Over 30 School Tools

For thirty somethings that are in school trying to add to their resume and move to higher income brackets going for more schooling is the answer for many.  Making the school experience successful  for an adult with obligations such as work, house duties, a spouce and children is a hard thing to do.  As I finally received my degree at 35 , I took a hard look at what it took now, versus what it would take someone fresh out of high school.  There is a significant difference, so the approach that adding school to a busy adult's life, needs to be handled in a very special way.  I will detail some of the tools that I used to manage my school life in a way that I could still take care of some of my home duties.

The first would be a Phablet (phone /tablet) .  Not an iPhone not a regular smartphone. When the girls need to get to dance , the boy needs to get to football practice and the wife's van needs servicing, time is a premium. The key to this is to use google docs so that you do your homework where ever you are. Having a   large phone can  a parent it is hard to nail down open windows of time during the week.  The key is to be able to work on tasks in those stolen moments.  Some examples of stolen moments:

- Waiting for kids to get out of extra coricular activities like dance or sports.
- Waiting in the grocery checkout line.
- In the bathroom (yep). 
- Pretty much any time that you would normally play candy crush saga, replace it with homework.

The next thing that I would suggest is to buy a tablet.  A tablet can be very useful as you can use it for reading most text books and access your schools website.  The benefit I have found over a laptop is the speed of access.  Since accessing your tablet is no different than waking your phone from sleep,  you can get to work quickly.

Finally I would purchase evernote premium.  Evernote is a note program that becomes your hub for all of our information.  I am going to go more into this in later blogs, but the true benefit of the software is the flexibility of it. This makes managing the information overload that comes with being in your 30s and in school more manageable. 

 
 

Use Cloudii to Upload Files to the Cloud

As great as the Galaxy Note is there had always been a small issue that I have had with them.   The lack of ability to back up S Note.  The S Note software becomes much more valuable when you feel safe that the data that you place in it will not be lost.  Cloudii is a cloud service that allows you access to your many cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Box.net, and DropBox.

The way that Cloudii is different is that it allows you to back up files from your phone from any folder to any folder in the cloud.  The software also allows you to back up automatically.  This is great for the S Note users as you now can rest assured that you important notes are recoverable. 

Resources:

Link to Cloudii in the Play Store 

Dropbox , Never Lose a Document Again

If you use a computer you will get into a situation that you will need Dropbox. There is nothing more stressful than having a presentation that you worked on all night, to wake up and your computer wont boot up!  Or what about the scenario when the print out of your term paper has gotten damaged by rain, and you are miles away from where your files are on your computer?  The less effective way had been to email things to yourself, which would make that document available for you anywhere.  The more clean and effective way to get this done is to use Dropbox.

Dropbox has gotten me out of way too many sticky situations for me to list.  The way that it works is it creates a folder on your computer that is synced with your Dropbox Internet account.  What ever you place in the folder is then accessible not only on your Internet Dropbox web account, but on any computer that you are using the Dropbox folder in.  To make this clearer:  Say you have a term paper that you save on your computer as termpaper.doc in your Dropbox folder on your computer.  That same document will be saved on your dropbox.com web site and on your second computer that also has the Dropbox program on it.  Also any changes made to the termpaper.doc will reflect on the web and the other computer instantly.

This is one of those must have apps for any busy person!

Resources:

Dropbox Website   
Dropbox Android App