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They're Not All Limited Trials!
Foreword
A friend told me the other day that she never bothers with "free" software or sites since they're "[n]othing more than limited trials." She's referring to the practice of offering a time- and/or feature-limited version for free to hook and sell you on the "full" paid version of the product or service.

In many cases, she's right. But not always. Some freebie "bait" products and online services really do offer something incredibly good for absolutely nothing, no strings attached.

This issue gives you two examples...
 

MediaFire
http://www.mediafire.com
No doubt you already know that the Internet is an incredible way to share files with your students. Just send the file to them by email attachment (if you have their email addresses) or give them a download link. All well and good with simple text and normal document/data files, but with multimedia files (video, audio, PowerPoint presentations, etc.), it gets a bit trickier.

Thing is media files tend to be obscenely huge. Many email services set limits on file attachment sizes... both on the sending and receiving ends (which means that even if your email account can send huge files, that doesn't necessarily mean your students can receive them).

Media filesizes can also present a problem even if you plan to distribute through website downloads. For example, I recently had to distribute a 9MB (even after compression) vidclip to the members of an online community. The online service we were using had a file sharing area, but it limited files to a max of 5MB.

Thankfully, I knew of MediaFire.

The MediaFire service lets you store and share files for free, up to 100MB in size (it has a pay-to-play "Pro" service if you need more than that, up to 10GB). Just upload the file then give out the link. Really, a hundred is probably more than enough for most if not all of the educational media files you'll be handling.

There are many other similar file storage and sharing services out there, but there are at least two reasons why MediaFire is worth seriously checking out:

• You don't need to sign up and set up an account before being able to use it.
   
• The banner ads it runs (it has to make money somehow!) are clean and appropriate for general audiences, unlike many of the other services I've seen.

Besides, it works. That 9MB vidclip I mentioned got distributed to over 200 people without a hitch (and not a single one of them asked for help downloading!). Now that I think about it, that last minimal support required bit is actually worth a heck of a whole lot...

Go to MediaFire
 

Stock.XCHNG
http://www.sxc.hu
Stock photography sites are a great source of images (vidclips and clipart too!) for all sorts of educational uses. Thing is, they cost. There are a few excellent low-cost stock photography sites (maybe we'll mention them to you someday), but it's hard to beat free, right?

Especially when it's pro-caliber free.

Stock.XCHNG, as you'll see, is definitely pro caliber. By Jupiter Media, it is, after all, supposed to help lead you to Jupiter's you-gotta-pay Stockxpert site. Although I'm sure Stockxpert's got the better images between the two of them, when you see what's at Stock.XCHNG, there's a good chance you'll be like, "So what?"

The site is packed. With over 350,000 images (slick ones!), this freebie's got more content than many pay sites! And they didn't scrimp on the intelligent features either, like keyword searching and — this one you'll really like — a "lightbox" feature, sort of like a temporary holding place for images that have caught your eye while browsing so you can easily return to them later.

Very, very impressive and useful freebie, this one.

Go to Stock.XCHNG