How Productive are Productivity Tools for Educators?

Here is an example of a few productivity tools for up and coming educators:

TinyURL- This application allows a teacher to crop the typical URL, making it into a much shorter, more manageable one. This would make a handy tool for teachers when having students work on a computer assignment either from home or at school. Often students will enter in the wrong letters, numbers and symbols creating confusion on why they can't get to the webpage they are supposed to be working on. This tool will make the accessibility for students and staff much more manageable.

Drop Box- Drop box is a wonderful application, not just for the teachers, but also the students. As a student, I always feel like I have documents and homework assignments in way too many places. Although one can always use a USB drive or e-mail themselves an attachment of the assignment, it becomes a huge pain! I remember one time I was inputing data for my job and I needed to finish it at home. I sent myself an e-mail attachment with the document, but I forgot that I had e-mailed it and didn't save it to my USB drive. I ended up inputing all the data again simply because I forgot where I had stored it. Drop box is a tool that would help me as a teacher organize my thousands of documents. It also is a tool I would want to teach my students to use. I think this would be helpful for them in their future schooling endeavors.

Teamviewer- Teamviewer is by far my favorite productivity tool right now. As a teacher, it would allow me to get on to student's computer to monitor their progress on assignments, help navigate them to appropriate information and lead the students through various processes while working from my computer. For the past five years I have been an assistant in special education classes. One of the hardest parts of my job is being able to access each of the students in order to give them the help that they need. By using Teamviewer it would allow me to help each student quicker and more efficiently.

Overall, these tools would be very useful while working within a classroom. The only downfall I see presenting itself is having accessibility to the necessary technology (computers, internet, applications, etc.) I can honestly say, I had no clue these applications existed until now. One of the most important parts of technology, and the most amazing thing about it, is that you have the ability to adapt these tools to fit your classroom, your students, and your teaching style. As we are going through this course, I am quickly learning my own teaching preferences and where all this "high-tech" stuff will come into play throughout my teaching career.