Cloud Computing is transforming education, mostly for the better...

Smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops are increasingly commonplace classroom tools, and they're all linked to an array of educational resources thanks to cloud computing.

Education-oriented cloud computing, which had an estimated market value of $8 billion in 2016, is projected to hit $25 billion by 2021. Flexible and cost-effective, it's been a boon to teachers and students alike, allowing them to assign and complete classwork over the internet.

When Andy Wolfenbarger, a teacher who taught in Virginia's Prince William County public school, had limited time to log grades in his school's computer system before they were due. It didn't help matters, then, when one day that system suddenly went dark.

The mishap, though, was a wake-up call that convinced Wolfenbarger (now supervisor of student information systems) to adopt Amazon's Web Services cloud for all of the county's public schools.

"One of the biggest pain points for teachers is going home and doing grades," he said in an Amazon Web Services blog post. "They never know what is going to happen. Teachers might log in with a magic combination of things....It might work and it might not. Our goal is to create an environment where students, parents and teachers can log in from anywhere, anytime."

Cloud Computing in education

Because cloud computing allows students to instantly access and store homework- and test-related materials on remote servers, their backpacks are lighter and they can work from wherever there's an internet connection. They can also collaborate with classmates on group assignments without having to be in the same room.

Consequently, more and more students are trading notebooks and binders for iPads and laptops, and more teachers are using online platforms to assign and track homework.

Another big draw of cloud computing in education is cost savings.

The Wild Rose school division in rural Canada, which comprises 19 schools and 4,800 students, for years maintained its own data center. But as demand rose, that became economically untenable, so storage was shifted to Microsoft's Azure cloud. The reported savings: $12,000 per year — plus an IT crew that was freed up to do other work.

"Now our annual cost is a third of what it would have been to replace," Travis Paakki, Sr. Director of Technology for Portland Public Schools, told Amazon of his district's decision to forego a data center revamp in favor of cloud migration. "And we now have increased capacity and disaster recovery – things we didn’t have access to with an on-premises data center."

As education continues its technological transformation, lots of businesses are vying to facilitate the transition.