Jerry Snyder

EDT 7000
October 28, 2013

1

Research Topic
Cloud Computing in the Classroom
Cloud computing is winning over school districts throughout the country. There is no
consensus on what devices to allow or how to access the material through the cloud. The
only true consensus is the contracting of information and networking to outside firms and
having them managed the schools network. As the cost of staffing and equipment for an
information technology department is schools continue to increase schools will need to be
able to provide computing resources to their staff and students. Cloud computing will be
a more attractive alternative for them.
This paper is a look at different ways schools can utilize cloud computing from a very
small scale to a very large scale. This will allow staff and students to bring their own
device or the school provide them a device to use for learning and assignments. This will
free school districts up from purchasing books, copier costs, and other administration
costs they are paying for now. These funds then can be moved to costs of cloud
computing which is cheaper than what is being done now in the schools. Below are
different methods and scenarios for providing cloud computing to schools.
Netbooks is one option for staff and students. A stable of affordable netbooks are
winning over educators even in the age of tablet computing. As long as wireless internet
access is available, there is no extra service fees required. Netbooks have a screen size
larger than a smartphone and a keyboard that's more familiar than a pad or tablet. The
netbooks can be used instead of purchasing interactive whiteboards for classrooms and
digital e-books for school libraries. So a budget is redirected to a district's 1-to-l netbook
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EDT 7000
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purchase, which can be powered in part by cloud-based versions of Moodle for course
management and Google Apps for Education for collaboration and e-mail.
For teachers we can look at is digital literacy which will become increasingly important
for students as they enter the workforce. Higher education institutions will find these
skills essential as calls increase to prepare students for the Internet future. In a recent
study, the Pew Internet and American Life Project noted that by 2020, large institutions,
including colleges and universities, will face significant pressure to become more
cooperative, efficient, and responsive as a result of expectations created by a networked
society. Teachers who embrace this direction and who want to design assignments that
take advantage of these new technologies will likely need to create new assessments and
learn new methods for creating student feedback.
Until recently, when cloud computing has helped to enable a participatory Internet
culture, this was a tall order. YouTube served over 12 billion videos in one month in
2009, and along with other social video sites, video consumption is growing at an
amazing pace. With the advent of inexpensive portable video recorders like the Flip video
camera and the use of digital cameras in mobile devices, the capacity to create video
productions is also increasing substantially. YouTube recently enabled an annotation
system that allows a user to overlay comments on a video, typically in the form of a
speech bubble. This method could be used to deliver simple informative feedback
because the source video is not altered. YouTube also offers a convenient spotlight
function that allows a user to outline an area of the screen to isolate and highlight a single
aspect of a set of frames. This strategy lets the teacher focus attention on a particular area
of the image. Google Docs is a suite of online tools that mirrors the basic functionality of
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EDT 7000
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Microsoft Office. Users can share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online.
With Google Forms you can create and publish an online form with almost no training.
Once the form is created, the URL can be sent to students, and their responses on the
Web will be collected and organized in a Google spreadsheet. This easy to use tool opens
the door to informal online assessment.
Another option for teachers would respond to essays by using screencasts. Screencasts
are short recordings of what happens on your computer screen. Screencasts have been
used for computer training to illustrate how to use a particular piece of software. This
same technology, however, can be used to comment on seminar papers, providing audio
and visual support for written comments. Although many students are in a digital world,
it is most frequently in the form of viewing multimedia rather than creating it. This
understanding of the range of talents among students suggests that increasingly we will
need to develop new ways for testing digital literacies among a diversely skilled student
body. At the same time, we should understand that, students are accustomed to using
digital products, and this ease with absorbing information in digital forms also includes
processing assessment information and feedback.
A key feature of mobile technology applications is the integration of cloud-based
resources on handheld devices supporting several computing and communication
functions. Mobile technologies unique affordances for teaching and assessment
especially automated, visual, available data collection methods and query searches can
create unique available task environments for learning and assessment. SimSchool is an
example of a computer simulation designed for teacher education that utilizes mobile
computing. Mobile simulation based measurement of teacher knowledge and skills
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EDT 7000
October 28, 2013

