Welcome to Week 8 – Files in the Clouds!
We hope you enjoy the journey you are about to take as you examine and evaluate the cloud data storage market. The over arching goal of this activities this week is for you to continue in your role as an EVA for your organization. You are challenged to use your critical skills to carefully examine the issues surrounding the adoption of cloud computing services in the education sector.
Team Bios
We wanted to reintroduce ourselves a little bit but mostly reflect on how we currently use cloud storage and cloud computing and what we feel are the benefits and limmitations. We ask that you do the same on the ETEC522 blog as your first discussion response to our topic. Please make sure you tag your response with ‘week8-1’ so we can find your posts quickly.
Stephen McQuaid
Stephen is a lifelong Prince Edward Islander, and has four more MET courses to go after this one. He has been teaching on PEI for ten years, and currently teaches students in grades six through eight. He uses a variety of cloud-based applications daily including WordPress, Blogger, Glogster EDU, and Google’s programs, among others. He dreams of one day teaching a class where students use mobile devices (their own, or school-given), but wireless access in PEI’s schools is as rare as a night without marking. Before use of the cloud can be widespread and optimized, policies and access need to be improved.
Ashley Ross
Ashley is currently residing in Ontario and will be completing the MET program at the end of this semester in December. She uses cloud-based applications and storage every day through Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Docs and the Google Calendar. In addition, Ashley also uses Dropbox to store and sync all of her documents to each of her computers and mobile devices. Ashley also uses the aforementioned cloud applications and cloud storage program when tutoring students with learning disabilities as it helps them stay organized and reduces the chance that they will misplace assignments or homework.
Jim Cash
Jim is a resource teacher in his board where he supports teachers using technology in their practice. He has two MET courses to complete before completing the program. Jim uses Dropbox, iCloud, Google Docs in his personal life and for MET work. He feels that the biggest barrier for wide adoption of cloud computing is speed, and more specifically, upload speeds. Large ISPs are built on the fast-download-slow-upload bandwidth model because, up until now, the vast majority of Internet users were getting information from the Internet. Cloud computing requires high speed in both directions to work seamlessly.
What about you?
Post your own cloud-related bio to our ETEC 522 blog.