MOBILE LEARNING AND CLOUD COMPUTING IN EDUCATION

All across the globe, students from elementary school through high school are increasingly engaging with advanced wireless devices to collaborate with peers, access rich digital content, and personalize their learning experiences. Mobile learning is a growing trend in classrooms. This trend is creating a more flexible, collaborative, and interactive learning experience in schools and districts. Mobile devices are changing the way educators teach and students process the content. Mobile learning is more than just using a mobile device to access content and communicate with others ? it is about the mobility of the learner. According to Mike Sharples, a leading authority in the field, mobile learning can be defined as: "the processes (both personal and public) of coming to know through exploration and conversation across multiple contexts amongst people and interactive technologies" Sharples, M. et al, 2007. Cloud computing has a lot to do with the Internet. In fact, the Internet has been referred to as ‘cloud’ in recent years because, after all, everyone can access it. Cloud computing has actually evolved from the original concept of the internet, and its purpose has been made broader. Basically, cloud computing allows people to access the Internet and most ? if not all ? of its resources anywhere and anytime. Lawrence Cruz, a writer for Associated Press, defines cloud computing in less technical manner. For Cruz (2011), cloud computing is a collection of applications and technologies which can be accessed and manipulated by a large number of users in real time. In the field of education, cloud computing is very practical for a variety of reasons. Indeed, cloud computing will enable a certain educational institution to actually make use of the global internet resources for data analysis and data storage. Furthermore, the world today is, quite literally, run by the cloud and and cloud-connected technologies. As such, to work independently from this fact is to work with futility.