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implemented in SimSchool contain lessons that may be broadly applicable to other
interactive and adaptive educational applications. The topic of teacher education and
mobile technologies skilled teachers who use, learn, and teach with mobile technologies
is critical to the future of education. Mobile technologies refer not only to devices such
as smartphones, but also to cloud computing. In the future, the devices will all be
different, but the principles of mobile technology will not change.
If something is mobile it means you can easily take it with you, it is untethered.
Information and computing power is everywhere you need it, accessible anywhere at any
time. Mobile technologies give access to everything that can be created. Mobile
technologies let us interact with everything digital that can be communicated wirelessly
to any kind of handheld device. As a result students are now increasingly likely to use a
mobile device to learn. A recent study found that half of middle school students have a
smartphone, and one-third use a mobile device to do their homework, even though only
6% of students are allowed to use the devices while in class. This growing gap in the use
of mobile technologies in school and at home is evidence of a need for teacher training to
go mobile in order to provide teachers with the knowledge, skills, and tools that their
students are increasingly taking for granted as part of life. With a mobile device in hand,
learning, shopping, getting and giving advice, staying up to date on the news, and
entertaining as well as being entertained are available anytime, anyplace except in the
classroom. For these reasons, teacher education programs need to include mobile
technologies in their preparation program, as well as in supporting continuing
professional education.
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EDT 7000
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Therefore SimSchool thus increases learning through action and reflection in a way that
is consistent with the principles of experimentation, leading to increased confidence,
acquisition of new skills, and changes attitudes. These features of assessment task
environment, data collection, and analysis are supported in new ways by cloud-based
mobile applications, such as SimSchool, that have been designed for learning with
assessment. The task environment of a mobile application is normally distributed in the
cloud and can involve input from a user and peers as well as integrate the user and the
application interface with the rest of the Internet knowledge, all while the user is on the
go, participating in the real world. Data collection in mobile applications can be designed
to work on several time scales and in many instances at the same time, in real places as
well as multiple spaces within the applications. Mobile technologies affordances for
teaching and assessment, when paired with automated data collection methods and
feedback, can create unique tools for virtual performance assessment. SimSchool, a
simulation designed for the acquisition of teacher knowledge and skills, provides for
teacher assessment that may be applicable to other kinds of educational applications.
Cloud-based mobile applications that have been designed for highly interactive learning
with assessments involve new kinds of environments, data collection, analysis, and
approaches.
Inspiration Software in January 2012 launched Webspiration Classroom, taking the
writing, visual thinking and collaboration tool to the cloud. Inspirations move is part of a
trend by educational software providers to offer time saving and cost saving alternative
access to products that once were loaded onto individual computers. Webspiration
Classrooms tools help students collaborate on group projects, develop essays, and
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EDT 7000
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reports and share documents, receiving guidance from teachers throughout the process.
All Webspiration classroom documents are automatically saved and backed up in the
cloud. Students sign in from anywhere they have Internet access. Everyones
contributions are organized in one document in one location. Webspiration Classroom is
available in one, two and three year subscriptions. One year classroom subscriptions start
at $110 for a 10-pack; individual educator subscriptions are $39 for one year.
Subscriptions include access to online support materials, including lesson plans and
implementation tools. A free 30-day trial subscription is available through the Inspiration
website.
Web 2.0 technologies include wikis, blogs, social networks, and video-sharing sites. As a
subset of Web 2.0 technology, cloud computing is an approach to increase capacity or
add capabilities without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or
licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription based or pay per
use service that extends ITs existing capabilities. The reference to a cloud is actually a
metaphor for the Internet. In the past users were delivered using local resources a server.
This computing approach involves services residing on hardware not owned by the user.
The user has individual access to the services or files unless he or she decides to work
collaboratively and share the services or files.
Clearly, cloud computing involves a new way of thinking when it comes to managing
computing resources. Traditionally, computing resources such as software or storage are
considered physical products than can be acquired at a store. Instead, cloud computing
views computing resources as being provided as a fully online service. In addition, the
data generated or acquired by the user also resides online and has sole access to that data
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EDT 7000
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unless the user decides to share it. This approach represents part of the evolution of the
client-server model where the server is elsewhere. Based on cloud computing concepts,
Google Docs have been used in high schools to support Advanced Placement program
students. Students found its high accessibility and the ability to storage files online to be
very positive features. Instructors found the posting of read-only versions of project
instructions and rubrics in the suite to be very handy. They discovered that it is very easy
to move files among the classroom, office, and home. It allows instructors to collaborate
with colleagues on projects such as research or white papers. Cloud computing and Web
2.0 technologies were found to provide effective means for actively engaging with
students. Also, they provided valuable tools for instructors such as group collaboration
with other professionals. While it does mean additional work on the part of the instructor,
the investment is deemed valuable. The question comes up whats next for the
classroom? One possibility is a combination of these technologies such as a class blog
contained in a wiki. This would be an opportunity for the entire class to work together in
order to summarize the key points at the end of teaching lecture. Another idea would be
to have a weekly course evaluation in a wiki-blog in order to gain class consensus on
feedback to the instructor. One can expect that there will be new and useful ways to use
the Internet in order to provide a good educational experience and improve the quality of
learning for the student. Learning using this Web 3.0 platform will translate to greater
levels of interaction and engagement, higher level of accessibility, improved uses of
avatars, and much more efficient search capabilities through the Web. The future looks
very promising and exciting to the instructor as the latest technologies evolve.
Jerry Snyder
EDT 7000
October 28, 2013

