Cloud Fundamentals

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Author’s Note Cloud Fundamentals The cloud is one of those terms that most people don’t understand and difficult to conceptualize. I was recently approached to provide a parent technology academy. The goal of the academy is to provide a very basic introduction to technology. This is a very broad topic so I thought we should focus on the most relevant aspects that parents could use with their children. Most technology today uses a Cloud service of some kind. Their children are most likely to use these services and I’m sure they’d like to know what their children are doing on Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. I proposed to provide an overview of the Cloud and what it means to them as they begin to use technology. The immediate feedback by the parent coordinator for the district was hesitation and uncertainty. She was concerned most parents wouldn’t understand the concept. I reassured her that I teach this concept to teachers daily and that I could convey the concept very well to parents. She remained unconvinced. This started me thinking of ways in which I could convey the concept in a way that was easy for most people to understand. I thought of my audience and figured most of them would be at least my age or younger. I’m 51 so most of them could have been my students at one time. It’s much easier to teach a concept that is based on a concept they understands. I thought of one that has been around for a long enough time and something that everyone has had some experience using. Most people have had some experience with radios and music stations. A radio station seems to me to be the closest analogy to a cloud service. It’s something we interact with regularly but don’t have direct access. For example, we can interact with the radio station through a Disk Jockey, DJ, by requesting songs on those lazy Sunday afternoons. Theory is great but I like my students to learn in context so I’ve included instructions for creating Cloud accounts with Google, Microsoft and Apple. I’ll be using these services along with others in future issues. Teaching through a magazine is different from teaching in a classroom. I don’t get your immediate feedback or get a chance to get formative feedback. So, I hope I’ve done a good job. Alex Reyes The cover for this magazine was inspired by artwork from graphicstock.com. 2 Digital Maestro
Digital Maestro 3 Cloud Fundamentals Cloud Services The concept of the Cloud is very important because future technologies used by yourself and students will be based on cloud services. These cloud services include email, Google Docs, Office 365, iCloud and many others. The cloud is very new to many people but in fact it’s been around for a very long time. I’ll begin my explanation of the cloud by referring to something that we all know very well. Think of a radio station. Radio stations send out signals that deliver audio in the form of music and news. A radio station has a library of music that it streams over the air to your radio. You can receive this stream of music from any radio in a variety of locations. You can listen to music in your car, in your stereo at home and on a portable radio in the park. In this example the radio station is like the Cloud, providing a service to everyone. Let’s take that same example and say that the radio station can provide you a channel of your own. This channel is your own special channel where you can listen to the music of your choice at any time and from anywhere. You can listen to this music from your car, your home and in the park. Now you have access to the same cloud service everyone else does, but you’ll have a special channel all your own. With this special channel you can choose the music you want to listen to and the order in which you would like to have it played. This is probably starting to sound familiar. Let’s replace the radio station with a computer. This is a very big and very fast computer. This computer puts out information that other computers around the world can access. To access this computer your computer tunes into the computers channel much like a radio tunes into a channel from a radio station. On a radio station this channel might be 88.5. On a computer this station number is a little longer. It’s usually a set of numbers separated by periods like this, nn.nn.nn.nn. Instead of remembering numbers, which can be hard, a computer translates our language into the computer language of numbers. Instead of numbers we can use gmail.com for the computer channel. It’s a lot like telling your phone to call your wife by tapping on the button with your wife’s name. You don’t need to know the number because the computer, will dial it for you. The computer putting out information is a cloud device. This is where the difference between radio stations and computers begins to change, but let’s see if we can have it make sense. Let’s say that you can send music to the radio station and it will play this music over your station. You can then go onto any radio where you have access and tune in your station to listen to the music. Now you can listen to your purchased music on any radio. Going back to the computer example, we can do the same thing. The computer, which we will call a server, can receive media from us like music and provide it to us on any device. This computer can receive content from us and make it available to us on any device we want. Instead of music, let’s say you have lots of pictures. You want to be able to see your pictures from any device. This device can be a computer, tablet or smart phone. You can send pictures to a cloud service, let’s call it Flickr. Flickr receives the pictures and then makes them available on any device.
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