Google Docs (now Google Drive) is great. But if you’re a teacher, you might feel overwhelmed by the number of documents you receive from students. So much clutter!

Here are three tips to help you.

1. Do not have students share individual documents with you.
They will forget. Even if they remember, it’s not an elegant solution. See Tip #2.

2. Instead, set up shared folders.
When students drag their document into a shared folder that you have set up, two things happen at once: (1) You get the document, (2) The document is automatically organized.

There are three logical ways to create shared folders. They are (1) by student, (2) by assignment, (3) by class. Each option has its pluses and minuses.

If you choose to create folders by student (which I did last year and which was very successful), you’ll have many folders, but you’ll be able to see your student’s entire portfolio at a glance. This also keeps things private.

On the other hand, if you create folders by assignment, it’ll be easier to grade your essays, but you’ll have to create new folders all the time.

Most teachers create a folder for each class. This keeps everything tidy but allows students to view (and modify!) their peers’ work. Some teachers find the openness helpful because students can assist each other.

3. Insist on a common way for students to title their documents.
If you don’t tell students to title their documents, you’ll receive tons of documents titled “Untitled.” Best practice is to find an easy way for students to identify their name, class, and assignment.

Some teachers have crazy naming conventions, which usually involve underscores, first initials, and confusing spacing. Here’s mine:

Period Number Last Name, First Name: Assignment
2 Isero, Mark: Persuasive Essay

The period number comes in handy because Google Docs will group all documents with the same number up front. Then, having a student’s last name come first keeps documents alphabetized and easy for grading purposes. Finally, I prefer a generic assignment name (rather than the student’s original title) so I can search for essays later in case they get lost.

So there you have it — three tips  to organize your students’ Google Docs. Please let me know if you have a better system or if you have questions. 

 I have two Google accounts — a personal one and one for work.

You probably do, too.

Don’t you hate switching back and forth? It’s not pleasant.

No matter how much Google says it is making it easier to manage multiple accounts, I still find it bothersome. That’s why I’m happy I came across a recent tip from teacher Kevin Brookhouser, who suggests using a lesser-known aspect of the Google Chrome browser: the sign-in feature.

This is how it works: You open Chrome, click on the settings wrench, sign in with your Google account, and then you’re able to create different user profiles. You can name them and select different icons to represent each user. All you need to do to switch between profiles is to click the icon at the top of your screen. That’s it. It’s easy.

Better yet, you can have different bookmarks and extensions on each profile. For me, that means that I can keep personal and work-related websites separate, which increases my productivity. I’m no longer as distracted. When I’m on my work profile, I’m doing work, and when I’m on my personal one, I’m enjoying.

Check out Mr. Brookhouser’s quick and clear explanation. It’s about three minutes:

See how easy? It’s quick to set up, and I think you’ll appreciate the clarity it’ll bring to your workflow. I’m very interested in decreasing multi-tasking and distraction, so I’m thankful I found this tip.

(Yes, this feature works only on Google Chrome. And don’t use it on a shared computer.)

Please let me know if you try it and whether it works for you. 

One of my most popular posts is a negative review of Evernote, the personal digital assistant that many people use to organize their lives.

In the post, I argued that Evernote is unnecessary for teachers because the application discourages hierarchical organization and instead relies on tagging and searching to find files.

I’m sorry. I was wrong.

After more than a year, I recently went back to try Evernote again, and I have changed my mind. Teachers definitely should take a look at the program. Here are a few ways I use Evernote.

1. It’s good for random curriculum ideas. Instead of opening up Google Docs to create a more formal document, Evernote records my little ideas no matter where I am. (The phone app is really easy and helpful.)

2. It’s good for recording in-person conversations with students. If your grading program doesn’t allow for easy note taking, Evernote can easily substitute. Just make sure the student’s name is in the note (preferably the title), and you can have a running record of your conversations.

For phone or text conversations — more common with parents — I prefer Google Voice, where you can add your note directly to the received or placed call.

3. It’s great with a scanner. I’ve found that scanning student work as images or PDFs can reduce your desk clutter. I prefer JPEGs for written or typed work (to maximize Evernote’s sharp OCR technology) and PDFs for artwork.

There’s also plenty of teaching materials that come only in soft copy. When I get something I don’t want to file, I scan it into Evernote, and I’m happy.

