Wednesday, August 27, 2008

All My Lifio

Leading the way among my web platform crushes for 2008 is drop.io, simple private sharing. My fondness for this app grows deeper every day. I have an account set up for the section of WRT195 I'm teaching right now, and it couldn't be much better for uploading and sharing PDFs, slide shows, documents, and audio clips. I simply password protected the account (one of the options when you set up an account), and presto. Students only need the URL and the password. Plus, when students log on to drop.io, they can easily glance the contents of any file by clicking on it. They don't have to download the files to view the contents. I'm hooked.

Already I can tell that I will be using more slideshow stuff this semester than I have in years past. For one, I am in a cramped space. It wasn't looking too bad when there were just twelve students enrolled, but within the past week eight more students have added, pushing us to the upper threshold of twenty. On Tuesday, there were a total of nineteen chairs in the room, counting the one my teacherly can was parked on (first come, first served, I say). Really there were only nineteen (counting me) in class that day, and no empty seats; two more have added since, and I had to put in an email request so we will be sure to have enough chairs tomorrow. My point: It's a cramped space. And rather than shimmy pardon me, excuse me, sorry over to the marker board, I think I will use the projector as a temporary solution. Plus, I can refine my slideshow style with this practice.

Nice about drop.io is that I can drop the slidshow into the quick-drop plugin in Firefox, and there it is: viewable online. It's slick.

Another thing: drop.io is founded on the idea of limited shelf life: after a year of inactivity, the drop evaporates and with it all of the content uploaded to it. A good match for certain course materials in that it doesn't flirt with all the niceties (and idealisms) of permanent archivization.

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 27, 2008 10:40 PM to Dry Ogre Chalking