What are the Top Five Apps to Help Prevent Distractions?

If you work from home, you know how little distractions that take fifteen minutes out of your day can really add up. These can come in the form getting lost surfing the web, playing a quick game of Angry Birds, or listening to your favorite radio show, which are all detrimental whether you're trying to meet a deadline in the office or complete your dissertation. While these are all important aspects of daily living, finding the time to manage your schedule so you can get things done can be hard without the proper guidance. Check out these top five anti-distraction apps that will help you stay on track while you work from home.

1. Stay Focusd

Have you ever told yourself you would take a five-minute break to watch a video on YouTube but still find yourself glued to the monitor watching cat videos an hour later? Stay Focusd addresses this issue by providing you with an easy-to-use blacklist for sites that you find too distracting. You can set the maximum allowed time you want to be able to use these distractive sites in a 24-hour period and after that time expires, the extension will no longer let you browse those sites. It is easy to set up and is seamlessly designed for Google Chrome.

2. Focus Booster

The pomodoro technique has long been thought of as an easy means to give yourself a small break while getting more work done throughout the day. The general idea is to give yourself 55 minutes of work time and five minutes of break time so that you stay focused on the task at hand. Focus Booster is an Adobe Air application that runs on your desktop. You can customize the time to give yourself as much as 15 minutes of break time. Focus Booster also comes in the form of a web app called Focus Booster Live if you don't want to download anything to your desktop.

3. Read It Later

If browsing RSS feeds causes you to lose a lot of time during your day, then Read It Later is the perfect companion to minimizing distractions. If you find a page you want to save until later, you can install one of the many extensions for Firefox, Chrome, or Safari and click a small button to add the page to your Read It Later account. When you have time to read everything you saved throughout the day, simply open the page. Read It Later also offers iOS and Android apps and cleans up unnecessary clutter so you only see the content you want to see.

4. Mr. Number

One of the most annoying things about smartphones is that they can be distracting when you need to get work done. If you want to prevent being distracted by someone constantly calling you or sending you texts, Mr. Number can help. You can block any phone number for any period of time. Mr. Number is available for Android smartphones.

5. Shush! Ringtone Restorer

One of worst things about silencing your phone to avoid distractions is forgetting to turn it back on when it is needed. Shush! solves this problem by allowing you to silence your phone for a specific period of time. Simply use the volume rocker to silence the phone and a window will pop up asking how long you would like to keep the phone silenced. Once that time period has passed, the phone will return to its previous volume level. Shush! is available for Android phones.

Of course, minimizing the distractions you suffer while using your computer depends on your own willpower. Apps like Stay Focusd include methods to keep you from circumventing their settings such as having to type an entire paragraph of text error free, but sticking to your guns and using these tools as a supplement rather than a crutch is always the best way to get things done in a timely manner.

Elaine Hirsch

Integrating Cellphones into Classrooms with Positive Results

I'm happy to announce that the post below is the first guest post on this site. Natalie is clearly enthusiastic about the use technology in the furtherance of education. I hope to see many more insightful posts from her. Natalie's bio is at the end of this post. TT

*

The use of cellphones within the last decade has changed to include more than simply a single mode of communication. As technology continues changing rapidly, educators need to explore the possibilities for using cellphones to enhance learning in online and conventional classrooms, especially on a secondary level. Rather than being a disruption to teaching, cellphones could actually be used by teachers with students as a technology to expand possibilities in the classrooms, if educators are open to changing traditional paradigms.

With the rise of text messaging among all cell phone users (not just young people), educators can recognize the value of this exercise in orthographic knowledge and ability. Some educators regard it as a major distraction, but many want to integrate a popular mode of communication with education and are realizing that text messaging can actually be used to boost learning. Recent studies have shown that texting in the classroom has a positive effect on students' ability to write lengthier and more creative papers in general.

More teachers are harnessing the vast power of texting as an educational tool in a variety of ways. For instance, teachers can have students send in their answers to projected questions for quizzes or discussion as text messages. This simple strategy turns students' phones into a simple and flexible classroom feedback system. Software used to receive text messages from students collects responses and may even give teachers options for managing and displaying collected data.

Student responses are then more easily gathered together and made accessible both to teachers and students themselves. This type of student input can be made anonymous, which can encourage students who might not otherwise participate to do so. By the same token, tracking specific students' responses gives teachers a clear view of who's struggling with comprehension and needs additional help, or who's getting ahead with the material and needs extra challenge.

This sort of constructive use of mobile technology can and should be used in all subject areas as a dynamic tool for learning. Taking advantage of technology students already have and will be using one way or another really is one of the most valuable means of harnessing that technology for educational ends. Whether teachers like it or not, technology is the future of schooling on all levels.

Indeed, cell phone use in the classroom isn't just limited to secondary schools: elementary teachers and students are also finding similar uses. For example, texting has led to the development of a new literary form known as the "cell phone novel." This type of literature is written entirely using text lingo, such as "Ur" instead of "you're." The novels are written in the form of a text message conversation between any number of interlocutors, include minimal punctuation, and are completely open to the shorthand that characterizes text messages. Young students can use this creative and entertaining form of writing to learn narrative structure and even grammatical mechanics (albeit without the usual focus on spelling and punctuation) much more effectively than they would with the rote drills usually reserved for such topics.

It may become increasingly important to take once distracting technologies like cell phones and harness their power for the benefit of the classroom. The transition may be fraught with bumps in the road, and the boundaries of technology use clearly drawn. Education needs to embrace technology, not simply to keep up with a new generation but to actually make good the promise technology holds for learning. Because of its prevalence and flexibility, many educators already advocate the use of cell phone technology in the classroom. Students need to benefit from the increased learning that will occur with well-considered use of technology, and feel validated for utilizing skills they are already confident with. Using cell phones in class can help both educators and students streamline the learning process and have a readily available tool for increasing class cooperation and participation.

Bio:

Natalie Hunter grew up wanting to be a teacher, and is addicted to learning and research. As a result she is grateful for the invention of the internet because it allows her to spend some time outside, rather than just poring through books in a library. She is fascinated by the different methodologies for education at large today, and particularly by the advent of online education. She also loves to travel and learn via interaction with other people and cultures.