Live Mesh: A must for teachers

If you’re like me, you have your documents saved in different places. Some of them are on your school computer, others are saved at home. And maybe, some are on both.

Up until this year, I made myself crazy trying to keep everything organized. One semester, the rule was, Always save on my flash drive! This worked until I left my flash drive at home. Another semester, the rule was, Email documents from home to back up on my school computer! This was way too cumbersome.

I’m happy to say that I think I’ve found an excellent solution: Live Mesh. Mesh syncs all your documents to all the computers you own. It acts like any other folder on your desktop. When you save a document in a Live Mesh folder, it’s saved everywhere.

Let’s say a parent calls you at home and wants a copy of the latest assignment. You can find your document easily and send off a quick email instead of adding another thing to your to-do list.

Or maybe you’ve found the perfect music clip to show to your class. Instead of emailing it to yourself, you can just save it, and it’ll be there in the morning.

Live Mesh, a Microsoft product, is easy to set up and is free with a Windows Live ID. Until Google delivers its GDrive, Live Mesh is the way to go. There are many more features, like online storage and remote desktop capability, but for most teachers, the syncing option is the most powerful.

The only (perhaps big) problem is that Live Mesh runs in the background, just like an anti-virus program. I can’t be certain, but whenever my computer is running slow, I say, “I think it’s Live Mesh.” It doesn’t bother me, but if you don’t have enough memory, you might want to try out another syncing solution. Coming soon!

3 Comments

  1. From first glances, a better solution to your problem is Office Live – since it seems to me that all you’re doing is syncing documents (presumably MS Office ones…), this won’t cause you the performance issues that Live Mesh does. It’ll add an option in the menu to save to the cloud, whereupon you can access your documents from anywhere with an internet connection. That being said, I also use Live Mesh, and it’s quite an excellent sync solution, despite it’s slightly large footprint.

    1. Thank you! I agree with you that Live Mesh can slow things down, but I figured that teachers might want to sync music and video files, too. It’s fascinating all the options that Microsoft offers: Office Live, Live Sync, Live Mesh, and SkyDrive. (Have you tried Live Sync?) My biggest point is that teachers don’t have to go in the direction of Dropbox of Syncplicity. They can solve the biggest teacher dilemma — having our files where we want them — with an option that’s free.

  2. Pingback: Live Mesh + Scanner = No Paper! – iserotope: teachers & technology

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