morning coffee break: finals survival day one.

I got the idea for this post last night while talking to my mom on the phone.  When in the midst of final papers, study guides, and creating materials, it is imperative to take advantage of the best resources out there to help you do well.  And this is one of them; I am doing a Finals Week survival guide of morning coffee break ideas, so here's day one!

Google Drive, in my opinion, is one of the best resources on the internet for college students.  A combination of Microsoft Word, Power Point, and Excel, it is the one place where you can store up to 15GB of data on the internet password protected by your Gmail account.  It is where I take notes for my psychology class because we do outlines and I can literally just type on them without having to worry about saving because the system saves everything for you every 5 seconds.  Another perk-you can access your Google Drive from any computer in the world, any mobile device, or anywhere really that you have internet.  I loved this option especially yesterday when I could only get a seat in the library at a PC computer station instead of a private cubicle; it meant I got to look at a bigger screen and actually do work on two computers at once!  But the perk that I love best is the sharing option.  When you make a Google Doc, you can choose to make the document private, password protected, or group invited.  We used a Google Doc last semester for a group paper, and it was great because you could see everyone actively typing their material because there are multiple colored cursors on the screen.  There is also a chat option for you to talk with group members about what you are working on as you do it.  Finally, what I love best is that once you finish a Google Doc, you can download it right to your computer and save it as whatever attachment you like.  I tend to save mine as word documents, do a few edits on them (in Google you can't do certain header and footer styles that teachers require for papers and sometimes the spacing gets a little funky) before printing them or submitting them online.  Then what's nice is you have everything you need in two places so there is never any chance of you losing it!

So my advice?  Get Google Drive, or at least try it out.  It's free, it's useful, and the best group project program/time saver ever.  Oh, and did I mention that it's FREE?