The world is moving to the cloud. With cloud-computing programs like DropBox, Apple’s iCloud, and Google Drive, more and more individuals and businesses find that moving to a cloud service can solve several technological hurdles.

From a cost or hardware perspective, cloud services are a great aide to businesses. With these tools, companies no longer need to buy individual and expensive servers to store all of their important files and data.

Package plans from cloud services offer as much storage as a business could need, leaving your company without having to worry about server maintenance or hardware malfunctions. And with no in-office servers to maintain, you save money by not needing to hire out specialists when an issue arises.

Everyone in your office can connect easily to the cloud system of your company’s choice. Usually the only thing required is Internet access and logging in to the company account. No need to learn any complicated server setup to find the documents they need.

Cloud computing has walked hand in hand with an increase in business collaboration. Employees can access files from anywhere, more than one employee can access the server and file at the same time. Several cloud services, such as Google Drive, allows multiple people to work on a single file at the same time.

The days of a single person working on a document, saving it, emailing or printing it off for the next person to work on, can be safely put to rest. Now, all members of a project can access the individual files at the same time, working collaboratively in order to finish their tasks quickly and more efficiently. And without having to worry about opening or working on an outdated version of the document.

It’s not hard to have an unproductive meeting. Bad meetings cause employees and managers alike frustration and anxiety, and the longer these inefficient meetings drone on, the longer your team is unable to get back to work and making progress on their projects.

If you want to frustrate your employees and hold long, agonizing meetings, be sure to follow these tips:

Learn how to use complicated meeting technology right at the start of the meeting.

If the collaboration technology you use for your meeting is too easy to use, or too user-friendly, it won’t take as long to get set up right before a meeting. So instead of starting on time, you’ll need to take a few minutes not talking about the purpose of the meeting to get everything configured and learn how to interact with your collaboration tools.

Don’t have a set agenda, just ramble on.

Outlines for a meeting’s agenda help keep a team too on track to end a meeting on time. Having an agenda make the whole conversation more focused and engaged. It’s better to just ramble on with your train of thought than keep yourself focused and on task during the whole meeting by having a reminder of the meeting’s goals.

Review previous conversations and add nothing new.

To have a bad meeting, it’s best to take a while to get to the point of your meeting. Reading over the last meeting’s notes is a great way to slow down the momentum of your team. That way they can hear what items are still on their to-do list that they could be doing right now instead of sitting in a meeting. If you don’t add any follow ups or additions to these notes, your team will feel like you’ve had a meeting just to remind people of what your last meeting was about.

Don’t make any decisions during the meeting.

A good meeting is all about discussing your options, gathering information and coming up with a solution or game plan. So to have a bad meeting, make sure that you never walk away with a clear sense of what you will be doing next. Your team won’t be sure how to quickly proceed with your plans until either your next email or meeting.

Good meetings are important to your organization. Don’t make the same mistakes that breed bad meetings. Plan ahead to save time, and use technology that is easy and quick to pick up do you can start on time.

Meetings help your team get on the same foot and figure out your goals. But don’t keep them too long, since it’s only when the meeting is done that your organization can start working to meet those goals.

Keeping strong employees around is an integral part of your business. By increasing your employee retention, you can spend less time and costs training to get new employees up to speed. Your business runs more efficiently when everyone involved fully understands how each piece of the puzzle works.

While some factors employees list for quitting are beyond an employer’s control, such as moving to follow a spouse, there are several ways that increasing the level of collaboration inside of your office can help improve employee morale.

We took a look at some of the most common reasons employees quit and found ways that you can utilize state-of-the-art technology to keep your best employees happy and satisfied with their work.

Failure to engage their employee’s creativity

Employees want to be intellectually and creatively challenged. If they feel like they are bored or left unchallenged by their work, or have a lot of busy work, it might start them looking elsewhere for a stronger challenge.

Adding new technology to your office may help engage their curiosity again. Giving your employees a new tool that will help them get their more tedious tasks out of the way quicker, and on to more challenging tasks will keep them more intellectually stimulated.

Feeling like their contributions are not welcome or are not appreciated

Your office is a team. When a member of the team feels like they are not contributing anything to your goals or that their feedback is not valued, they themselves do not feel like a valuable asset to the team.

