Apps for the 12 Days of Christmas - Otixo

With an increase in the use of cloud storage, whether it be DropBox, Google Drive, Box, or SugarSync, organizing and remembering what files you saved where can be a daunting task.  Otixo is an App that provides users a way to access and organize their files across multiple cloud storage apps.  For personal use, Otixo is free, but has a limit of 2GB of Bandwidth; meaning the amount of network traffic or data transfer that you use while interacting with your files in Otixo.

The App also allows users to preview documents and images before opening them.  Users can copy and move files from one service to another without downloading to your computer. It's as easy as drag-and-drop.  One extra feature is called Spaces, which allows users to create a space for sharing files and folders with others.  These Spaces allow you to determine what access is provided to those that you collaborate with.  You can learn more by watching the video below.


If you find yourself using multiple Cloud based storage services, then Otixo is definitely worth looking into.

Apps for the 12 Days of Christmas - Day One - Edcanvas
Apps for the 12 Days of Christmas - Day Two - Cubby
Apps for the 12 Days of Christmas - Day Three - NextUp

Shadow Drive - Social Cloud Drive

ShadowDrive is a web application that plans to make sharing content more social through various social networks.  It is still in development and plans are in place to have desktop, tablet, and mobile services available in October of 2013.  You can currently join for free by logging in through Facebook (Twitter in the future).  You can still use the service, but the space allotment is currently small, just 1GB.  What makes it worthwhile is that students probably won't be using a large amount of space in the first place.

With integration into Facebook, ShadowDrive would make it easy for students or teachers to have important files or documents easily made available to students and have it appear on their Facebook Timeline.  We are well aware that students are on Facebook.  Now, if you have a teacher page or classroom page you can have files made available to students.  Students that are working together on a project could also use the service to share pieces of a project, artifacts, pictures, videos, etc. 

Another benefit is that if your Facebook friends are using the App, then they would have access to the same files through the ShadowDrive site.  There are several security features in place to not only protect privacy, but also to protect the legality issues that might surface.  Like other applications on Facebook, you do have to provide permission to this App. 

Here is a video that introduces the product and provides more information.  If you are an active user of social media (Facebook and Twitter) in your classrooms with your students, this might be an app worth investigating. 



To learn more here are some other reviews of interest:

http://www.estartups.org/promoted/shadowdrive-the-social-cloud-storage-drive/

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/shadowdrive-a-web-service-to-easily-upload-files-share-with-online-friends/

50 FREE GB of Cloud Storage

Box.net is a competitor to Dropbox and recently they have announced an opportunity for users and new users to get 50 Gigabytes of FREE cloud storage in an effort to combat the recent release of iCloud from Apple.  Box.net offers an App for both iPhone and iPod and other wireless devices which can come in handy as the move towards tablets grows.  If you are using cloud storage with your students, this would be a valuable option for storing student work and provide you with plenty of storage room for your classes throughout the years.  For all the schools out there that use Google Docs, Box.net can be integrated into web based program. 

Thanks to Edudemic for sharing this information and check out their article to learn how you can get your own free 50 GB of Cloud Storage.

For more information, view the video below