Google Drive is Google’s answer to dropbox, right? I set out to explore this question and learned of other competitors. Skydrive, Sugarsync, and box were new to me, but dropbox I have been using in my daily personal and professional life.
I want to talk about cloud storage as it pertains to teaching and learning in secondary and higher education. Sugarsync did not hold my interest long, because it does not have a collaborative editing tool, and that is important to me. Collaborative writing with Google docs has afforded me the opportunity to publish with fellow graduate students, make co-created rubrics with students, and lead teacher candidates to write collaboratively in response to young adult literature.
Many middle and high school English Language Arts teachers already use Google documents in class, but I have not seen the use of shared folders within a class. I see value in the ability for teachers to create a shared class folder and an individual shared folder between the teacher and the individual student. While dropbox could allow for the same options, Google documents are already in use, so it seems the easiest system for teachers and students to begin using in a shared digital space.
My question lies in how will I handle revisions once a paper has been submitted with a deadline. For example, if my third period has a paper due to be submitted in their Google Drive folder with a deadline of Tuesday by 8 p.m., then do I want to say that they cannot revise after this time? I don’t think so, but how can it be handled in a fair manner? If Aaron revises past the deadline and Jane doesn’t get a chance because I have already graded her paper, is that fair?
I think I would be upfront and tell the class that the due date matters, but they may revise after submission KNOWING that they take a risk of not knowing when I will grade the paper. It would also be important to be explicit about grading cycles. To be fair, I would tell them that I will rotate whose paper gets graded first and then each time I would begin grading with a different person. After all, if a student wants to continue work on a paper, who am I to say no? The pitfall? Sometimes deadlines are nice; the student can STOP. What do you think?