Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Is software in the cloud the future for education?

In education, we have become very aware of the benefits of 'the cloud' through the use of VLEs, Learning Platforms, Google Apps for Education and other such services.  Files and content are often saved online in order to be easily accessible and to allow greater collaboration and sharing.  My colleague Lucy (@lj101) attended a course over the summer organised by NAACE where she was introduced to Point2Educate (at the time called Stream2Schools) which seems an interesting extension of 'the cloud', in that instead of hosting files and content, it hosts software, both free (open source) and commerical (rental) that schools can access both at school and at home.  This got me thinking...is this the future for schools in regard to how they manage their networks and software?