November, 2011

Interesting story in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald, about the dilemma for today’s students. Their everyday learning is commonly taking place on or with a computer - writing essays in Word not with a pencil, researching online as much as through books, and developing high level skills as they draft, revise and improve their assignments in the same way you and I do in the workplace. And then we put them into an exam hall with pencil and paper, and expect them to work completely differently for their high stakes tests.

Rachel Olding’s article “The pen’s no longer mightier but still important” takes a look at the challenges that creates. It covers the changes between the ways and tools students are learning, and they tools they use in critical assessments. And it includes this insight:

	…a student at Riverside Girls High, says some classmates had taped batteries and weights to pens to strengthen hand muscles weakened by tapping away on keyboards.

Almost diverted my eye from the bizarre references to Moodle as ‘noodles’

Read the original SMH article "The pen's no longer mightier but still important"

Over the weekend, a friend of my daughter was excited about the idea of becoming a spy for a career, and how her careers officer had failed to mention it as part of her career planning. So my daughter decided to help her by finding out how you get a job as a spy.

My father-in-law said it was all about the ‘old boy network’, but he was quickly corrected when we found out that MI5 - the UK security agency equivalent of ASIO - run job ads on their website in the same way as another organisation).

So we went online to look at their job ads. And it turns out if you want to get a job as a spy, these days you need to know how to use business applications like Excel and Access [link]

And linking back to the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, ‘What skills do your students need to work in the world’s best workplaces’, it seems that’s true for lots of other companies.

Of course, if you want to work at Microsoft, knowing how to use Microsoft software is an absolute must. And the same applies for many other jobs in other companies. A colleague in the US spotted that if you want to work at Google, you’re going to need the same kinds of skills. When he checked last week, there were 88 open jobs on their website that required either Excel or PowerPoint experience [link]

So as your students start to make choices about the subjects they are studying, remind them that the right choice of the skills and qualifications they can get at school, TAFE and university will be critical when it comes to getting their first, second or even tenth job.

Maybe that’s why we’re seeing lots of education systems around the world taking advantage of the IT Academy programme, where students can get technical and/or proficiency qualifications as they progress through the education system. Students could leave with a high level technical qualification on their resume, such as Microsoft Certified Professionals, Microsoft Technology Associates or Microsoft Office Specialists. (And you’d also give them a great intro to the acronym-tastic modern workplace, with MCP, MTA & MOS as starters!)

Some of the IT Academy participants include North Carolina, KL University, Boston City Campus and Business College, Washington State and Box Hill TAFE in Australia.

Learn more about the Microsoft IT Academy programme

Since we launched the new Microsoft licensing programmes for education earlier this year, with their snappy names of EES (Enrolment for Education Solutions) and OVS-ES (Open Value Subscription for Education Solutions), we’ve had good feedback on how they have radically simplified licensing for our education customers.

I was in Melbourne speaking at an event a couple of weeks ago, and one school actually said to me “I keep telling the other companies we deal with that they need to make their licensing much simpler, like yours is now.”. As a 25 year veteran of Microsoft education licensing, I can assure you that was a bit of surprising (and pleasant) moment!

What the scheme does is to allow schools to simply count their Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) staff, and then decide which software to license, and that gives them their core desktop licensing agreement under either scheme. Then they add on a ‘student option’ for any devices that are dedicated 1:1 for students, and any additional products (like servers and Microsoft Project/Visio etc), and then they’re done. There’s a similar scheme (just under EES for their servers too).

• EES is for organisations or consortia with more than 1,000 FTEs
• OVS-ES is for organisations with less than 1,000 FTEs

Many customers are saving money under the new scheme, and one of the significant benefits is that it takes out the peaks and troughs of IT spend, as instead of big lumps of software purchases, you pay a single consistent subscription fee each year.

Although many education customers already know about this in Australia - of the 3,000+ non-state schools, nearly half have signed up to the scheme - there are still lots of individual schools out there (independent and catholic schools) that would benefit from looking at the new schemes to replace their existing licensing arrangements.

Ultimately, the choice is there for the customer to decide which one works best for them, but to encourage all of our Authorised Education Resellers (AER) to have the conversation with their customers, we’re running an incentive programme for education partners until the end of December, which is applicable to partners promoting the OVS-ES programme for customers with less than 1,000 FTEs.

