by Karen Nichols
Sue Frantz just posted two items in her Technology for Academics blog that you may find useful in a variety of settings The first post offers up a great way to foster student collaboration no matter what modality you're using to deliver your course. Dropbox has a new feature that allows others to deposit files into your Dropbox account via a URL. Sue Franz does a great job explaining the how-to part in the blog, so let's think of ways we can use this feature called File Requests. If you give your students a group project and they are each responsible for a part of the project, they can then deposit their contribution into the Dropbox of their other group members. Once complete, the group can in turn deposit their final project into your designated Dropbox. I can also see applications for this feature when collaborating with colleagues at a distance.
Sue Frantz' second post centers on engagement. In this instance, ParticiPoll works in a face-to-face setting when you want to use polls and embed the polls in your Power Point presentations. How cool is that? Again, the Technology for Academics blog post explains the how-to. In addition to using it in class, wouldn't this be a useful feature to add engagement in a conference presentation? I've just attended two conferences back to back plus a virtual one this week and the polling attempts were not 100% successful. I want to experiment with this polling app myself for an upcoming conference, but also to see if we can adapt it to be used virtually or at least via Blackboard Collaborate.
So if you find you have a little free time on your hands this summer, I recommend checking out Dropbox File Request and Participoll. Let us know if you do and what you think of these two tools.