(I know. I Know. I KNOW! Trust that I am not bragging about this and rather this is me confessing my own sinfulness because I feel convicted at the notion that I am hardly as "green" as I could be.)
All of that being said, there is one thing that makes me decidedly very green despite my best lack of efforts. How is that? Well, in any of the digital art courses I teach, I do things entirely paperless!!! That's right. They get their assignments via our school's closed server/shared drive and they submit their work for grading electronically as well. Recently though, because of server issues, I switched to using Google Docs (well, not it's Google Drive but I am also the person who continues to call New York & Company, Lerner).
Here is a snapshot of me sorting through student work on Google drive...
I really REALLY like Google Drive because it has made it possible for me to not be on campus and still access all of the student work when I need to grade things. (Which I do. I am SO backed up with things lately. *sigh*) I don't know why I never used Google to do file sharing but now that I have switched? I am NOT going back.
Recently I made a HUGE discovery that is changing the view of the way the shared files are presented to me. I used to have to deal with a long list of text but I discovered on accident the other day that if you toggle the switch (indicated below in the picture) you can see snapshots a little bigger than thumbnails of ALL of your files!!!!
This is SO awesome because it means that I don't have to deal with reading and for as much as I don't like to broadcast it? (Especially after my one posting about teaching reading in Art Education) I am not a fan of reading and I try to avoid it usually to not slow myself down. (Because of my unique learning challenges)
Google Drive is AMAZING and the upgrades they make to it for the purposes of networking, sharing, storage, etc. etc. etc.
All my students use iPads and I'm always looking for ways they can share images from their photo galleries online so I can see them and grade from home. Setting up blogs worked for a bit but now their images aren't showing up because they aren't uploading files.... Any ideas? Maybe set up a class Flikr page?
ReplyDeleteI am not all that familiar with how Flickr works because it has been so long since I have used it. It seems like it could still end up being an issue though since it would still require them to upload their image files. Do most of them have camera phones? I wonder if the most optimal and efficient way to for them to get their stuff online would be for them to post things on a push-button publishing app (tumblr could work for this too) and then they could tag you so you would automatically see it when it is posted? That would give you a date/time stamp and it is immediate for them as well since they are already so inclined to take photos with their phones. I don't know. *shrug*
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