If you’re a Microsoft Education partner in Australia…

If you’re an AER, you should have heard about the programme from us directly by email, but just in case you haven’t, you can register and find out more at the EEScore website (What are the odds we’ve sent the email to somebody who’s out on holiday for a month, and when they come back, it’ll be down the bottom of their inbox?)

If you’re not an AER, then I assume you’re not selling licences to education customers (because only AERs have access to the special academic pricing), but if you want to, there’s more info on the AER programme here.

There are two webinars coming up for partners, covering both the EES and OVS-ES programme, on 17th November and 1st December - both at 10:00-10:30AM. You can register here

If you’re an Education customer in Australia…

If you’re a customer and buy your own licences, and you’ve not heard about this from your regular Microsoft partner yet (either EES or OVS-ES), then I suggest you get them on the phone, as you don’t want to be last to find out the details! If you want to find your local Authorised Education Reseller, then you can look them up on this AER Search page

Learn more about our Academic licensing programmes

I’ve had such a hectic week that I’ve not really had the time to sit down and write a detailed blog post about an education initiative today.

So I thought I would share a little bit about what’s going on in my head, and it’s a thought that came out of a meeting with a partner in Sydney this morning. I was thinking about the reasons to blog, and came to a realisation that at the moment:

I blog to learn

What does ‘I blog to learn’ mean?

Mike Phillips wrote an excellent article - 8 reasons you should blog - on his EatSleepSocial blog last year. And as I was preparing to deliver a blogging workshop, I was looking at the list again:

1. Learn something new about your industry
2. Learn something new about yourself
3. Learn from being criticised
4. Demonstrate thought leadership – don’t just be a sheep
5. Be part of the community
6. Be transparent and authentic
7. Use your free time constructively
8. Create a movement

I first read it last year, and at the time my reasons to blog were mainly down the lower end of his list. But since moving to Australia in January and starting this new blog I’ve realised that’s changed. I’ve been plunged into a completely new continent, market, job and community of people, and so I am now blogging more often as a process of self-learning - because in order to write a blog post that makes sense, I have to be sure I know what I’m talking about (most of the time )

It means that it takes me longer to write a blog post than it used to, because I have to do more research to get the context right. But every single blog process forces me to learn more. In Mike’s list, here’s what his top 3 reasons mean to me:

Learn something new about your industry

For yesterday’s blog post about the looming teacher shortage in Australia, I had to go and do a bunch of research on Australian statistics to understand the story behind the headline, and to write something that added depth to the headline story).

Learn something new about yourself

I try and write a blog post every weekday. If you don’t blog yourself, that may not sound tricky, but I can assure you it is - especially as I try very hard to make sure that everything is in the context of readers who work in or with Australian education institutions, and have an interest in ICT. My typical blog posts are 600+ words, so that’s 3,000+ words a week on top of everything else I’m doing.

Learn from being criticised

I’ve been blogging for six years now, so I’ve learnt to develop a thick skin, because it’s much easier to criticise on the web - especially if (like this blog) you allow people to comment freely. And I always look at it as feedback and try not to take it to heart if somebody tells me I’m an idiot for expressing a point of view.

And writing this blog post was a learning process for me, and made me reflect on my reasons to blog yet again.

If you’re looking for long-term trends in education in Australia, that will strongly influence decisions that schools, TAFEs and universities take on their future strategy, then one strong driver of behaviour for leaders (at an institution and state level) is going to be the availability of teaching staff.

According to the Clarius Skills Index:

	Three major employment sectors will face substantial skills gaps as Australia’s ageing workforce heads for retirement, according to the latest Clarius Skills Index…for every 107 teachers who retire, there will only be 73 to replace them if the wider population’s qualifications remain unchanged over the next decade-and-a-half.

So as the average age of the teacher profession increases (with a large group who are now close to retirement), there aren’t going to be enough young teachers coming into the classroom to replace them. According to the ABS, there were 286,000 teaching staff in Australian schools in 2010*, and other research suggests up to a third are close to retirement*.

Australian teaching staff:student ratios

Over the last decade, the number of students per teacher has declined, leading the potential for smaller class sizes, and more specialist teaching in smaller groups. The chart below, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, shows the trend for 'Student to Teaching Staff’ ratios since 2000.

At the same time, the number of students in private schools has increased by 21% compared with an only 1% increase in students attending government schools. The proportion of students in private schools is now 34%, or more than 1 in 3, up 4% since 2000*.

