To a lot people the "cloud" is a mysterious term used by technophiles and T.V. commercials. The commercial that irks me the most is the Microsoft commercial where some tech idiot encounters a problem and a tech-savy person comes along and says "To the cloud". Suddenly the problem is solved and everyone is happy. The worst of these commercials shows a family taking a family portrait and the mom goes "to the cloud" and removes her kids' weird faces for smiling ones. Great job Microsoft, now not only do you have people still wondering "what in the heck is the 'cloud'" but now they think it's some sort of picture editing software. For a good explanation check out Google's 20 Things I Learned about the Internet. It's a great little e-book that will get you all smart-feeling in no time. It takes about 15-20 minutes to read but it's well worth it. Of course, being produced by Google, it's biased towards its own products and rightfully so.
That brings us on to internet browsers. To view content on the internet you have about 4 predominate choices. There is of course Microsoft Internet Explorer with which most of us have been forced to use most of our lives. The other big personal computer company, Apple, offers their own browser named Safari. Both of these browsers are copyrighted and owned by their respective companies. They decide what these browsers can and cannot do. The other two browsers in the running are Mozilla Firefox and Google's Chrome. These two products are open source and anyone with programming smarts can modify the product, the idea being that collaboration between many minds will create a better product. And in many ways, it has.
Now, my intention isn't to compare all of the pros and cons of these products, that can be found all over the internet made by people much more knowledgeable than me (for example, here). But I would rather look at what can be best used by students and teachers to streamline class and make learning easier.
First off you must know I have a built in bias, I'm an Apple fanboy. Being such, I have used Safari for years and have no major complaints, it's a good browser and does what I need it to do. But other than looking better and not crashing, it doesn't have much up on the other browsers.
My other bias: I regularly curse Microsoft (both in the profane and the dark arts). After trying other browsers and using all four of these regularly, I HATE Internet Explorer. It seems like a malicious lackey of our school district's IT department, trying to stop me from introducing new tech into my classroom and hindering my overall productivity. I'm always fighting with this devilish little piece of software trying to get it to do mundane tasks. I could go on, but in the end it just lacks some of the features the other browsers have that I feel should be standard and crashes way to often (IE 10 is supposed to be the bee's knees, but sorry Microsoft, it's too late).
So last year to combat my frustration, I installed Firefox. I had many of the problems solved and really liked some of Firefox's customizable features. It has a great gallery of extensions which allow you to expand the capabilities of the browser. For example, if you want to highlight any old web page and come back later to to see what you've highlighted, you can do it. You can block out swear words instead of whole sites. Being an open source program anyone can pretty much program an extension to do anything they want it to do. I have a friend who made an extension to sort his Netflix queue by how many stars a movie has instead of the default sorting options Netflix has. This is the beauty of open source platforms, they get better all of the time without waiting for the slow cogs at a big software company to turn. I'm sure there are many extensions that could be used in a school setting, but I never had time to explore them.
Lastly we have Google's offering, Chrome. I think that this browser, MUCH more than any of the others can be used in education. If you've read the e-book linked at the beginning of the article you'll be aware of some of its advantages. At the surface Chrome has a much simpler interface than the other browsers. When I introduce new tech to teachers I usually make the mistake of telling them, "it's easy." Most of them reply, "Oh, I've heard that before." For years they've been hearing about how technology is going to simplify their lives and yet every time they attempt to use is the learning curve is so steep they never become proficient users. Everything is trivial once you know it, but if a teacher never learns a new technology they will just feel frustrated, give up and go back to doing what they have always done. But with Chrome it really is easier. Chrome makes great use of HTML5. You don't need to know what this is but just know that IE9 doesn't have it. Here's an example of how this makes the internet easier:
One of the most simple tasks on a computer is attaching a file to an email. This is still a daunting task for many users (sorry Dad). We've all felt the frustration of saving a file and then browsing for it in and endless stream of subfolders. With Chrome (and gmail) you can simply drag the file and drop it on your email to attach it. No more searching. Simple.
The one thing that sets Chrome apart from the rest is its web store. Just like Firefox, the web store has extensions that expand the abilities of the browser. But that not the best part. The web store also allows to install apps in the Chrome browser. FOR FREE! Because many of these apps use a "cloud" nothing is stored on your computer. You can install as many apps as you like and all of your setting are far away in Google's magical server fairy land. You can then sync your Google account to Chrome so no matter what computer you log into, Chrome will save and load all of your settings and apps.
So go check out the app store. There is an education category and a collection of free student apps that you might find useful. I have recently been playing around with a number of these trying to thinks of ways to effectively use them with my curriculum.
Here are a few I might find useful (some of the apps are just links that take you to an outside website, others run in the browser):
Diigo
Art Project
Brightstorm
Cobocards
Evernote
Khan Academy
If you're not already addicted get the Angry Birds app for free!
