Dropbox and DropitTome in the Classroom

One of the big negative effects of being a teacher is the amount of paperwork that a teacher has to deal with and at times, it is hard to be organized with so many papers on top of their desks. However, nowadays, this lack of organization does not need to be a problem anymore. Teachers can now use Dropbox to store and access their files from any device that is connected to the Internet. Although it may seem like Dropbox is for those teachers that are very good with technology, even those less tech-savvy teachers can use this easy tool. If you download the Dropbox client to your device, you can just create, upload and delete files and folders, and as soon as your device connects to the Internet, it will automatically synchronize your updated content into all of your other devices.

Pros:

• Store all of your lesson plans and handouts into a folder that can be private or shared.
• Share a folder with your classroom by having them create an account. Then, they can have access to the content of those folders and also be able to add their own documents to it.
• Students can share research documents and turn in assignments. 
• If you want to show the students what another student did another year, then you can just print the document from Dropbox instead of having to type it, or store it in file cabinets.

Cons:

• You might not want every student to create a Dropbox account.
• You might feel like students can see each other's work and therefore copy off each other.

 

How to solve cons:

• If you do not want every student to create a Dropbox account, you can use a service called DropitTome. This service provides the students with a web address for students to access with a password to upload files to their teacher's Dropbox. This makes the sharing a bit more secure because students cannot see other files within the folder.