Including more collaborative equipment in your meetings can be a solid way to highlight the importance of your employee’s voices. Let them annotate and give concerns, suggestions and feedback in real time. And be sure to write on a screen or recording the meeting to show that you are listening to their input.

Time not valued or respected

Holding more efficient meetings, or even allowing employees to video conference in, can help reduce the time your employees spend sitting in a meeting room and not actively working towards finishing their list of day to day duties.

Instead of being forced to work overtime, or adjust their family or business travel schedules to make sure that they are in the office at meeting time, incorporate video conferencing and allow them a bit more room to breathe and not rush around.

More collaborative technology may not solve all of the reasons a good employee may choose to leave, but integrating more interactive technology can be a step in the right direction to reduce your turnover rate.

One of the best features to come from a more collaborative workspace is video conferencing. With more interactive technology and better broadband services, video conferences became the foremost way to include other members of your team in your meetings, especially when not everyone is able to be in the same physical location.

Integrating video conferencing into your regularly scheduled meetings comes with many benefits. Here are some ways the it can help improve your business.

Reduced travel costs

The first benefit is the most obvious. If you can video conference into your meeting, you do not have to worry about additional expenses that team members, who regularly are not inside your normal office, whether they work from home or frequently travel for business, might accrue traveling to be a part of your meeting in person.

Prevents meeting delays

Someone running behind from a previous appointment who won’t be able to get to the conference room in time? No need to wait for them to arrive, go ahead and just conference them into the meeting from afar. Keeping your meetings starting and stopping on time are integral to your productivity.

Bring in more experts and trainers

When you need an expert’s opinion on a topic or need to hold staff training on a specialized subject, video conferencing allows you to bring in additional people to help your team without worrying about traveling expenses. Video also allows your team to visually follow what an expert or trainer might teach, instead of just listening, especially when the training is more hands-on.

Quicker decisions

When you are able to pool every member of your team into a single conference call, you no longer have to wait until you talk to the people who couldn’t make it. With everyone able to converse, no matter their physical location, your team can make those final decisions faster.

Expand your customer service opportunities

Video conferencing does not just benefit meetings; it can also greatly benefit your success with your clients. Call in to walk your customers through any support assistance they might require. Or give demonstrations over the video conference on how your product works and what it can be used for. That extra push to provide better service improves your company’s brand and reputation all across the board.

Small business owners face lots of everyday obstacles in order to compete in today’s market.  As technology grows and expands into deeper integration with business, small business owners meet new challenges that technology continues to produce.

But no need to throw in the towel yet. We’ve compiled a few of the biggest problems technology can cause for a small business, and how to overcome them.

Problem: Lack of Information Technology Knowledge/Help

New technology may seem complex and confusing. Many small business owners have little experience with technology and can easily feel overwhelmed trying to sort through all of their options and going down a list of what items may be necessary to install to get their business up and running.

Solution: Use Search Engines to Your Advantage

While researching your options takes time, search engines like Google and Bing are your best and cheapest alternative to hiring an IT company to handle setting everything up for you. With a few moments of research using appropriate keywords, you can easily find the answers to any questions or issues you might have or run into.

Problem: Unable to Scale IT Needs as the Company Grows

After your business takes off, your website or internal storage may no longer be sufficient to handle your needs. As you hire new hands, you may not have the right services available to add new email addresses for your employees or email storage left.

Solution: Prepare Ahead of Time

Plan ahead as best as you can. If you only need 3 email addresses right now, but your service provider offers a choice to more, choose more. Choose a website provider whose servers can handle a lot of visitors at once and shows a willingness to adopt new website tricks. Planning and preparing for your business’ success is not just a good mindset to stay in, but a good technology strategy.

Problem: Training New Employees on Your Technology

If your CRM, email, or internal databases use a confusing, or not as user-friendly system or interface, it can be hard to get new employees up to speed quickly. Instead of taking care of other business matters, small business owners might end up spending more time than they’d like answering technology questions.

