I love using the Cloud. I almost love it as much as a being surprised with a piece of fruit pizza showing up out of the blue for me to eat. The cloud makes working on projects so much more efficient and convenient because they are always with you. Box.com is a cloud option that allows you to save all your projects and access them anywhere you want. Box.com, along with Skydrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox.com are all great cloud options that allows us to be free and not tied to devices or flash drives. All these cloud options give you free storage, so the only reason you may need to use more than one cloud is if your free storage gets used up on one of them. The only difference between Google Drive and the others (which is why Google Drive is my fav.) is that Google Drive gives you creation options, the others are strictly storage. Another great thing about these cloud options is that with the speed and advancement of technology these days, all this stuff is streamlined and accessible on our mobile devices. All these clouds have apps to make it even more convenient for us. Once we get more devices into this school district, our students will be able to depend on the cloud and they will love it. It will mean more quality work, more efficiency, and best of all, less excuses! (No longer valid: I lost it, I can't find it, I left it at home, etc....)
Writing is such a big deal. With Draftin.com, you can write and share it with colleagues or collaborators. Simply go to Draftin.com and sign up for a free account. Once in, you can create a new document and "share" it with anyone, which allows them to add/edit the document as well. Since you are the creator of the document, you must approve all changes to the document before they are put in place. You can share via link or email. You can create text documents or transcriptions (audio).
Applications for Education: Writing using Draftin.com allows you to utilize a "cloud" writing tool. When students write in Draftin.com, they can share it with their partner and they can both work on it at home. Partner students up and have them work on a document together. This teaches good 21st century collaboration skills. Students can use Draftin.com to write a paper individually and turn it in via email. This allows them to always have their work with them, no forgetting a flash drive or losing their paper.
Have you ever heard people talk about the "Cloud" and wonder what in the world they were talking about? Well, the cloud is basically the internet. The "cloud" concept is that you save all your "stuff" in this "cloud" which follows you wherever you go, which means your files are always with you when you need them. It is a great concept and a great tool to use. With the cloud, you don't have to worry about emailing things back and forth, remembering what flash drive you used, or finding yourself out of luck because what you need is at your home computer. The Cloud stores everything for you on the internet. There are multiple "cloud" tools. Google Docs is definitely a cloud because you can store documents, PowerPoint, spread sheets, forms, etc. in your Google docs account and access them wherever you are, as long as you have the internet. Another cloud tool that I love and use all the time is called "DropBox." Dropbox can be downloaded onto your computer or you can use dropbox.com and simply log in. Whenever you save something to Dropbox, it is stored in your "cloud" and you have it wherever/whenever you need it or want to work on it. Dropbox is free, but the free version comes with limited space. However, there are some easy things to do to increase the free storage space, which is explained at dropbox.com. Sign up for Dropbox.com and check it out! I think you will find it very convenient.
Application for Education: This is a good tool to use to work on your school work, but you can also use Dropbox with your students, especially if you are using the iPads. Saving has been an issue so far with the iPads. How do students save their work? Well, the answer is Dropbox. When students create a project on the iPads, they can log into your dropbox account with the dropbox app and save it into your dropbox account, so you will have all projects in one place and can look at them at home, school, on your phone, etc. When doing this, you will want to change your dropbox password to something easy for the kids to enter, then change it back once the school day is done.