What happens next?

In other countries facing this problem, there have been two key focus strategies.

• Increase the number of people entering teaching (which has turned out to be quite tricky in many cases)
• Develop new models of learning that rely less on low student:teacher ratios

Australia is no different to these countries. But the critical difference is that over the next few years we are going to see an increase in the devolution of power to school Principals - including more responsibility for hiring their own staff. That’s going to be quite a challenge to take on at a time when there’s going to be more competition for teachers due to a shortage.

Enter the role of ICT in the classroom?

If you are considering developing an education technology for the future, this trend probably means that there will be much more demand for learner-centric support, rather than teacher-centric (eg with less teachers, are we going to see less demand for teaching led from the front of the class with interactive whiteboards, and more demand for interactive study resources for learners to use individually?).

I think I’m a pretty dab hand at PowerPoint, but that hasn’t stopped my kids showing me some pretty impressive things I’ve learnt from. So, whilst the video below is an advert, I reckon it’s happening in real life in households all around Australia on a regular basis.

Next time you’re preparing a presentation, maybe ask your kids for help - I bet you’ll both learn something.

• You’ll learn something about PowerPoint
• They’ll learn something about what you’re planning to talk about

Win-Win

And in related news…I can’t use Publisher. My 11 year-old uses it all the time (party invites last night). But fortunately she still needs my high-tech skills - because she can’t turn the wireless printer on - it’s on top of a cupboard

Generation-e, one of our education partners, is running three events on video conferencing in education, on 22-24th November. They have a long history of working with education customers across Australia, as providers of unified communications systems using Microsoft’s Lync (phone, instant messaging, video conferencing, live remote teaching etc). They’ve worked with schools who have switched off their old telephone system, and increased collaboration by replacing the phone system with a voice, video and IM system. They’ve also done a similar project with Vicdeaf, where the instant nature of the video connections means that they have introduced new accessible messaging options between staff (as you can see on this Vicdeaf case study video)

Here’s the information from the Generation-e team on the events:

	Use Video Conferencing to Enrich Learning You know the technology... but how can it be applied in the classroom? Many schools have started to understand the value video conferencing can add for students and staff alike and are looking to acquire this technology. In addition, recent Government Funding has made Video Conferencing even more obtainable for schools. The reality, however, is that once these schools gain access to this amazing technology, many educators find themselves at a loss as to what they can truly do with it. To show educators exactly how video conferencing can help achieve learning outcomes, Generation-e and Polycom would like to invite you to attend one of our FREE interactive events scheduled throughout the month of November. Each of these events will allow you to experience exactly how interactive knowledge sharing and cross-cultural understanding can be incorporated into your school's blended learning approach. Every event will include: - virtual field trips - virtual classroom experiences - a variety of live cultural, scientific and musical video conferences - an introduction to a wide range of education technology resources Come along  to take part in this great exercise and see how you can enrich your students’ learning experiences, make curriculum more powerful and provide opportunities for professional development any time, from anywhere, over any network.

There are three events - one at the Polycom offices in Melbourne, and two webinars. But, let’s be honest, the one on the 22nd at the offices would get my vote, as you’ll get to meet with colleagues from other schools, and it includes wine & cheese. The two webinar options would definitely be BYO - but much more convenient if you’re not in Victoria!

• 22nd November, 4 to 6pm, at the Polycom offices at 20/8 Exhibition Street, Melbourne - Register here
• 23rd November, 1 to 2pm - online webinar - Register here
• 24rd November, 3:30 to 4:30pm - online webinar - Register here

There are three webcasts to know about this week - the one specifically for schools is the Tech Tuesday webcast on office, and then there are two general ones for technical teams. The teams running the two more geeky sessions have provided me with quite a technical description of what they are going to cover - and I’ve not opted to translate it into plain English (mainly because it’s an indicator of the technical level of the webinar - if you can understand the description, then you’ll stand a chance of understanding the session!)