Solution: Collect and Record All How-To Information

In your research, make sure that you evaluate how helpful and useful a product’s support system is. The more helpful a product’s support is, the easier it will be to turn to them for advanced help. Keep a collection of all help, support and how-to information you might have been provided

Problem: High Cost of Technology

Technology is expensive. All the small costs add up over time, and most technology needed to keep your business running require monthly or yearly subscriptions. If your software or hardware is proprietary, it can limit your ability to find cheaper alternative solutions.

Solution: Research and Invest Wisely

Research is once again your friend. Before you put money down, be sure to check on how effective a product is or that it will not cause more headaches than it will fix. Shopping around also can help you find the harder to find at first glance, but more affordable, alternative. Be wary to not buy everything you think might be helpful or just looks impressive. If cost is a concern, invest only in what is most important to your business’ long term goals.

The classroom is ever-changing. As time and technology slowly tweaks the way today’s students learn and adapt to new information, the best teachers are the ones who think outside of the box.

Innovative educators constantly adapt old learning strategies and lesson plans into something modern students can learn from and grow.

Educational technology is a great way that you can spice up your classroom, but it is not the only way. We found 10 things that innovative teachers do that fuel their student’s success.

1. Prioritize what is most important to your student’s future.

Innovation requires a level of honesty with yourself, especially on your goals and what is realistically possible. If you prioritize teaching the skills and lessons that will be the best for your students, you’ll worry less about trying to get everything into your lesson plans and focus more on the topics your students are more invested in.

2. Teach your students to find reliable sources.

The old school library has become outdated. Now, knowledge and information are at your students’ fingertips with search engines. Learn the ins and outs of online searches and teach your students how to effectively find reliable, useful resources during their online sources.

3. Know what tech and apps are out there – and what they are best used for

New educational apps can be exciting. But make sure that the time it takes to learn a whole new app and system is worth the end result. Avoid using new apps just because they are new and look cool. Make sure that your students learn something throughout the whole process from start to finish.

4. Be flexible but keep your high expectations

Students like a challenge. When a task is too easy, they will grow bored and start tuning you out. Having high expectations for your students’ abilities lets you keep them constantly challenging themselves to grow. But avoid the trap of becoming inflexible. Bend where you need to, and only as far as you need to.

5. Don’t let restrictive standards be an excuse for less engaging lesson plans.

Rules are rules but standards can be more like guidelines for your lesson plans. Avoid creating lesson plans limited by administrative standards. Take those initial guidelines and use them as your starting point in your lesson planning. Look at your topics from all angles to find ways you can branch off from the normal lessons and create a plan that will continue to engage your students.

6. Don’t be afraid of failure.

Ultimately, innovation is about failure. Educators, as well as students, learn more from failing than they do from always getting things right the first time. Innovators take risks, and when something doesn’t work as expected, they tweak their plans and lessons as they go along. Don’t be so afraid that a lesson has a chance to not go as planned that you refuse to try something new. Your students are worth the risk.

The last thing you want your students to do is stop paying attention in class. Even the dullest subject or most information packed lecture can be spruced up by adding an interactive element to your lesson.

Replacing your chalkboard or whiteboard with a large, interactive display may be the best tool in your arsenal. Here are some creative ways that you to quickly bring your students’ attention back up to speed.

1. Interactivity breaks up the traditional lecture

Lectures are useful when you have a lot of material to cover, but we understand that temptation to start dozing off. Today’s students respond better and retain more when that information is broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

By inserting moments for your students to come up and point out or interact directly with the board, it keeps the pace of your lesson moving along nicely, giving your students time to process what you have talked about so far, and getting them involved and moving again before going back to new information.

2. New technology peaks student interest

New gadgets usually prompt a sense of curiosity and interest, which can keep your students more involved in your lecture as they watch and learn not only the information you are giving them, but how you are using the tools on hand.

More visual elements that come with the latest educational technology are also designed to appeal to different learning types. Students who are more visual or hands on learners will gain a great deal more from a more interactive classroom.

3. Real time responses keep students more engaged

Your students can fill in and respond to changes on the interactive display in real time. No need to slow down and wait for students to write their answers down and pass in their worksheets in as orderly as possible.

Have them come up and present their answers and write out their answers or calculations on the screen. Their marks and annotations show up instantly and for the whole class to see. This way, the entire class can also work together to produce the right answers, fostering discussion.