4. It’s not hard to create an organizational system. One of my biggest gripes was that Evernote almost wanted you to shun organization. This isn’t true. You can have more than one notebook, or you can set up tags to create a nested system. Because Evernote is addictive, I highly recommend that you think of setting up your organization scheme before you go crazy writing notes and uploading files. Just because the program is supposed to be your “second brain,” I’ve always preferred having just one.

5. You can upload a lot. My free account gives me 60 megabytes a month for free, which isn’t much if you’re uploading a lot of art, but it’s a whole lot if you’re uploading mostly documents.

There you have it. I’m officially an Evernote convert. Feel free to leave comments about how you use Evernote as a teacher.

Yes, I’m one of those Palm Pre lovers. Since school began, I’m noticing that my phone is making me a better teacher, especially with communication. Here’s why.

1. Automatic contact syncing
If you’re a teacher, you know that parents’ and students’ contact information changes all the time. Young people especially are notorious for changing their numbers, whether it’s because they can’t pay their bill or they’re feeling stalked. Of course, when students do get a new number, they never bother to update their teachers.

It feels like I’ve had to become a detective just to keep up with current numbers. This means that whenever I learn about a changed number, I immediately input it, no matter if I’m on my phone or my computer. Palm Pre’s Synergy system makes sure that everything is updated so that I don’t have to worry about having an old number.

2. Perfect with Google Voice
My school doesn’t have voicemail, and I don’t have a landline, so my cellphone is my only number. I want to be accessible to my students and parents, but giving out my personal number seems, well, a bit personal.

So this year, I gave out my Google Voice number. There are so many advantages. I choose whether incoming calls ring or go straight to voicemail. Google transcribes messages into visual voicemail. And when I call from my Palm Pre’s gDial app, it uses my Google Voice number. The Pre has made it much more fun to communicate with students and families without interrupting my personal life.

3. Affordable Unlimited Plan
All this texting and talking to students and parents made me worried that I would surpass my monthly minutes and have to buy a more expensive calling plan.

That was before Sprint announced its new Any Mobile plan, which allows unlimited calling to any cellphone for just $69. The plan includes 450 anytime landline minutes, far more than I’ll need, plus unlimited texting, MMS, and Internet.

4. Fast Unfiltered Internet
I get frustrated by our school’s content filter, which blocks YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. It even blocks Google Images! Yes, it’s time to mount an offensive against this censorship, but until then, I have my phone.

I like to use media in my lessons, but I hate having to wait until getting home to do my planning. Sometimes I have a good idea that gets forgotten just because I can’t access a website. Sure, there are other ways around this problem, but using my phone to get to content has worked well so far.

5. The Coolness Factor
“Ooooh! You got the Pre?” my students call out. I’m suddenly cool. For someone who has taught 13 years, I know that coolness gets you only so far, and really the quality of my teaching is what engages students. But as I age, I notice that being “old cool” is not a bad reputation to have.

My Palm Pre is different enough and cool enough to impress even my iPhoned students. They like the keyboard for texting (why do they text so fast and type so slow?), and of course they enjoy multitasking. I have a hunch that the Pre’s the reason they’re texting me more often with questions about tonight’s homework.

It’s budget crisis time again in California, which means students are cramped and teachers are scurrying around to their various classrooms.

It’s happening to me, too. I’m teaching in three different classrooms this year.

The good news is, There is a computer in each classroom, so I don’t have to lug around my laptop, keep charging its battery, or worry about getting online.

But until this year, I would have stressed out about my files. Like many teachers, I likely would have used a flash drive to supplement Google Docs and to keep all of my stuff updated and organized. And then each day, I would have made sure to sync my files with my computer at home.

No more.

I’ve written about Live Mesh before. I’m very pleased to report that Live Mesh has made my nomadic teaching lifestyle bearable.

No matter where I save something, I know it’ll be on the other computers, ready for me, with no additional anxiety. This has helped me keep track of scanned student work, files from teachers not on Google Docs, and attachments parents send me.

Sure, there are other alternatives — please leave comments to share yours — but for me, Live Mesh has worked well.

Every once in a while, a trendy application comes out that makes me wonder, “Do we really need that?”

