Dropbox
On Saturday my daughter spilled an entire glass of sweet tea on my laptop, causing it to turn off and it has not restarted (stifled sob). As an online student and an online instructor you can imagine my close proximity to nervous breakdown. It has dried, with lovely sugar crystal crunchiness, and has a date with an Apple genius tomorrow evening who will no doubt tell me it is wrecked. I am hopeful that the hard drive will be salvageable; first world problems. No laptop. I have had to download a few apps to my iPad so that I can attend my classes via video conferencing, and I am typing this blog on the touch screen of that same tool. I was mid-research on a literature review dealing with, you guessed it, studies involving iPads in education when this occurred, and thanks to some foresight, and an app called Dropbox I have pdf copies of all of the articles I found in a nice tidy folder that I can access from my iPad, iPhone, and from my computer (sniff). I also have all of the syllabi, articles, and written assignments from two years of Phd coursework, as well as a variety of shared folders with friends, family, and colleagues.
So, how is this a useful tool for educators? Um, let me count the bajillion ways. If your students have Internet access at any point during the day, you can create shared folders to store class assignments, photos, videos, you name it. These could be organized by chapter, by unit, by topic, etc. if you are lucky enough to have some kind of mobile technology in the classroom (smart phones or tablets) then dropbox has an app for that device. If you have a classroom set of these devices they could all be synced to have the same content in their dropboxes. However, this is really an app that is helping to shape the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement. Unlike the Amazon, Google, or Apple renditions of cloud storage and sharing, this is accessible from any device under the sun. If your students have Internet access at home, Dropbox could facilitate collaborative learning by housing group assignments and folders, not unlike a wiki or a google doc (stay tuned for more on these). Assignments could be posted and completed here. Each student could have their own folder where they complete assignments. Best part: it's free and you can grow your storage space by inviting others to join.
As a graduate student I have fully adopted a paperless lifestyle. No more huge files of articles I've read that inevitably get stepped or spilled on (shedding a few tears). I have my iPad and my Dropbox. Hundreds of articles in nice neat folders, labeled and everything. Moving documents between folders is super easy, and this week sans laptop has shown me that I can access my library and EBSCO from the iPad and save articles directly to the Dropbox app.
There might be a slight learning curve for those who have never experienced cloud storage, but there are lovely tutorials to help you get started: https://www.dropbox.com/tour. This one little app has seriously made research, writing, and collaboration so much more efficient and streamlined.
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