iCloud Tutorial - Apple iCloud

in this video tutorial I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna be saved into my iCloud pages but it's also gonna 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

Channel: Technology for Teachers and Students

Views: 956,694

Keywords: icloud tutorial, apple icloud, cloud computing, apple icloud tutorial, apple cloud, pages online, numbers online, keynote online, icloud, using apple icloud, using icloud, accessing icloud, find my iphone, find my ipad, find my apple device, how to use icloud

Id: DTbtXQU_P3Y

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2017