Journal 1- Computing in the Clouds-NETS III & V

Johnson, D. (2009/2010, December/January). Learning and leading with technology. Computing in the Clouds, 37(4), Retrieved from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/200912#pg1 

    This was a great article to read, for so it could help many schools and people save a lot of money. Cloud computing is a set of programs that allow us to complete many tasks, such as creations of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and surveys, best of all, these programs are free! Cloud computing will save you money and time, which is very important to know because we are all in great need of these two. The advantages of cloud computing are many: some of our local computers don’t have to hold much information on its hard drive, runs faster and you can work on any project anywhere no matter what computer you are using. No worrying about saving things into flash drives, nor keeping track of the latest versions of documents and even better no worrying about having the right software to open a file! I used to have so many problems with having the right software to open my files, it used to stress me out so much! This one is a great relief for so many people! Wiki and googledocs are two cloud computing applications where you can easily share and collaboratively edit your files with others and you can open these files in any computer! Another good thing about cloud computing is that it allows us to use less powerful computers such as netbooks. Netbooks are low cost computers and basically all you need is a web browser, antivirus, and spyware. Netbooks saves you some money and if schools were able to substitute their old computers for netbooks and use cloud computing programs then schools would save a lot of money, these savings can be used to improve our schools in so many ways and it would benefit our students so much. 

Do I see myself using a netbook? After reading this article I am more encouraged to buy a netbook. I have been wanting to buy myself a laptop and a netbook seems to be the perfect one for me. Right now I don’t have a computer and so its really hard to try to complete all my assignments on time, for so there is always many inconveniences that I run through trying to find the right time and computer to do my homework.  As the article describes the netbooks, it says they are very inexpensive, battery life is good, wireless connectivity is fast, very lightweight and all we need to buy is a web browser, anti virus and spyware. It would really save me a lot of money and time, best of all it would relieve me from some unnecessary stress!

What do I think schools should do? I definitely think schools should change to netbooks when planning to get new computers and to use cloud computing to complete all required work at school and home. If schools learn, train, and use this cloud computing system they would be saving a lot of money that can be used for other important programs in our schools.