Sixty-five percent of districts surveyed in a report from the Consortium of School Networking are using cloud services to provide mobile learning to students, according to DistrictAdministration.com

The report, called the 2015 "K-12 IT Leadership Survey Report" found a rapid increase of 55% more districts using cloud services this year from last.

“'Districts are becoming more comfortable with cloud services—it’s just a natural evolution of the market,' says Bob Moore, project director for CoSN’s Protecting Privacy in Connected Learning," according to the article.

According to Moore, districts are electing to use cloud services because "don’t require students to have to pass through a district firewall to access programs" and they "tend to be less expensive than other software."

Moore says that the advantages of cloud services will result in more and more districts signing up, but warns that administrators are careful and well educated about proliferation of student data.

After all, one of the biggest concerns with using cloud services is keeping track of student data. Data security is in the hand of districts and they must ensure "contracts comply with FERPA laws" and also must know if the provider is sharing student data with a third party.

“'If you’re going to trust cloud applications, you need to absolutely make sure you are asking the cloud service provider a lot of hard questions about the security provisions they take, and make sure that certain provisions are included in your contract,' Moore says," according to the article.

Read the full article here and comment below.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

4/22/2015