I was looking at the different cloud drives and how these can benefit teachers and students. There are many different drives to choose from. Some of the drives you can sign up for are: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and Skydrive. When you sign up for these programs you can get up to 16 gig free storage. These drives allow you to integrate them into your Windows program, They run in the background and when you save a document you can choose to save directly to one of the cloud drives. You can retrieve your document from any computer or smartphone. There are even some tablets that you can see your document from. Cloud drives are a great way to share documents with other people. You can make folders to share with others. It is a great collaboration tool. There can be more than one person working on a document.
I use all of the different cloud drives. They all have different attributes that work better for different applications. In one of my classes we used the Google drive to collaborate. It works great with Google + when we had meetings online. It holds all of our documents and hangout notes. This way if anyone missed a meeting then they could look back at the notes. There is another program that links all the cloud drives together it is called Cloud Magic. This program links all the drives into one place. You set up all your accounts so you can search for any document.
I think this is a great addition for the teachers to share with their students. This will help the student keep in touch with the assignments and you as the teacher. How else do you think this may be useful? DO you think this is a good fit for your class?
Hi Kristin,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great posting on Cloud Drives. I am a big fan and supporter for using cloud as a data backup tool which I wrote about it in one of my previous blog posts. I have been faithfully using Google+, Dropbox, and Google Drive for saving important documents and multimedia. However, I’m not very familiar with Skydrive. I just recently came across some office web apps that are linked with Skydrive. You can actually create a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet, or an Excel Survey directly in Skydrive. Also, the formatting features mirror the actual office software program. With Google Drive, I think the document and spreadsheet formatting features does not compare and are difficult to navigate at times. In regards to the Box drive, I recently signed up for this to use with my work computer and I’m still trying to familiarize myself with the features. One cool thing I’ve come across so far is the “Box for Office” app. It’s a free add-on that imbeds a widget directly into your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint program on your PC. This widget allows you to open, share, and save documents within the program. Therefore, you don’t need to use the old File/Save as options. Box has some other great free apps as well for different tasks. I’ve never heard of Cloud Magic but I will definitely look into it.
Thanks for introducing me to some additional cloud drives.
Skydrive was one of the first cloud drives I used. It is from Microsoft. You can use an account called a Live account it links your Hotmail and skydrive. It is also used for Windows 8 sign in.
DeleteKristin-
ReplyDeleteExcellent, informative post of how to incorporate cloud drives in the classroom. I was having a difficult time trying to think about how my students could work on their digital storytelling projects both at school and at home, if needed. Being able to use a cloud drive may have just solved my problem! I am familiar with the names of each that you described, but have never used any of them myself for saving purposes. I guess I have a new weekend project!
I just signed up for a Dropbox account and was incredibly easy to do! I am in the process of transferring some of my school files in order to have access to them on the weekends and don't have to cart all my flash drives back on forth each time! What a great tool for teachers!
Thanks for sharing about Cloud Drives!
Beth
I am glad this helped you. This technology is going to make flash drive obsolete. As long as you can get on the Internet you can work on your files.
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