Paul Holmes – St Mary’s College

Always take backups of your work – a great free online storage service called dropbox (www.dropbox.com) allows you to upload work and to be able to access it anywhere in the world – great for backing up files.

Usb hard drives and pen drives are a cheap and reliable way to transfer data and work files. Also an ideal way to store digital media such as films, music and photographs.

If you do use usb pendrives and hard drives ensure that all your computers have an up to date virus scanner installed and is up to date.Ensure that you have backups of the work on the pen drive as at some point you will lose or break the drive.Norton and AVG offer brilliant protection and a reasonable price.

Everyday ensure that your recycle bin is emptied

right click on the bin on the desktop and select empty recycle bin

If you right click the hard drive under my computer and select tools there are a number of utilites you can use for monthly housekeeping.

Error Checking – will automatically scan your hard drive and report or fix issues with the drive. Both options for automatically fixing file system errors and scan for bad sectors should be ticked.

Defragmentation – most important tool, will improve the performance and speed of a pc or laptop. This option can take a while on older machines, but if the machine is left over night to “defrag” it performance will improve. Should be done couple of times a year.

Be very wary of opening or viewing emails from people you don’t know or recognize in your inbox

Never forward emails offering advice, special offers or jokes as these often contain malicious code that can capture personal data

Banks, insurance companies and parcel delivery services (Fedex) never email customers – so ignore any messages from these companies as they are scam emails that will try to con you out of money or gain your personal data

At St Mary’s College we recommend that staff don’t befriend current students on Facebook as it puts both parties at risk.

It’s worth explaining to students that comments on Facebook are all logged and can leave a lasting impression on other young people.

If you use Facebook only put on content that you would want your mum or boss to see. The NHS currently warn staff who disclose or write derogatory comments about staff or patients. Once a comment is in the public domain it can never really be deleted or taken back.

If staff go on trips we recommend staff don’t use their own digital camera or mobile phone to take photos or videos, as often these devices will upload photographs to their own pc at home, and could put the staff member at risk.

Cyberbullying http://www.kirklees-ednet.org.uk/subjects/

esafety/cybebullying.htm Free Teaching Support Resourceshttp://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/

accessapps.phpMy Study Bar (Brilliant Free Tool for

students) http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/

mystudybar.php