I have been thinking more and more lately about harnessing online tools for education and the classroom. I have grown disillusioned by “traditional” software; its usually cumbersome, has little if any social emphasis, and is expensive and not open-source.
In the course of searching for alternatives I came across this post, which has sparked my interest. Some of their recommendations can be implemented on the individual level–setting up a class blog, for example, or a google page. Others require institution support (I tried out Moodle on my server tonight, and while I was impressed, it was overkill for hosting one or two courses).
A Temporary Solution
My classroom needs are actually fairly limited; email announcements, reminders, a document repository, all easily accessible. It would be nice if it was cross-platform. It would be nice if it would provide email notifications. It would be nice if privacy could be easily managed. RSS feeds are probably a pipe-dream, but would be an excellent feature. Oh, and hosted on someone else’s server.
Turns out, drop.io (mentioned here) provides all of these features. It really is amazing how something so simple could be so incredibly powerful and versatile.
So here is my wish-list for drop.io. (1) Slightly more (free) space. (2) Sync to a local folder. (3) File overwrites (if you add a file that is already there, it overwrites that file).
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