Free Online Media and Storage

I am an educator who loves to put different forms of media in my content. I also love storage space that's accessible and convenient. And because I'm an educator I need to do it on the cheap, budgets being what they are these days (virtually nonexistent).

The near revolutionary growth of free Web-based tools makes it possible as I will describe, by focusing on two free tools: Jing, and Dropbox.

Jing, by its name alone, doesn't tell you much about what it does. Basically, it's a screen capture tool that records both still images and animations and stores them "in the cloud" at screencast.com, which gives you two gigabytes of free storage space. Jing is available at www.techsmith.com/jing as a free download. It installs in a few moments and places itself on your computer screen at the top in the shape of a semi-transparent gold-and-yellow half circle. Move your mouse over the circle, and it exposes a few simple options:



Upon clicking capture, Jing exposes a cross-hair style cursor which you can use to trace a rectangle around a portion of the screen you want to capture, or a whole window. The animation below shows you the process of capturing a portion of the USF home page.

Once captured, you can save the image or a SWF (Flash) video animation, save it to your account at screencast.com, or save it to the other free cloud storage solution I want to discuss: Dropbox.

Go to dropbox.com and you can sign up for 2 gigabytes of free storage space, provided by an application you download that creates a folder on your computer, which looks like just about any other folder you have except that it is characterized with a little green checkmark type icon next to each item in the folder.

The beauty of dropbox is that you can download the app to two or more computers. I have dropbox on two office computers and on my home computer. And with that capability I can upload a document (e.g., a spreadsheet) to my dropbox folder on my work computer, and have it instantly accessible from the dropbox folder on my home computer.

For a nominal fee you can increase your storage space to 50 gigabytes or more, but with the free account you get 2 gigabytes.

One benefit of this is freedom from the flash drive (a/k/a "thumb" drive or "jump" drive). I know the flash drive has been a tremendous convenience for making files portable, but they are prone to carrying infections (viruses), and I've grown wary of them. I have had no such issues with Dropbox, but don't take my word for it. Run your virus protection software against it and see for yourself.

There is but one caveat I have with any free service you get from the web, and that is decline the option to have the program run on startup. Keep that checkbox unselected (see example below).

In other words do not launch on startup. Having too many programs active on startup creates too much memory overhead that slows down your computer. Just run the program(s) when you need them.

By the way, all of the media you've seen on this blog post have been created with the tools that I've described, except the last one.