Nowadays, having your head in the cloud isn’t so bad. Education is going just that way: a new consortium is forming that is indicative of a major trend in education regarding the use of cloud computing*. Under the direction of New York-based Visions for Education (a 501c3), a global community of instructional technology developers, researchers in pedagogy, educators and students will engage in the eduCloud, a “suite of services, providers, tools, and capabilities rendered in the Cloud to support the K12 institution, teachers, and students.” (eduCloud is defined as “a hosted platform with suitable scalability, redundancy, and capacity, to support a teaching and learning environment where every learner and educator has always-on, real-time access to personal learning technology.”)

A group of member organizations working collaboratively to develop white papers, guidance documents and to act as a focal point for cloud services unique to the K-12 industry, eduCloud’s initial product is a set of requirements for K-12 specific applications—content, tools, assessments—hosted on or accessed through cloud environments. They’ve listed five working groups: 1. Technology infrastructure as a service, platforms, software as a service 2. Provisioning of public private cloud services 3. K-12 System Expectations 4. Educator and instructional implications and 5. Business model implications. Check back here on EdTech Digest to meet the founders of the consortium and what they have to say, meanwhile, find out more about how this group will lay the groundwork for cloud computing in the instructional setting and build up an optimal and shared vision of cloud computing in education overall: eduCloudconsortium.org

*Cloud computing is Internet-based computing whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid. Source: Wikipedia.org