Two factors have given way to a shift in the focus of technology in the classroom. The need to cut state and district education budgets across the country forces school administrators to find cheap, yet effective, ways to educate their students. Educators are also realizing that many students are already immersed in the technology slowly getting introduced in classes. By bringing technology into the classroom, teachers can hone in on methodology that students are familiar with, leading to more effective teaching strategies and better results.
These two factors are now ushering cloud computing into a number of classrooms across the United States, allowing teachers to use the technology for conducting lessons, performing student assessments and developing homework plans in a virtual teaching space.
Subscriptions for the cloud technology are usually less than the purchase of software to facilitate a similar environment, and students and faculty alike usually adapt to the online approach much better than grappling with software installation and implementation.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing uses the Internet for much of the functionality that has traditionally been offered by software installations. The term "cloud" refers to the Internet and is similar to the network diagrams used by both phones and computers in the past. According to the website for Smart Schools, services included in cloud computing are:
- Google Apps
- Google Maps
- Gmail
- Google Docs
- Amazon
- Microsoft Windows Live
Previous technology generations placed all of