Dropbox

The Dropbox service just won a Crunchie (a TechCrunch award) for being an awesome online file storage system. It is one you should really check out as you start your road towards college or towards your senior year. What distinguishes Dropbox from other cloud services is the integration with all of your devices. How it works is this - you download the Dropbox program on your laptop or desktop PC and it will set up a folder for you. Every file you put in that folder is automatically synced Dropbox app on your smartphone or iPad and you will have access to the most recent version of your files and any changes you make are automatically saved and synced. So, when you work on a file at the library, you go home and all of your changes are waiting for you. It is very, very handy and you can also set up shared folders so that if you have a group project, different folks can contribute to a single folder and you always have access to their work, no matter where you are. Dropbox offers a free 2GB of space and always tosses out opportunities to increase that amount. Right now, they are offering another 5 GB free for Beta testing a new build of the software, for instance. So check it out if you have the chance, it might make your school work a little easier to manage...

Sign up for DropBox

Note: using some form of cloud service is probably a benefit to a lot of you right now since forgetting to print out something at home can be rectified if you can log onto a cloud service and have your document ready to email to a teacher or download and print out at the media center. Dropbox, at least, makes sure that what you email or download represents the final version of your work. Very useful...