Classroom Teacher

Why I’m Still Using Dropbox in the Classroom

Grade 8 Teacher

It’s been a year since I signed up for dropbox and I’m happy to renew my premium subscription, even though it’s costing me $138 US per year. (That’s $99 for 50 GB of space in the cloud and $39 for the “pack rat” unlimited undo history feature.)

Right now, I’m using 30 GB of 82.25 GB. Even though I’ve only paid for 50 GB of space, I have a lot of extra free space because of all the people that I refer to dropbox.

Of course, now that dropbox is an integral part of my life (30 GB that is), I’m hooked (and stuck).

Dropbox has a lovely referral program and you can get free space just by inviting your friends, but there are limits and caps.

For example, for every friend that you invite who actually joins and installs dropbox, you get 500 MB to 1 GB of extra free space (depending on if you have a free or paid account.) Your friend gets 500 MB of extra free space (up to a limit of 32 referrals.)

If you use this link to set up your dropbox account, you’ll get 500 MB of extra free space. I won’t get any extra free space because I’m already at the 32 GB limit, so it’s all about you baby.

Even though I have 32 GB of referrals, if I drop down to the free plan, those 32 referrals drop down to 18 GB of free space. Still impressive, but the reason why I upgraded was because cleaning house was a headache.

Once you run out of space on dropbox, it stops syncing your files. Rather than spending hours constantly trying to keep my files under a certain limit, I’m willing to shell out some money to make my life easier.

You can actually get over 32 GB of free space because you can get bonus space just by doing some simple tasks.

(I’m actually at 32.75 GB of bonus space earned because I completed these simple tasks.)

So, why am I still using dropbox at school and at home? Here are 6 reasons:

6 Reasons Why I Still Use Dropbox in my Classroom. (I just renewed my premium subscription.)

  1. It’s a really easy way for teachers to sync files between their school computer, their home computer and their phone. For example, it’s easy to sync your MarkBook data between your home and your school computer if you use dropbox. Check out reason number seven.
  2. You can share folders with other teachers to create communal spaces. (The downside is that it can quickly fill up your colleagues hard drives or someone uploads a really large video file, all of a sudden everyone with free 2 GB dropbox accounts are out of luck and dropbox will stop syncing their files.)
  3. You can access your files anywhere that you have internet access. For example, if you’re on a Google Chromebook, you can’t install dropbox. But you can go to dropbox.com to access all of your files. You can still open up PDFs, etc.
  4. So many iPads and iOS apps integrate nicely with dropbox. In fact, if the iPad app doesn’t have dropbox integration, I find I’m less likely to use it because I’m afraid that the data will be easily accessible. If you ever lose your iPad, just go to dropbox.com > settings > my apps and you can delete which apps have access to your dropbox account. (I really like the CameraSync IOS app because you snap a photo and automatically gets uploaded to your dropbox account. Sure, iCloud and Photo Stream does the same thing, but the Photo Stream polls. In all of your photos across all of your devices on the same iTunes account . That means that your personal photos and your work photos all get mixed together. Chances are, you don’t want to install iCloud on your work/school computer and so the camera sync app is a nice way to pull in specific photos to your work computer, as necessary. )
  5. 1password is a great software to keep track of all your passwords that plays nicely with dropbox. It lets you sync through dropbox and 1PasswordAnywhere lets you decrypt and view your encrypted passwords when you’re away from your computer as long as you have access the internet in a modern browser. In other words, if you can’t install 1password on your school computer, you can still access all of your passwords through the internet and your dropbox account.
  6. You can undo mistakes. If you accidentally delete a paragraph on a test assignment or handout and then save the file, normally, you would be out of luck. You just wrote over the file with a bad version and you can undo that. With dropbox, however, the free account comes with 30 days of undo history which means you can restore a previous version and recover your lost data. I love this feature. Dropbox saved me hours of marking by restoring an accidentally deleted Mark file. I’ve paid for the packrat unlimited undo history which means that dropbox keeps an unlimited number of my deleted files in old versions in case I need to view them later on. The only downside is that while you can undelete folders, you can’t restore entire folders to previous versions. You have to do that one by one, which is a headache.

If you do use dropbox, you do need think about how much dropbox space you need and data privacy – especially if you’re storing student information in the cloud.

This blog post was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium voice recognition software and Windows Live Writer blogging software.

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