All of the timings for the webcasts are AEST (Australia East Coast time).
See ** below for more details on how the webcasts work

This week’s webcasts

Tech Tuesday - The Microsoft Office Suite in Education

We’ll take a look at the latest version of Microsoft Office, and how it supports teaching and learning across the curriculum

Tuesday 8th November 11AM-12PM AEST - Register here for the webinar

Upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012: A Comprehensive Look

This session provides an in-depth look at how to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 or how to upgrade to the next major release of SQL Server 2012. The session covers the essential phases and steps involved in upgrading from SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2012 by using best practices and available resources. We cover the complete upgrade cycle, including the preparation tasks, upgrade tasks and post-upgrade tasks. This session covers upgrading a stand-alone instance, upgrading a clustered instance, upgrading instances involved in mirroring, log shipping, and replication, feature-specific considerations and recommended tools for a successful upgrade. Several demos are given covering the process and the available tools.

Tuesday 8th November 2-4PM AEST - Register here for the webinar

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012: What’s in It, and How It Enables the Building of Private Clouds and Federation to the Public Cloud

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 is designed to deliver industry-leading virtual machine management, deployment and configuration for services in private cloud environments. It features deep investments in server application virtualization, service design, and service modelling -- all of which can be used to build an on-premises private cloud. This session includes an overview of key VMM 2012 capabilities like Image Based Management, Host Role Deployment, Service Design, Image Composability, Application Elasticity, and Fabric Management. This session also covers VMM 2012 features that can be used to create a unified management experience for public and private clouds, including migrating workloads between these clouds. Gain an understanding of VMM 2012 supported scenarios, along with an understanding of how to use these capabilities to build an on-premise private cloud with federation to the public cloud.

Friday 11th November 2-4PM AEST - Register here for the webinar

Future webcasts

** You’ll need to register in advance, and you’ll then receive a Calendar note, as well as info on how to join the Live Meeting online. All of the timings given are for Australia East Coast time.

After writing about the new UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers yesterday, I spent time reading through the model, and thinking about how the information could be applied. I found some sections which were really useful in the context of Business Intelligence in education - how schools use their own data to improve students’ learning. In Appendix 2 of the document, there’s an example syllabus for Technology Literacy, and there are two specific sections which deal with using data to manage and monitor student performance. As well as scoping out what they mean, there’s a really useful list of best practices and obstacles, as well as common and critical mistakes. If you’re thinking of developing a business intelligence (BI) project in education, bringing together a varied mix of learning and assessment data to create a comprehensive picture, it’s worth reading the list of common and critical mistakes to learn from the experiences of others.

Published case studies rarely focus on the mistakes made during a project - but the broad base of contributors to the UNESCO framework means that it captures lessons from many projects, from many countries.

What I’ve done is to pull out the key sections on data use for monitoring student performance from two different sections of the document - Curriculum & Assessment (2.4) and ICT (4.6) - and summarise them together to help to get the full picture. The sections cover the selection of a tool to monitor and share student performance data, and using software to manage student and classroom data (from pages 49 and 57 of the Competency Framework document)

Scope of what’s covered

Using the UNESCO framework, I’ve combined the two scope elements into :

	Using ICT to record, manage and report on student performance data (grades, portfolios of student work, recognition of student achievement, reports to students, parents and administration). Includes use of standalone and networked software; use of spreadsheets; use of school management system (for the purposes of attendance, record keeping, grades, student enrolment, time tables etc.)

So if that’s the challenge, what are the key nuggets that the document contains? And how can we apply it into a project rolling out a system for business intelligence in education? Well, there’s some key issues - advice, obstacles and mistakes - that it identifies from the projects that have been looked at. If you look at your projects (or your plans for future projects), how many of these areas can you feel confident about - and are there extra things that you can do to reinforce the good practice, and minimise the risk of mistakes?

The data from the UNESCO report is in blue - with my additional comments in italics below each section

Best practice advice

• Creating a culture of data-quality
• Keeping up-to-date with data-entry
• Using data from a wide variety of sources to monitor performance: use different types of assessment, comparisons with other students, teachers or schools
• Using ICT-based systems to improve parent involvement through better information flow to them
• Making use of the improved information which ICT-based systems can provide, for example early indicators of a failing student or teacher revealed by timely and detailed ICT records of grades

Using data effectively is a journey, not a single final destination. As good practice will evolve, it’s okay to start with something that isn’t yet ideal - for example, using just a single source of data to monitor performance initially, as you move to make more of your data usable, and extend the way it’s used. Similarly, if you want to improve parental communication, but don’t have much in your existing systems that you can share, start with a little information and increase it as you go along. Don’t wait for everything to be collated, databased and analysed before starting to use the data. Use the best practice advice to set your direction, and then tackle the task in steps. eg you might aspire to get your teachers to enter all of their markbook data online, but your first steps might involve creating the culture of data-quality and data-entry, rather than mandating everything’s in your system.

