To an everyday technology user a decade ago, clouds were simply floating masses of condensed water vapor to watch on a lazy day. Over the past year, however, the term has exploded and become a dominating force in today’s world of information exchange.

Despite the massive growth of cloud computing, for many educators, the concept of “the Cloud” is still rather nebulous (pun intended). Cloud offers immense benefits that are transforming the education industry and needs to be fully optimized throughout districts as not only a tool in content storage, but also in content creation.

Cloud entails hosting information on the internet, in remote servers. Many teachers have already unknowingly dabbled in cloud use through platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox. Here are 5 highlighted benefits of the Cloud in education.

Collaboration

District-wide networks allow open communication and information transfer. Sharing files no longer means uploading resources to a USB drive. Rather, you can upload work to your system, where it is immediately available to the rest of your network. Cloud platforms provide transparency between teachers and, if need be, higher-level supervisors and parents. In terms of lesson content creation, this network gives teachers the opportunity to openly share their favorite resources and pull the best information from each other.

Flexibility

Teachers can access stored data from virtually any device as long as there is internet connection. Cloud offers ultimate workspace mobility so that forgetting your laptop at home does not disable you in your productivity. Also, hardware updates, which were formerly immense overhauls, are reduced to simple online updates. Without all of the equipment commitment, districts have the freedom to switch between service subscriptions to find their best option.

Productivity

Easy access to online lesson files at any time without the hassles of sifting through stacks of paper files translates into much needed time saved. Cloud storage streamlines lesson resource management by placing files wherever they are needed, whenever they are needed.

Cost efficiency

In a budget-sensitive industry like education, managing expenses is especially important. Districts no longer need to pay high, upfront costs for data storage hardware. All of the heavy-duty machinery is managed remotely, which also means no more machine maintenance expenses.

Security

A crash in an in-house district server no longer jeopardizes the security of files. Security features are managed by the cloud service and various versions of them are automatically backed up.

Although understanding the concepts of Cloud computing can seem abstract, its vast benefits when applied to EdTech are very concrete. Cloud-based platforms are powerful, cost-effective tools that give individual teachers as well as district networks the freedom and transparency to deliver exceptional instruction. This is why we created UClass.io to optimize Cloud services. To find out more about UClass.io features, click here.