Try DROPitTOme to Collect Assignments Online

When Drop.io announced that they had sold out to Facebook and would be shutting down effective on December 15th, I immediately shared that news with you. One of the services offered by Drop.io that I'm really going to miss is their hidden upload tool which allowed you to have others submit files to your drop. For the last couple of years I used Drop.io's hidden uploader to collect assignments from students. Since Drop.io's shut down announcement I've looked for a replacement to their hidden uploader and I think I've found a good one. Actually, I didn't find it it was recommended by Bill Ferreirae in a comment he posted.

DROPitTOme is a free service that works with Drop Box to allow people to upload files to your Drop Box account without giving them access to the contents of your Drop Box account. For those not familiar with Drop Box it is a service that provides 2GB of free online file storage (by the way, that's way more than the 100mb Drop.io offered). You can access your Drop Box from any computer and most mobile devices. You can also sync it across multiple computers.  Learn more about Drop Box in the video below.



DROPitTOme works by synchronizing with your Drop Box account. After connecting the two services DROPitTOme provides a url that you can give to others to upload files to your Drop Box account. You must specify a password that has to be entered before an upload can take place. Give the url and password to those people you want to be able to upload files to your Drop Box account.




Applications for Education
I've implemented DROPitToMe on my course blog by placing a link to my DROPitTOme url along with the password for uploading assignments.

3 Tools to Help You Save Paper & Ink in Your Classroom

This year, one of my goals is to make my classroom as paperless as Shelly Blake-Plock's classroom. However, as much as I strive toward that goal, as Michael Scott would remind us, a lot of business is still done on paper. Even if we still have to print items, we don't have to wasteful in our printing habits. Here are three tools that can help you reduce how much paper and ink you use when printing materials for your classroom.

Print What You Like is a simple web tool that lets users select just a portion of a website. This is particularly useful for printing articles from websites or blogs that do not have a "printer friendly" option. Print What You Like is not simply a cropping tool, users can also remove images from the background or foreground of a website before printing.

If you have ever wanted to print an article from a blog or a website, but wish you could do it without printing all of the ads and widgets in the side columns, you should take a look at PrintFriendly. PrintFriendly strips away all of the ads and side bar content allowing you to print only the article on the page. There are two ways to use PrintFriendly. You can copy and paste an article's url into the PrintFriendly homepage or use the PrintFriendly bookmarklet. I tried it both ways and much prefer using the bookmarklet as it doesn't require any toggling between browser tabs or windows. Below is a video overview of PrintFriendly.

Printliminator is a handy little bookmarklet for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Printliminator allows you to highlight a webpage and select only the elements which you wish to print. You can install Printliminator in seconds by just clicking and dragging it into your browser's toolbar. Watch the video below to learn more about Printliminator.

EdTech Open Mic Night

Shelly Blake-Plock and Will Richardson are hosting an online open mic night on Wednesday, July 14 at 7pm EST. They'll be facilitating discussions about all things ed tech and education. Currently, Shelly is looking for topic suggestions. You can leave your suggestions here. Check it out, I think there will be some great conversations emerging from this open mic night.

Go Paperless for Earth Day

Earth Day is exactly one month away which makes today a good day to tell you about Shelly Blake-Plock's Earth Day Paperless Classroom Pledge. To date, more than 750 teachers have signed-up and pledged to go paperless on Earth Day. Read more about the Earth Day Paperless Classroom Pledge on Shelly's blog, Teach Paperless.









Here are some ideas to get you started teaching without paper:
1. Get your students using Google Docs to write their essays. Students can share essays with you and you can grade them without printing.
2. Try using the Drop.io upload widget to collect your students' work online.
3. Compare the articles in your textbooks with articles on Wikipedia about the same topic. Similarly, get your students started building a wiki of reliable articles that can replace your older textbooks and periodicals.
4. If you're in the habit of sending newsletters home, start an email list or better yet a blog to replace that newsletter.
5. If you're teaching in a 1:1 environment, stop printing assignments and just post them online.