That IS the question! When cloud computing first came out, I was EXTREMELY skeptical. I was really going to put all my data out there? Where anyone could get it? Looking back, it is how my parents first reacted to gift cards. What? I am going to put money on a card? Why not just use cash?

Until this year, I have scrupulously backed up my computer every week to a separate hard drive. Even though work also backed up my computer to their server, I didn’t trust it. And there were a few times over the last 12 years where my backup came in use because their’s failed. It means they have gotten used to me being responsible for my own data. Last year, the school put us all into the cloud for automatic backups, which is why a year later, I gave up on backing up. Backups are useless when the tech department decides to no longer purchase the application for documents you have backed up. So I switched to updating all my documents to the cloud apps with backups to the cloud.

Forward to this weekend, when the intermittent freezing of my computer became more consistent while I was, of course, in Vancouver. Yes, I could get all my cloud backed up documents on my daughter’s computer, but she was needing to use it! Since mine was a school computer, I couldn’t do the diagnostics on it that I wanted to because I didn’t have that type of administrator control. I limped along till I returned to Victoria and took ‘lappie’ in to the office where it was confirmed, her trackpad and keyboard were going into cardiac arrest. So now, I have a loaner computer, with a personal computer in the mail, slowly separating my school files and my personal files into their separate cloud storage spaces.  Thank goodness for the cloud, because I wouldn’t have been hauling my backup with me to Vancouver

Being in the cloud and away from home is convenient. And I have nothing really personal stored in the cloud – no budgeting or banking information, few pictures, and limited personal information. My educator hat is there. I have had the lovely experience of having my bank and credit cards stopped because of identity theft and have had to shut down 3 different credit cards taken out in my name. And I traced the situation to a particular card that I use only when working as an IBEN educator which I used in Los Angeles back when they still took your credit card away from you to put it through a machine. Lesson learned.

But in my work as an IBEN educator, I can never rely on internet access or people having the skills to deal with a Google drive. I bring multiple flash drives with the drive information on them so participants can share. But they are adults and are supposedly informed about their cloud usage and sharing decisions. They have the choice to share through Google drive or through the flash drives. Yet, what about work with students?

Our school asks parents and students to sign permission forms which detail the programs we use and where the information is stored. If I want to start using another program with my students, it has to go through our Risk Management and another permission form needs to be signed. If, as part of my research project for my masters’, I am going to use any social media platform, online app or the cloud with minors and not go through a school, I need to research the platforms and the personal legal implications: Trello, Twitter, Feedly, Slack, WhatsApp, BlueJeans, FlipGrid, EverNote, even the hosting server. It is my responsibility to ensure the safety of the students accessing the resources I am considering curating, creating and monitoring, as well as the safety of their personal information. As well, I need to find apps that are established enough that they do not become defunct soon and find a way to track student work that students will enjoy following – I like the suggestion I was given of a wordpress site .

I would really like whatever I create to have experiences in the inquiry model. I firmly believe that it is a great motivator, even when students may not feel particularly gifted in a subject area. Between Trevor MacKenzie‘s visit and Jeff Hopkin‘s visits to class, my interest in making some online math interest connections are stronger. I also found some interesting reads in the November 2016 edition of “The Mathematics Teacher”.  What might be the most helpful is the dissertation written by Peidi Gu, one of the authors of the article I found for Edci 515, Promoting Students’ Motivation and Use of SRL Strategies in the Web-Based Mathematics Learning Environment. The whole thing may just be too much of a dream, but I have to start somewhere.

Dreamer, by Roger Hodgson, was first recorded by SuperTramp on the album Crime of the Century, 1974. Note: audio is in compliance with fair dealing under the Copyright Act and with the SoundCloud site.