Campus Technology 2010 – Monday, part 2

Trends:

• in 1863, Abraham Lincoln recognized that for the U.S. to grow the 2 coasts needed to be connected by railroad reducing travel from 6 months to 6 days
• in 1954, Dwight Eisenhower recognized that a interstate highway system was needed to reduce travel from 62 days to 4 days.

Trends for cloud computing:

1. Widespread wireless access
2. Affordable mobile devices such as Ipads, smart phones, netbooks, they do have limitations – strapped to all students hips – need to find apps that talk to all of these appliances. ITunes has ITunes University – also building a K-12 initiative
3. ASP or Cloud Computing

What is cloud computing?

convergence of 3 trends

• virtualization
• utility computing across a grid
• software is a service

Bottom line it is a powerful, affordable, and scaleable like the electricity grid. Showing us the Spoon site:

He demonstrated how this site that runs applications through a server. First he demonstrated how Spoon runs apps such as Google Earth without loading a site.

Spoon’s business model offers to take campus apps and host them rather than requiring individuals to install software on individual devices.

Side note: Presenter asked if it bothers him that people are not looking at him. He said, no, in fact modern day presenters need to get over that…you have to assume they are paying attention.

Update…

Talking about 21st century learning tools

• Google Docs – Use forms to gather information that is reported in an Excel spreadsheets.
• Google Earth
• Schoolfusion – Content management system – handling
• Collaborative Mind Mapping
• Sliderocket
• ZamZar for converting to .flv.
• Mindmeister – two or three maps for free then subscribe.
• Jing – free version of Camtasia.

As he talks about using the cloud apps and how to integrate them for learning. He mentions that IT departments can’t provide this, but I’m wondering how long all of these apps will remain free. But I can’t help but be excited about these free tools.

Update:

Final hour – we’re starting to talk about DropBox, which is online storage that syncs itself across multiple devices. This is better for the educational community than the corporate world where security and intellectual property protection is paramount.

Next we talk about Jing, the online video creation tool. Like mentioned earlier it is Camtasia Lite from TechSmith. The demonstration for Jing – points out that it can be used to help people with computing issues. Microsoft’s Communicator takes it one better by providing desktop sharing during a chat.