What is Dropbox?

● Tool that enables students to submit assignments through OAKS

● Prevents students from emailing assignments or turning in hard copies to you
● Helps you track exactly when student assignments are submitted
● Have access to student work from any location as long as you have an internet
connection

What can you do with Dropbox?

● See student submission times
● View and download student assignments
● Associate assignments to rubrics
● Return submissions to students with grade and text feedback

How to get to Dropbox:

● Located in upper menu, under grades
● Click Dropbox

Navigating Dropbox:
● Now we’re in our dropbox. On my screen, you can see that I’ve already created a folder,
but if you haven’t used Dropbox before, you won’t see anything there.
● There are two main action buttons.
● The “New Folder” button allows you to create new assignment folders.
● The “More Actions” button allows you to manage your folders once you’ve created them.
You can use the “More Actions” button to rearrange, preview, or delete existing folders.

Dropbox Folder
● The Dropbox folder is where your assignments will live.
● You may want to create categories to group your assignments together. You can see that
in my Dropbox folder, I have two categories. One for research papers and one for a final
project.
● If you don’t create categories, your assignments will just appear in a list. It’s up to you
how you choose to set this up.
● Over on the right side of the page, you can see how many files have been uploaded by
your students for a particular assignment. You can see here that I’ve received one file for
Research Paper 1, but that I haven’t received any files yet for Research Paper 2 or Final
Project. You can also see when each item is due.

Folder Submission Details

● To see the assignment details, you just click on the assignment name to take us into the
submissions area.
● You can set up separate Dropbox folders for each assignment and restrict access to the
folders by date and time, group membership, or special access permissions.
 ● Each dropbox folder’s search and filter options enable you to find users’ submitted files
by user name, submission history, or the amount of feedback they’ve received.
● I only have one student enrolled in this course who has submitted a file, so you only see
one student listed here.
● From this page, you can download all of the submissions to your computer’s hard drive
for offline grading. You can also email students through the dropbox who may be having
trouble with the assignment, or those who haven’t yet submitted an assignment.
● As we move down, you’ll see the student’s name and any file or files they’ve submitted
for a given assignment. Students also have the opportunity to type comments to you,
and you see the date and time that the assignment was submitted.
● From this page, you can also add grades or feedback to the assignment.

Creating a New Assignment

● Now I’m going to go back to my Folder List and I’ll show you how to create a new
assignment…

Grading Dropbox Assignments

● Once you’re in your Dropbox folder, you’re going to click on the assignment that you’d
like to grade to get into the submission view.
● Once you’re in the submissions area, you can see that I have one student and that
student has submitted her research paper.
● I’m going to show you how to grade each student on an individual basis.
● To get started, I’ll click on the Evaluate button.
● On this page, I can see the file that the student uploaded, the student’s name, and the
date and time that the paper was submitted.
● I can also see the comments that the student left.
● Let’s say that I decide that it’s too early to grade this student’s paper, and I want to give
her some extra time. I can click on the little flag icon to flag the item so that I can come
back to it later.
● If I was going to go ahead and grade this item, I would click the arrow to the right of the
file name to either preview the file or download it to my computer. I prefer to download
files to my computer so that I can go ahead and give feedback or edit within the
document.
● On the right side of the screen, you see a little more information about the student. If the
student has a photo associated with his or her account, you’ll see their picture. You can
click the icons to email, page, view the student’s profile, or view the student’s grades.
● Underneath that, you just see a little more information about this specific assignment.
You can see the instructions for the assignment and also the due date and availability
dates.

Evaluating an Assignment
 ● I mentioned before that I was going to download this student’s assignment so that I could
go ahead and grade it. I’m going to do that now by going back to the arrow next to the
student’s name, then clicking download.
● When I open that student’s assignment and read the assignment, I’ll be able to enter the
score directly on this page. I can also give the student feedback here.
● If I’ve used track changes in Word to make some changes to the student’s paper, I can
then add that file here, also. Or if I had a particular resource that my student may find
helpful, I could attach that as well.
● I could also record audio from this page to include with my student feedback. If I just
wanted to talk through my student’s paper or make it a little more personal, I may decide
to add audio to my feedback.

Rubrics
● If you were to associate an OAKS rubric with this assignment, it
would also appear in this window.
● I’m not going to cover that today since a lot of people don’t seem
to use OAKS rubrics, but that is an option, and you would be able
to score an assignment using that rubric from this window.

● Once you’ve included all the grading information that you want to include, you can
choose whether you want to publish the grade, or save it as a draft.
● If you publish the grade, the student will see the grade right away. If the assignment
hasn’t closed yet and you don’t want that student to get feedback until all assignments
have been turned in, you can choose to save a draft instead. This will allow you to go
back later and publish the grade once all assignments have been turned in.
● Since I don’t have other students, I’m going to go ahead and publish.
● Once I’ve published, I could click “Next Student” in the upper right hand corner if I
wanted to move on to grading the next student. Since I don’t have any other students, I’ll
just go back to folder submissions.
● If I had chosen to save the feedback as a draft, once I’m back on this menu, I could click
the box to select all students, then click publish feedback. That would send out grades
and feedback all at the same time.

Offline Grading
● I’m not going to talk about offline grading too much, but you can download all of your
students’ files at once if you wanted to be able to do some grading, but you weren’t
going to have a network connection.
● To download files, you would click the arrow to select all of your students, then click
download.
● This will download all of your students’ files into a zip folder.
● When you open the folder, you’ll see that OAKS has automatically named each file for
the student.
 ● You can go into the files, track your changes to edit the file, then save it to upload at a
later time.
● Once you have a network connection again, you can go back into your submission view
and click Evaluate to grade each student’s assignment. There, you can add the file from
your computer and enter the score as you normally would.
● If you have a large class, there is a way to bulk upload feedback files so that you could
upload all of the files at once and they would be associated with the proper student. I’m
not going to get into that today because it would be difficult to show you with only one
student in my course, but we do have a tutorial on our blog or you can contact your
instructional technologist to learn more.

End Notes
● Open lab Thursday and Friday
● Contact your Instructional Technologist
● Tutorials on blog that cover everything we’ve done today