The Downside to the Cloud

I love the cloud.  I've had a Dropbox account forever, and continue to find it indispensable.  All my photos are stored on Shutterfly, which makes bragging about my little niece super simple.  The Evernote suite has been indispensable for note taking for the past several years, and when you throw Penultimate into the mix, the ability to type OR write in my cloud-based notebooks?  Awesome.  To add to my wonderfully cloudy sky, I started using Google Drive for everything that I don't have in Dropbox.

I love the cloud.  Or maybe two.

Conferences and Report Cards.
(yes, that's two.)

Because I store all my records, notes, lesson plans, units of study, student work, files for projects and activities, and just about everything else I need to do my job, which includes writing report cards twice a year, and preparing for conferences twice a year...... well, I can't exactly shut off my wi-fi to keep me from being distracted online like I did in the olden days.

Which I desperately need to do.

I spent the entire weekend prepping for conferences.  Or should I say, avoiding prepping for conferences.  It's not that conference prep is all that challenging.  There's a sense of accomplishment in seeing the growth from September until now, and, if growth isn't on the menu, adjusting goals and interventions so that growth is achieved in between now and second quarter.

Getting started, though...... that's what's impossible, thanks, in part, to the cloud.

I spent my weekend playing gin and cribbage with others on Yahoo, window shopping on Zulily, adding to my amazon wish list, building a new Shutterfly book for my niece, researching virtual field trips connected to classroom content, predicting weather patterns, diagnosing my dog's cough, diagnosing my most recent spell of headaches, looking for recipes that I'd actually eat, reading up on favorite movies on IMDB, and shopping for couches.

In other words, since I couldn't turn my internet off, I couldn't do any prepping for conferences.

Darn you cloud computing.......

Guess it's a good thing that I work great under pressure!