This week consisted of one of my most monstrous of projects. I use a Microsoft program called Photo Story where students narrate pictures of their family members in order to practice their vocabulary and grammar. We spend several days in front of computers in the computer lab. Students spend days lining up their photos and recording their voice as they describe the ages, likes and dislikes and give descriptions of their family members. Then, render them into videos.
However, when students participate in a project such as this, the conundrum occurs when it is time to submit their work. In the past, our school had a large amount of space tied to their student ID. While it was a bit tedious, in order to grade the projects, I would find their folder on our shared drive and find their project. This meant that I had to be at school on the network. This school year, in order to save server space, the district did away with the "Student Docs". At first, it sent me into a panic, how in the world am I going to grade 70 projects if they can't save them on our shared drive? No way was I going to accept a flash drive from each student. Can you imagine the mess? This problem ended up being a blessing in disguise. It forced me to investigate the many different ways of submitting to the cloud.
Our school does not have a Classroom Management System for each teacher. Something like Blackboard or Moodle offer very easy ways for students to submit electronic assignments, but I don't have those at my fingertips and I can't afford to buy them. Two other free options are Schoology or Edmodo. My students use Edmodo on a regular basis. Edmodo offers up to 100MB in size for each student submission. That was plenty of space for these projects. But, in order for the students to turn it in, there is a "process" that they had to follow. I wanted to avoid the issue of "I can't remember my log in" or "How do I submit to an assignment". While Edmodo offers what I needed, it was too labor intensive. I wanted something easier.
At last, after a weekend of searching, my husband came across "Drop It To Me". This ended up being the answer to this frustrating problem. With Drop It To Me, I set up an account so that when students submit their assignment to me, it goes into a Dropbox folder on my Dropbox account. Teachers, if you don't have a Dropbox account, you need one. My account has 14 GB of space because I send students invites in order to expand my available space. (Smart, huh!) I put a link unto my website, (Which isn't even necessary because the URL for Drop It To Me is very simple.) and my students uploaded their projects. Important Note: I had my students save as "classperiod_lastname" For example, my file, if I were in 5th hour, would be 5_Burton.wmv--for a Photo Story movie. Since I had students save this way, their files appeared in class order alphabetically. Awesome!! I could walk around with my IPad, open the Dropbox app and show students immediately that I had received their project. Double Awesome!! It is important to note that there is a file size limit of 75MB, but for these projects that was plenty of space.
Here is a link to the instructions that I gave my students:
Submission Instructions with Screen Shoots
Now, I need to sit down and grade some projects! Which I can do with my Ipad on my couch, thanks to Dropbox!
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