Drop What You are Doing!
Contributed by Veronica Pejril, Coordinator, DePauw University Music Instructional Technology Center
Have you ever needed to share files with a class, a group of colleagues, or your department? How do you do it? Email attachments can work, but they can be clumsy and fill up others’ boxes, especially with rich media content.
Enter drop.io. drop.io is a free, web-based file storage service which can be as public or private as you wish, and can even be used completely anonymously. That’s right… you can store content on drop.io without entering a single thing about yourself online. Content can be open or protected behind a password.
At the heart of drop.io is the filespace itself, appropriately called a “drop.” Each free drop is limited to 100MB, but you can have as many drops as you wish. Content can be added to a drop by dragging and dropping files onto the page (firefox plugin required).
If you choose to allow them, others can place content into your drop. Because you can choose to make the drop’s contents invisible to all but you, drop.io has many possibilities as a robust digital drop-box for student-created content.
If you upload rich media such as photos, audio, video, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations to drop.io, they automatically become viewable/listenable online. Additionally, embed-code is automatically generated so that the content in your drop may easily be distributed in Moodle or a blog.
Because this service is very RSS-savvy and well connected to social-networking services like Twitter, drop.io can be used for far more than simple file storage and distribution. Audio files placed in your drop, for example, immediately become podcasts that you can share with a class or a team of colleagues.
Dragging files onto drop.io’s webpage is only one way to add content to your drop. If you are on the road, you can add to your drop by emailing to your drop’s unique email address. You may even call your drop’s voicemail extension to record audio content from your phone.
Please take a look at what a variety of uploaded content looks like, at http://drop.io/dputest
Whatever you’re doing… drop it!