Coming back to life after a hard drive crash has been yet another painful experience on my technology road. That is not to say that I knew it could happen, odds were for it happening, yes, it has happened to me before...I am already over the files I lost because I didn't do a recent back up...I regret the email I may never reply to because, yes, all that is gone....but the one thing I am thankful for losing are all my favorite URLs that were stored in Internet Explorer!

You don't believe me...it is true because I now FURL instead of using boomarks for favorites that are stuck in a browser on a single computer. FURL has made it possible for me to share all of my web resources with everyone online. You can visit my FURLed sites.
I have set up categories to contain my urls and can determine if the urls are private, only for my viewing, or public online viewing. It is so easy to FURL new urls with the toolbar button that is linked in my favorite browser. When I find a url that I want to archive, all I do is click the FURL toolbar in my browser . I record a short description for my FURLed url and select the category I would like it referenced in. It is that simple for me to make my urls available to you! Oh, and did I mention that this is FREE!!!!

Now teachers, think of the possibilities!
1. You could publish links for students to activate their prior knowledge about content .

2. Share classroom resources for students and parents.

3. Create a classroom FURL site where students can add resources pertaining to a topic of study.

4. You could use FURL links for supporting your differentiated student tasks with varied level of text.

5. Collaborate with your grade level teaching team to find web resources for content area study so that everyone can contribute and reap the benefits of teamwork!

6. Students are using this outside the classroom:)

7. Create links to virtual manipulatives and other learning tools for students easy access!

8. Try out FURLing and email me with other ideas of how teachers are using FURL for classroom management and student learning activities. I will post them here!!

By the way----check out my Virtual Tools and Manipulatives category to find some useful online tools for students!

Well, the inevitable happened with technology...my hard drive crashed! Due to an interruption with my blog software there is a link now to my previous blogs called Past Blog Topics in my Links Bar on the right.

But about the CRASH! There were no symptoms that I could detect. I woke up after a late night of preparing for training sessions and the dreaded "can't find the operating system" error!! All my previous month's work--GONE! Yes, I do not always practice what I preach...my last file backup was 29 days ago!!! But remember I said THERE WERE NO SYMPTOMS!

But, come to find out that was not totally true, there was a clicking of the hard drive I hadn't noticed, but one had to put an ear right by the drive to hear it!

So for all those out there that work from a non-networked server environment like a home or home office and need to backup on a shoestring budget, I offer some sage advice:

1) You have a CD burner, right?! Well use it! Any time you create files, have email or a list of favorites that you could not bear to lose, burn to a CDRW to save your files. I now have a stack! It is the quickest way to backup data but you have to remember to do so!

2) Leave your email on your ISP's server for a period of time before they are deleted, if possible. That way they will still be available after something happens to your computer.

3) Consider a web-based mail account like G-Mail, Hotmail, etc.

4) Use Furl to keep track of your archives of favorites or bookmarks of urls. The pain about backing up your files is that you have to remember more than just dragging a folder to a CDRW. Remembering to export your favorites/bookmarks is a hassle! A better solution may be to have a web-based solution for your favorite urls.

5) Label the disks you burn so that you don't have to go through everyone to find the files you are looking for when you restore to another machine. (Sounds simple right, but it seems that one is always in a hurry when doing a backup!)

6) Use an inexpensive flash/thumb drive to save your files. Mine ofcourse would need to be over 2 gigs for all my data.

7) And ofcourse, tell your friends about your mishap, so that it might jog them into thinking it may happen to them!! Just one week after my crash, my friend Meg also lost her hard drive!

8) Friends---heed the advice of colleagues when they tell you their system crashed and do something with your files before it happens to you!