Thing #18

My method is a thing of the past. In college, before jump drives were huge, so they were way overpriced for a college kid living on Ramen Noodles, I didn't trust disks - they needed to be "reformatted" just as soon as you were done with your document. I didn't have a printer at home. Ink required money. I was a member of the Honor's Lab, so I could print for free. Plus, it was in the Humanities building, and I was a history major. The library was across campus. Easy cheesey. I developed a system for my papers. I would work on my paper at home. Email it to myself. Open it in the Honor's Lab. Work on it. Email the new one to myself. Open it at home. Work on it. Save the changes. Get confused because I had multiple docs with the same or very similar names. Email it back to myself. Print it the next day in the Honor's Lab for free. I teach my students the same method, with some improvements to prevent the confusion. They like it because they don't have printers either.

This would have saved all that emailing. Just put it in Google Docs and make changes where ever you go! This is so neat. The downside - and its a pretty big downside - is the size limit. For a word document, the size is 500kb. That's only 25 pages or so. Many of my documents are projects for school or work that is a compilation of information or a research project with links and stuff. Links and formatting add to the kb real fast, so my average size of a doc is well over the 500kb max. But... for my students, this would be beautiful. They could work on something BCIS, where the teachers encourage typing their essays for English to practice their typing skills, pull it up in my room for peer editing, then take it to the library to print, all without spending money on disks, jump drives, or anything except the 20 cents to print. Beautiful.