Last week at Mobile Users Group here at BTC, we talked about the cloud and how it can help us as instructors.

If you are unfamiliar, ‘The Cloud’ simply refers to a way of storing media or files on a server where we can access them from anywhere. Gone are the days of keeping files on your computer and emailing them back and forth. The cloud provides easy ways to share content and collaborate.

We broke Cloud-based tools into 2 categories. Examples are provided below.

Cloud services for a Specific Purpose (stores a specific thing or set of things)

• Youtube (videos)
• Flickr (photos and videos)
• Educreations (simple screencasts)
• Google Drive (collaborative documents
• Blogs (articles, journals, images, etc.) (ex. WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc)
• Evernote (notes, including images, text, audio, etc)

Cloud services for File storage and sharing

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• Skydrive

These services can be combined with other software, but what you use and how you use it is so unique the individual, it would take a long time to describe every way they could be used. So explore, and have fun!