Yesterday, someone in my Twitter network posted a link to an article on Make Use Of titled 8 Ways to Use Drop.io. I’ve mentioned Drop.io eight times on this blog including How Drop.io Saved My Morning and My 12 Favorite Resources of 2008. The article on Make Use Of outlines eight ways that the general population can use Drop.io. After reading the article I thought it would be appropriate to mention some ways that I have used Drop.io in my classroom.

Applications for Education
Substitute Plans: Last year when my school decided to try to give old (8-9 years old) laptops to all 9th grade students, I took as full advantage of the opportunity as I could. One thing I did early on was to call my Drop.io account and leave messages for my students on the days when I was going to be out of the classroom. The first step in all of my sub plans then became, “have students listen to voicemail message on their laptops.” By doing this, the students could no longer say, “the sub didn’t tell us to do that.”

Outlines, slideshows, assignments, and rubrics: Drop.io is a very simple way to post resources that your students and their parents may need. Students, especially 9th grade students, lose a lot of papers. Rather than giving students extra copies of materials, they can go online to view or print the materials they’ve lost. Posting materials on Drop.io is also a great way to share information with parents, particularly PDF’s of permission slips or other forms that parents may need to sign for their children.

Organize a webquest: Some of my special education students have difficulty transcribing or correctly entering long urls. One method I’ve used to help students get beyond urls and into the content of a webquest is to post on Drop.io a list of hyperlinked urls for students to click in sequence.

Have you tried Drop.io yet? How are you using Drop.io in your classroom?