Journal 7

This week I took the opportunity to get to know my Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/home#!/home)  a little better. 

Rationale:

I just started using this free file-sharing site in January at the suggestion of one of my colleagues, and so far I’ve found it helpful and convenient for my personal use.  However, I’ve never used Dropbox with my students, and before I do so, I should become more of an expert on its features than I currently am.

Pros:

It’s easy and free!  It is also a tool that makes things easier, not more complicated.  That’s because I don’t have to worry about emailing attachments or keeping my flashdrive with me all the time.  All I had to do was make an account and then copy the files I want to access anywhere into my Dropbox folder.   Now on my work and home computers there is a Dropbox icon on my startup menu, and I can get to any file I need.   The best part is that now I don’t have to worry about accidentally using the wrong version of a document that I updated at home but not at school.  I’m using the same document everywhere!

Another thing that makes it easy to used (but I just discovered it in making this blog post) is that there is a tour that new users can take that illuminates the different features.

 “Invite your friends, family and teammates to any folder in your Dropbox, and it'll be as if you saved that folder straight to their computers.”

Cons-

There is limited space on the free account. (But turn that in to a “pro” because  you can earn free space by sharing with friends or following on Facebook or Twitter.) Everyone starts with 500MG, but just by taking the tour and sharing with coworkers, I am up to 2.75GB.

I wish that the online tour was a little more detailed.  There weren’t many things in it that I couldn’t figure out without the tool.  What I still want to know would be the specifics on how to share folders with my students so that they can have full access to some files but read-only access to others, or if

that’s even possible.

Every once in a while, my school’s network doesn’t work very well.  If the file I need is only on Dropbox and not on a hard drive or flash drive, I will be out of luck.  So backing up with some portable storage every so often is probably still a smart idea.

Today’s exploration:

In my attempt to move beyond the basics, I took the short web tour (see “Cons” above), and then rummaged around on the “Sharing” page.  That page was pretty helpful as it explained with screen shots how to share your folders with other Dropbox users.  It also had some hyperlinks to advanced issues should those problems ever arise. 

The only thing I still don’t know is if students can have “read-only” access or not.  Since it’s not mentioned anywhere, I’ll assume that they don’t.  Just to double check, I also looked through the “Privacy” page, to see if there were separate privacy settings for individual files, like there are on Google docs and our network’s shared drive, but that wasn’t an option I saw.

I would use this tool with students (probably high school level) if I were coteaching a with a classroom teacher and the students had to complete any type of group work.  This tool would allow students to share copies of papers with each other and edit them, while eliminating some of the troubles that usually come with group projects like students losing the group’s flash drive.  I could also share instructional documents with the students.

This tool would help students gain digital literacy as it is an easily accessible online tool.  It would help encourage higher-order thinking skills and decision making that comes with truly collaborative group work.  Rather than the burden of typing or coordinating being on one or two students, they could all easily work together.