Ever since the day when my flash drive failed, I’ve become a big Dropbox fan.  Dropbox is a cloud storage application that automatically synchronizes files on your computer to the cloud, and other computers on which you’ve installed the Dropbox application. Files inyour My Dropbox folder under My Documents are automatically synchronized. It just works.

There’s also a phone app so you can look at your files on your smart phone. Dropbox starts you off with 2G of storage, and you can earn more for free by promoting Dropbox on Facebook, Twitter, and with your friends.

I read this  article on Lifehacker describing ways to get more free space on Dropbox. I knew that if you refer a friend who installs Dropbox, you and your friend each get 250 MB of additional storage space for free. I thought I was good, using Dropbox for about two years now, I managed to accumulate 8.25 GB of storage.  I referred a new friend yesterday, and received confirmation of my increase in storage space.

I knew Dropbox also has a promotion for students and educators. Anyone who registers a Dropbox account with a .edu email address automatically receives double storage space, for free.

Today I linked my .edu email address with my Dropbox account.  My storage almost doubled.  Retroactively!  I now have 14.5 GB of storage space on Dropbox.

In the classroom, I store graded assignments  and large handouts to Dropbox, and send the URL’s back to students to download them from my public folder. It’s an easy way to make files available on the Web without having to manually upload them.