I am a big fan of Drop.io for its simple yet powerful file hosting and file sharing capabilities. I’ve been using Drop.io for the last 18 months for all kinds of things including sharing presentations, posting outlines, collecting student work, and recording voice messages. Recently, I began using the Drop.io bookmarklet to save my daily Twitter finds. Last week Drop.io unveiled some new improvements to its voice recording options in the form of the Phone.io applet.
The new Phone.io applet makes it easier than it was with the original Drop.io voice service to push your voice recordings to iTunes or embed your voice recording as an MP3 into blogs and websites. To record your voice message, simply set up a “drop” then call the phone number assigned to your drop. It’s very simple, but for a visual explanation of Phone.io watch this screencast. If you need a quick way to set up a conference call, Phone.io does that too although it doesn’t record the conference call.
Applications for Education
Since Gcast changed from a free model to a minimum $99 fee service, some teachers have been looking for new ways to record short podcasts. Phone.io provides a simple, free platform for creating short podcasts. The storage limit is 100mb. I didn’t come close to using up all 100mb even when I had 20 minutes of voice in one drop. If you do find you need more space, Drop.io is giving a 15% discount on storage to people moving over from Gcast.
When all of my students had laptops – hopefully, they will again next year- I used Drop.io to record my substitute teacher plans for the students to listen to. By doing that I was able to eliminate the excuse of “the sub didn’t tell us to do that.”
