Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “iCloud Tutorial – Apple iCloud”.
In this article tutorial, I’m gon na try to cover, in a short amount of time, a wonderful tool that many users of Apple products don’t even know that they have access to now. Many others know that they have access to it, but don’t really use it to its full potential. And so the topic of this video is Apple’s iCloud and how to start using it. And what is it good for if you use an Apple product, whether it be an iPod, an iPhone, whether it be an iPad, a laptop and iMac, even if you’ve just purchased something from iTunes chances? Are you have an iCloud account to access? This account simply go to iCloud calm when you get there, you’ll see something like this and you can click to sign into iCloud, now notice what it’s asking for it’s asking for your Apple ID and, like I said chances, are you already have one of these? So try putting in the email address that you think is associated with your Apple account. You know: how do you sign into iTunes? How do you sign into the App Store whatever email address is associated with that try putting it in here and then the password? If you don’t remember it notice what you can do, there’s a link here to try to recover your Apple ID or password. If you’re really brand new to using Apple products, you might have to click this link to create an Apple ID. So give me a few seconds to sign into my iCloud account and then we’ll proceed once you sign in it’ll take a few seconds possibly, but then it will bring up your Apple tools that you have available to you online. As I said before, a lot of people use Apple products and they might use Apple Mail. They might use numbers or pages or keynote. They might use notes on their smart phone, but not realize that they have access to these tools as well online. In the cloud in the form of iCloud com, so let’s take a look quickly at many of these tools that are at your disposal online. The first is mail. Now this is just an online version of your Apple Mail account so think of this as being kind of like Outlook, a lot of people install Microsoft, Outlook on their computer and have it running from their computer, but it also exists line in the form of outlook.com.
Well, that’s basically what this is. This is Apple Mail, but instead of being installed on your computer and instead of you accessing it on your computer, you’re accessing it in the cloud you can see that I’ve got my different folders here. I’Ve got my VIPs. I’Ve got trash, I’ve got sent so some of the typical folders that you’re used to having are there.
You can always add a new folder just by clicking this plus sign okay, and you can just type it in I mean this is very much like using Apple Mail on your computer, but instead you’re doing it online. Let’S say you want to compose a message: you can just click here to create a new message put in who it’s to put in the subject put in the content. You can also attach images or files here and there’s some formatting options, so pretty basic, pretty simple, but this is nice that you have access to Apple Mail in the cloud using iCloud calm. Not only do you have Apple Mail, but if you click here on iCloud, you can also get access to all these other things.
Let’S look quickly at contacts when you click on contacts. It brings up names of people that maybe you’ve added on your smartphone or your tablet or your iPod, and this is their contact information and you can click to go in and to edit some of that information. So for some of us it’s a little hard to do this on an iPhone, because it’s so small right, I feel a little bit more comfortable making these edits on my computer using iCloud. Now you can also create new contacts here in iCloud. Just go down click! The plus sign create a new contact or even a new group of contacts and then just start filling out the form first name last name phone number.
You can even add photos and so forth. So this is something that honestly, I don’t spend a lot of time. Doing this on my phone because it’s such a hassle and the phone is so small and all that, but using iCloud, I could see myself adding a lot more contacts.
This way. Next up, I’m going to click in the upper left and switch to calendar. This is the iCloud version of it and you can see it’s it’s a typical calendar application. Okay, you can go forward in time.
You can go back in time. You can switch at the bottom to a day view a week view or a month view. I’M gon na go back to a week view and you can add events very simply just by clicking and dragging on the day and the times that make up the event.
So this is very similar to the Outlook calendar as well as to Google Calendar. You can just go in and type in the name of the event, I’m gon na click to switch now to photos now. Photos is especially useful if you have chosen to backup all of your device photos to iCloud.
So if you enable this all the photos, you take, whether it be from your iPhone, your iPad and iPod Touch or a Mac, those will all be uploaded into your iCloud photos and it also works with videos. Now I don’t have a paid iCloud account. I just use the free storage that is given to me automatically, and so I have opted not to do this. I don’t back up my photos with iCloud.
Instead, I use Google photos for that, but if you are willing to pay to upgrade your storage on iCloud, this would be a great way to backup your photos and have a collection of all the videos and photos that you take. I just clicked back to get back here, but I just as well could have clicked here in the upper left to go to the next part of iCloud. Both methods work well to get back here to these options. Okay, so we’ve looked at these first four tools, and these are all great, but this next one is particularly useful. It’S called iCloud Drive and I’m gon na click on that to open it up and as it’s loading. Let me just tell you that this is very similar to Dropbox it’s similar to Microsoft, onedrive to Google Drive.
This is a way and a place for you to store files and folders and pictures and whatever it might be and they’ll be stored here, so that you can access them whenever and wherever you need to now, you can see it’s automatically created some folders for me. I have created and/or uploaded some pages documents, some numbers documents and keynote documents, and also an app called just press record, and so because of that it automatically created these folders for me, and I can double click to go in and get a glimpse of the documents That are there in my iCloud Drive for now, though, I’m just gon na back out to the main iCloud Drive screen, because I want you to see how to add files and other items into your drive. And it’s really as simple as just clicking here, where it has a picture of a cloud with an arrow going up right for upload, so I’m gon na click on that and then it pulls up My Documents folder on my computer. So it’s having me look on my computer for a document to upload and I’m gon na go into my downloads cuz. I know I have some documents there and I’d like to upload this Civil War, history, quiz and I just double clicked on it, and it is uploading a copy of that quiz into my account. So this is a great way for you to backup files and folders and other documents that you have on your computer, or maybe that colleagues send to you. It’S a nice way to start collecting the documents that you’re gon na need in your career.
