Got Paper?

In a BYOD teaching and learning environment, how do I have students submit and store their work?  That's a question that I've been giving a great deal of thought to this week as I have been working on updating the curriculum maps for my school district.  One of my goals for this next school year is to go paperless.  Tonight I was given a tool that I feel is going to be very useful in helping me achieve this goal. It's called Evernote .  As a HUGE Alabama fan, I have to say that I love the elephant on their logo!  It's not just a great logo that makes Evernote awesome!  Evernote is a great note taking app.  The beauty of Evernote is that it's available for all formats including iPads, cell phones, and Android tablets.  It allows users to not only to create notebooks and create notes, but to capture a picture, webpage, etc.  It also allows these "notes" to be shared.  It also dates and time stamps each entry which means it has the great possibility of becoming an electronic portfolio.  I can't wait to try all of this out with my students in August!

Lions, Tigers, and Files! Oh My!

One of the biggest hurdles with one-to-one laptop or BYOD initiatives to overcome is storing student work.  Fortunately there are several options for this hurdle.  Here are some of my favorites:

1. Dropbox (www.dropbox.com): Dropbox gives users 2 GB of storage space for free.  Dropbox allows users to setup shared folders as well.  Dropbox also provides a small software piece that allows easy syncing from your computer to the web.

2. Box.net (www.box.net) Box.net give users 5GB of storage space for free. It also allows user to share folders and files fairly easy.  However files must be uploaded through the website.  Users can also drag files to the box.net page for easy upload.

3. Google Drive(http://drive.google.com Google Drive is a new service offered by Google that gives users 5GB of free space. It also works nicely with Google Docs as well as other files. Along with these sites there are sites such as Edmodo and Moodle that also allow students to upload completed work! So when the files are piling up, try a web based version of a thumb drive.