First it was Twitter. Now it’s Evernote.

Evernote, hardly a newcomer to online notetaking, lets you save and organize web clippings, photos, and handwritten notes, among other things. It wants to become “your second brain” or “your external brain.”

I don’t want any of my brains to be that disorganized.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a teacher and I can’t see myself walking around the supermarket taking pictures of sake labels, as CEO Phil Libin from Evernote seems to do, given this promo video. (He also likes ninja shirts.) (He also uses Evernote to remember where he put his car.)

Let me be fair: I’m all for organization, and Evernote claims to organize your life. Whatever notes you create — whether by typing them, clipping them from a website, or taking a picture of them — are accessible online from any device, including your mobile phone.

The problem is, the service encourages you not to organize your stuff. Sure, it lets you tag notes and create notebooks. But all their advertising suggests don’t! Instead, save everything all in one place and then search for it later! Evernote is “a tool for lazy slobs,” Phil says. Well, perhaps there are many people out there who can get away with loose organization systems, but teachers in general cannot.

Evernote’s photo + OCR capability makes things even worse, particularly if you have an iPhone. Because it can scan pretty much anything you throw at it, there’s no reason not to start taking pictures of all your student work. Yes, you can do this with Evernote, but that doesn’t mean you should. It becomes anti-organization overkill.

I’ve spent several hours over the last couple months trying to make Evernote work for me. After all, Lifehacker called it “the most popular note-taking application.”  But I just don’t get it. It’s clunky, it’s complicated, it just doesn’t work for me.

Of course, some people would say the same thing about Google Apps and Live Mesh, so I would be happy to hear from teachers who find Evernote helpful. Please let me know how you use it!

It’s the summer, so in addition to relaxing, I’m finally making huge progress on something I call Project Scan.

I just finished my 12th year teaching, so this means I’ve created and accumulated thousands of documents. No matter how organized I am, I’m still left with piles of paper: student records, readings on educational equity, a random lesson plan a colleague gave me. Some of these piles make their way into binders; others stay in file cabinets; still others are on a table in my classroom, ready for me to organize them when I get back in August.

Up until now, I’ve had two strategies to organize this whole mess: (1) Recycle stuff quickly, (2) Get as much of the stuff in electronic form as possible.

I’m good at throwing stuff out. My belief is, If a paper document is important enough, it’ll come back to you. One year I tested this philosophy by never taking handouts at staff meetings, and I have to say, nothing horrible happened.

On the other hand, I haven’t much liked converting documents into electronic form. Before Google Docs, my colleagues would habitually print out their work and then wonder why nobody could find it the following year. Even when they sent an email attachment, it would get lost. When kids are buzzing around you, who wants to click the attachment, download, find the precise folder, and save?

I knew I needed to do something about this, so last year, I splurged ($339 on Amazon) and bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510. I like gadgets, especially when they’re helpful, and so far, this scanner has been wonderful. It can scan stacks of 50 pages at a time, and it’s very quick. Immediately, I resolved to get my piles of paper down to a reasonable size.

Everything was going great until I hit a snag: Where should I save these files? After all, the scanner could connect with only one of my three computers (home computer, school computer, laptop) at a time. It would make sense that everything would go on my school computer. But what if I’m planning a lesson at home and need a document I scanned at school? What if a parent called me in the evening to inquire about her child’s student records? And what if I wanted to scan my bills and personal documents?

For a few months, I lugged the scanner around, coming up with a crazy system whereby all three of my computers housed some of the documents. I found myself holding on to documents waiting to scan them in a different location. That meant organizing papers to get ready to organize them. I got anxious. After all, shouldn’t technology make things simpler?

Enter Live Mesh. I’ve already written about how Live Mesh can organize your Microsoft Office documents. With a high-speed scanner, Live Mesh’s power becomes even more apparent. It means that every piece of paper — a colleague’s hand-written notes, a student’s essay, your electric bill — can disappear.

Better still, saving it on my home computer means saving it to all of my three computers. No matter what machine I’m at, the document is in the same place. When a student asks for something, it’s nice to be able to find it in less than five seconds.

I’m happy to report that I finished up Part 1 of Project Scan today. All of last year’s school documents are safely stored on my Live Mesh. What’s Part 2, you ask? Stay tuned!

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!