So now I have that, in my account I can click and drag and put it into the pages folder, and that would make a lot of sense. This is a Pages document, but I just wanted you to see how easy it is to get a document in there now there are other ways to do it. Okay, one of the other easier ways is to simply click and drag and drop a document from your desktop into this window, and it will upload it. So that’s another way to get documents and other files into your iCloud drive once they’re in there. You can double click on them to open them up, and this is really a very short quiz.
It’S a work in progress, but there it is – and this is a document that I will be able to access wherever I am because it’s in my iCloud drive now notice that you can also add folders. So if you want to create your own folder structure, maybe you can put in one for history and then you could create another folder for language, arts and so forth, and then you could put the different documents into the folders that are appropriate. Now. Not only can you upload files and folders and documents and you can create folders, but you can also download, so I could download a particular document.
Let’S say just by clicking on it. The download button appears and I could click to. I can also delete documents and I can email documents right from within the iCloud drive. So this is a very useful tool, like I said before, it’s similar to Dropbox, it’s similar to onedrive and Google Drive, but it’s nice to have one that is specific to Apple and Apple products.
Now, if you are working on your Mac, if that’s the device that you’re using especially a laptop or an iMac, you can go here to finder and you should be able to find your iCloud drive here at the left in your list of favorites okay. So this makes it even easier to put things into your iCloud Drive, just open the finder click on iCloud Drive and drag anything you want into this folder and whatever you put, there will be uploaded backed up into the iCloud Drive now in a future. Video I’d like to show you some of the nice features of keynote on line numbers on line and pages on line, but for now that’s all I’ll say about iCloud Drive it’s time now to go and take a quick look at notes. So I’m gon na click on that and open it up, and this is just what you would expect it’s similar to the Notes.
App. That’S on your iPhone or your iPad. You can click to create a note, a new note and then you can just click.
To begin writing the note now, depending on your settings on your smart phone and on your tablets, let’s say this note could be synced to your devices, and so you could create a note or edit a note here in iCloud, and it should be saved to your Other devices, but again that depends on the syncing settings that you have on your devices. Okay, we also have reminders online in iCloud and, if you click through these you’ll see that these are the same reminders on your smart phone. The same reminders on your tablet, but you have access to them here. You can create a new reminder any time just by clicking on the kind of reminder and then new item, and then you can put in what that reminder is. You can even put in the details, for example, if you want to be reminded.
When would you like to be reminded and then you can put in notes as well. So again, these should be some familiar tools. You we probably use many of these tools, but what iCloud does is it brings them all together in the cloud and you can access them whenever and wherever you want to these next three, I’m just gon na gloss over quickly, but just know that you can access Pages online, you don’t even have to have pages installed on your computer, you just go to icloud.com sign in and you can create pages documents online for free. I can just click, create document.
They’Ve got different templates reports, envelopes, etc, or you can just pick a blank. One, you click and it loads up an interface that you can use to create a Pages document which, if you’re not familiar with pages, is very similar to Microsoft. Word! Okay, so I can create this document and when I’m done, I can ex out, and that document is gon na be saved into my iCloud pages.
But it’s also gon na be in my iCloud drive. Numbers works very similarly, as does keynote okay, so numbers is like Excel and keynote is like Microsoft PowerPoint. But it’s really wonderful that you can create these online for free using your iCloud account.
So I highly recommend that you check out these aspects of iCloud and help you do that. I plan to make some videos that focus specifically on these tools. Next up in our list of online tools in iCloud, we have find friends, and this is for those of you that use the app.
This is a way that you can track friends and know where they are and I’ll be honest. I find this a little bit. Creepy, so I don’t use find friends, but I think that it’s cool that you can sign into it here if you’d like what I do use all the time is find iPhone.
Okay, this is the same app Find My iPhone. That’S on your iPhone. It’S probably on your iPad, but you can also access it here online in iCloud, so I can be at work. I can be out at a school in a library wherever I might be, and I can click this sign in and see where my kids iPods are.
I can see where my iPhone is. If let’s say I forgot, it left it at home. I can see where my tablet is and so forth. So it’s a really nice tool to be able to sign in online without even having your other devices with you and find out where they are. Okay.
The last two parts of the iCloud suite of tools are number one settings, and if you click on settings it opens it up. It gives you an overview of the storage that you have left in your account. It gives you a list of your devices, and it gives you an option up here at the top to manage your Apple ID.
Maybe you need to add a credit card or change the credit card or whatever it might be, the time zone, the language and then down here at the bottom. There are some advanced options where you can restore lost contacts. You can restore files, calendars reminders. You could sign out with one-click.
You could sign out of all browsers that are currently signed in to iCloud comm and there’s a few more things that you can do as well. So it’s nice to have all of those iCloud settings right there at your fingertips. Okay, now there was one more wasn’t there.
There was another little app symbol here. It’S disappeared and you’ll understand why in just a minute, but normally if you’re in one of the iCloud apps and then you click here in the upper left, you’ll see this little app symbol for Launchpad and all launchpad is. Is it’s a way to see all of these tools in a bigger layout and I think in a more attractive way? Okay, so this is launchpad alright. So if you’re ever in one of these tools and decide hey, I want to get back to the main menu. That’S a good way to do it, just click in the upper left and then click launchpad, okay.
So that was a quick overview of each of these tools that help make up your icloud comm account. I hope that that’s been useful and that you’ll start using these. So many people that use Apple products just never get to icloud.com and never fully use these wonderful tools, so I hope you’ll check it out and in the future, look for videos that will focus on pages online numbers online and keynote online thanks for watching, and please Consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new video, at least every Monday. .