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Setting up and using Dropbox

07:40 JEcomputing 0 Comments Category : , , ,


One of the things that I’m often asked asked by staff at my school is how to print off pupil's work, from the iPad. Whilst there are many ways of doing this, (for example, emailing the work to the teacher), I have tried to encourage teachers and pupils to use cloud based storage to do this. There are different ways of doing this, with the two most popular services being Google Drive and Dropbox. See this link for a comparison between four main iCloud services. In my school, I have linked all iPads and PCs (including teacher laptops) to a school Dropbox account. This means that pupils can share the work that they have produced on the iPad to their class Dropbox folder. This can then be printed out from either the teacher’s laptop or from the school PCs/Laptops. See this video that I made for staff to help them with setting up and using Dropbox (sorry about the background noise - it was a particular loud dinner time outside)!
     
      

Other uses of Dropbox

As well as printing out, pupils can also save their work to their class folders (or individual folders if these have been set up),so that others can view them. For example, last year pupils from my class made some excellent books on the Tudors, using the fabulous Book Creator app. Rather than sharing directly into the iBook store, pupils first saved to their Dropbox folders first, so that they could read each others book from their iPad. This saved having to swap iPads continuously with each other in order to view them.

A workflow system using Dropbox

image: http://mattdubois.com/advantages-of-online-file-storage/
Another great use of using Dropbox, is that you can share useful documents that you want pupils to access for a particular lesson (e.g. a video that they might then edit in iMovie or images from a school trip that they then might use to make a poster or photo story using an app such as Splice). Pupils  simply go to the appropriate folder in Dropbox and save their video or image to the camera roll. Within the app that they are working, they can then link to their camera roll and access their images/videos. If it’s a text based document (e.g. a worksheet), pupils could save it to an app such as Notability, which will enable them to write on it. You could then even ask them to save their completed worksheet to their Dropbox folder, open their worksheet in Notability yourself and mark it (before then sharing it back to Dropbox folders for them to view)! A complete lesson without a pencil or piece of paper in sight!

If you would like any support in setting up a workflow model using a cloud based service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, please don't hesitate to contact me




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