Dropbox and the Paperless Classroom

For teachers that want to go to a paperless classroom, the one drawback is finding a free solution that allows you to distribute work and still collect work without complication.  Many teachers have a dropbox account and have created public folders so that students can submit work.  The problem with this is that students can see everyone else's work, which leads to problems with academic integrity, cheating, and plagiarism.

Today, I ran across a great solution that will help teachers using Dropbox.  This tool is called Jotform.  If you go to Jotform.com/dropbox, you can create a form that allows students to submit assignments to your dropbox account.  Its pretty simple as long as you already have an existing dropbox account and you use the link above.

  

To get started, you'll first need to go to http://jotform.com to create an account.  Then, follow the instructions below to create your dropbox form.

1. Go to http://jotform.com/dropbox.  
2. Click the "Create a Dropbox Form" button.
3. You'll be asked to login to your Dropbox account and link it to Jotform.
4. After linking the two accounts, you'll get a link and an Embed code you can use to post your form online. 
5. A form template has already been created, so all you need to do is click Next when prompted.  
6. After the process is complete, close the popup window and go to My Forms.  You can see and edit your form at any time.

After you create your form, you can always go back to Jotform and find your Embed Code and URL for sharing.  You can also edit this form to include collect other information such as Class Period, Grade, etc....  If you click the Integration button, you can also integrate other services besides dropbox.  

Once your Dropbox account and your Jotform account are linked, you will see a new folder in your Dropbox account called "JotForm to Dropbox".  You'll want to test our your new form for the first time after creating it.  

This is a great alternative if you are not a Google Apps for Education school and you are a religious dropbox user.  My suggestion would be to create a separate dropbox account apart from your personal one that is used only for your classroom.  Then start collecting student work!