The cloud is becoming a place where small schools — even individual classes or assignments — can do their educating in the connective digital ecology. Educators early on thought of top-down, systemwide ways for wiring schools and managing digital edu stuff. At the Web 2.0 Expo I found an example of a method that works in the opposite way. What I found works for projects other schools, of course, but I have been looking for how Web 2.0 can impact teaching and learning, and here is a powerful way:

The Morph AppCloud is a fully managed environment — monitored, backed up, updated, etc. — within the cloud where apps can, for example, service a single school project. Costs are tiny, in the range up from $30 a month. Projects are, Morph explains: “Highly Customizable. Easily customize your platform components according to your business needs with a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies setup.”

The Morph folks have a morph eXchange website with a growing list of free applications that can run for users in the cloud. An example of these that could be excellent for classes that require reports from students is a self-publishing app. A user can create a book of any length and in doing so be supported by features such as indexing, table of contents, etc. An individual teacher/class can use this app directly and cheaply — yet be state-of-the-art, doing education in the cloud.

The cloud is becoming a place where small schools — even individual classes or assignments — can do their educating in the connective digital ecology. Educators early on thought of top-down, systemwide ways for wiring schools and managing digital edu stuff. At the Web 2.0 Expo I found an example of a method that works [...]