8

The use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in the academic world has become
common, both in distance learning courses and in person courses. Before that, to make
the appropriate environment for the student, considering his /her individual characteristic
is a need today. In this field, it is the ubiquitous learning (U-Learning), which allows the
access to educational resources with full mobility and system adaptation to the students
context. Today the Virtual Learning Environments are in a constant development and
adaptation process. The Cloud or Cloud Computing emerges as a technology to improve
and make the computer resources more efficient, through features such as availability,
services, where the user can access remotely his/her programs and have at his/her
disposal a greater capacity for storage and processing, without the need of having more
expensive equipment, because his/her data will be available in the cloud. The problem of
increasing the Internet size and complexity and also the user technological diversity
brings the need to treat each connection to the environment as an individual connection
identifying the user profile and developing applications in virtual environments to the
user. This is a new technology that is intended to be comprehensive and provide services
to the user that hosts personal documents on the Internet, to companies that outsource the
entire IT infrastructure. To use the system the user does not need software or hardware,
reducing the cost for the user. The infrastructure in the environment of Cloud Computing
usually consists of several physical machines connected by means of a network. Each
computer has the same software configurations, but it can vary the ability of hardware in
terms of processing power, storage, and memory. Within each piece of equipment there
are a variable number of virtual machines or hypervisors, according to the physical
machine.
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EDT 7000
October 28, 2013

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Eucalyptus is open source private cloud software that enables organizations to build
compatible private clouds without expensive infrastructure commitment. The
architecture of Eucalyptus is simple, flexible, and contains a hierarchy that shows the
common resources of the environment. The Eucalyptus aims at providing a tool for the
development of technologies for the Cloud, with a simple implementation, using tools for
administration and management of the system and the users, with the capacity to
configure several clusters.
The Mle-Moodle is a system designed to operate on mobile devices such as telephones,
PDAs, smartphones and tablets to help m-learning system. It has code free source and it
is free of charge, in addition to having the possibility of adaptation. The access to the
Mle-Moodle can be performed through any browser on any cell phone, but you can also
use the MLE-Client, which is an app especially developed for the process of learning
with mobile devices. In the last decade, the studies on u-learning (ubiquitous learning)
brought new opportunities and new challenges. This environment of Cloud Computing is
implemented with Eucalyptus technology, under an operating system platform Ubuntu
Linux. For the use of the U-SEA in the environment, it was created an instance in Linux,
for the installation of Moodle adapted to the application. The U-SEA operates in a
transparent manner to the user, when the student enters in the environment, this
apparently does not change, having characteristics of u-learning software. When the
student accesses the course, the system verifies his/her connection speed and provides the
materials that are suitable for use in accordance to the identified network. The U-SEA
also provides the tools that will be shown during the use of the application, as an
example, in slow connections the chats are not available, making the navigation and the
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EDT 7000
October 28, 2013

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interaction more quick and appropriate. The adapted environment stores the speeds of the
students connection and the material that were accessed, making it possible the study of
the students profile by providing an improvement in the quality of the lessons in the
distance modality. The computation is moving to a new modality, where all the services
for data storage applications will be available at all times and at any place where the user
has access to the Internet. In this context they are extremely necessary to learning
material be appropriate to the student, the materials are of good quality and the whole
structure of this environment to work in order to provide an appropriate environment for
the structure of teaching and learning. This process shows the need for the improvement
of the VLEs and their adaptation to the requirements to the users. The characteristics of
availability through the technology of Cloud Computing, the adaptation of the content for
the mobile devices of the students and the adequacy of the tools and content for the
context of the student through the connection integrated to VLE Moodle U-SEA u-
learning software.
These are just a few examples of Cloud Computing being used and developed. As I write
this paper there are more improvements and sites of Cloud Computing being offered to
anyone who wants to use them. The battle is whether the computing will be done in a
public or private network. Cloud Computing will change the way we learn, work, and
conduct business now and in the near future.




Jerry Snyder
EDT 7000
October 28, 2013

11

Bibliography
1. A Home for Netbooks in the Classroom, by Dian Schaffhauser, the Magazine,
Nov/Dec 2011.
2. Alternative Assessment in the Cloud, by Paul Baepler, Assessment Update, Mar/Apr
2011.
3. Assessing Teaching Skills with a Mobile Simulation, by David Gibson, Journal of
Digital Learning in Teacher Education, Volume 1 Number 1 2013.
4. Inspiration Goes to the Cloud with Webspiration Classroom, by Electronic Education
Report, 2011.
5. A Survey of Web 2.0 Technologies for Classroom Learning, by Les Pang, The
International Journal of Learning, Volume 16, Number 9, 2009.
6. U-Sea: A Learning Environment Ubiquitous Using Cloud Computing, by S. D.
Piovesan, The International Journal of Emerging Technologies, Volume 7, Number 1,
2012.