year to http://sharpsav.com/blog/ . She offers several posts for the SMARTboard users, but like Kelly offers a lot of tips for people using any interactive whiteboard or even none at all.

Again all these blogs are short reads that yield a lot of valuable content and would be great sites for those who are just starting to following blogs. There are several others I feel could be added to the list, but it's the summer after all, so I'll keep the reading list brief. Just a little extra education for that much-deserved vacation. :)