Common obstacles

• Lack of hardware, software resources and financial resources
• Lack of culture of accountability

In Australian schools, the first obstacle is probably not a serious impediment - there will be enough resources available. The culture of accountability will vary between individual educational institutions, and you’ll need to ensure that any change plan allows sufficient time and focus to ensure that there’s a complete buy-in from staff - leaders, admin and teachers - to achieve your (and their) end goals

Common mistakes

• Incorrect data entry (including incomplete data)
• Poor data management skills
• Not keeping passwords secure
• Incorrect formulae to calculate results
• “Garbage in garbage out”
• Not verifying the captured data
• Incorrect formulae or analysis (for example, selecting the wrong type of graph for a report)

So let’s be positive - these are common mistakes, which means that you’re likely to make one or more of them. The good news is that you’ve got the list - based on other people’s projects - to use as a sanity check when your education BI project turns up some bizarre data quirks. When you’re surprised to find that all of class 6W are mini-Einsteins, don’t be surprised to find out that their teacher was using a 1-5 scale, when the rest of the teachers were using a 5-1 scale.
If you treat the early stages of a project as a learning journey, then all the staff can learn together, and iron out the wrinkles before it does any harm!

Critical Mistakes

• Not keeping confidential information secure
• Allowing vulnerability to hackers
• Incorrect conclusions from inaccurate data
• Inaction in the face of available data (failing to use the information provided by ICT-based system because such information did not previously exist)
• Not having backups of the data

These mistakes are important because they could derail your project. Making a ‘common mistake’ eg having a report that throws up wrong answers might demotivate the team, and cause people to question what’s going on. But making a ‘critical mistake’, like a lack of data security, may well derail the project on it’s first day, and cause the whole thing to be stopped. Again, the benefit of having the list is that you can use it as a project tick list:

• Is the data secure? Tick.
• Is the data backed-up? Tick.
• Will we cross-check critical data before it impacts on decision that affects student’s learning? Tick.

In some ways these are the hygiene factors which have to be right and will hit you immediately if they are wrong. The hidden one is number 4 - will you do something with the data? For example, if you find out that one teacher has a significant impact on exam results, will you find a way to use that info to benefit all students? And if you find that one course module that you’re all attached to produces poor results, will you simply live with it, or will you improve or drop it?

How will you use this information?

Now you’ve got the info, how does it help you? Is it something to go into your project plan? Or if you’re buying a BI system, is it the question list you use to test all of the suppliers? Or if you’re already using data well, does it help you to define your next step?

If it helps, I’ve quickly dropped the bullet points above into a series of PowerPoint slides that might help when talking with colleagues. I’ve called it “Common Mistakes in BI projects in Education”

See other articles on this blog about BI in Education

UNESCO have captured a great understatement with their introduction to the new framework for ICT in education:

	Two decades after the first mainstream rollout of computers in schools we have learned many significant lessons about ICT in Education and their potential transforming impact on national education systems. Yet, countries around the world face urgent challenges in harnessing the power of ICT in the classroom and beyond.

UNESCO have just updated their ICT Competency Framework for Teachers, which is an international model for use by education systems around the world to support teachers’ use of ICT in teaching and learning. It aims to help countries to develop comprehensive national teacher ICT competency policies and standards, and they position it as an overall component of national education strategy.

I also think it’s a valuable framework for individual schools, or school systems, thinking about the development needs of existing teachers. It can be used as a self-diagnosis tool by individual teachers, or as a professional development framework for a curriculum department or whole school.

What the ICT Competency Framework for Teachers contains

The framework addresses:

• Understanding ICT in education - policy awareness, understanding and innovation
• Curriculum and Assessment - basic knowledge, how to apply it, and skills for a knowledge society
• Pedagogy - integrating pedagogy, complex problem solving and self management
• ICT - the tools
• Organisation and Administration - from the standard classroom, to collaborative groups, to complex learning organisations
• Teacher Professional Learning - from digital literacy, to the teacher as a model learner

	UNESCO’s framework emphasises that it is not enough for teachers to have ICT competencies to be able to teach them to their students. Teachers need to be able to help students become collaborative, problem solving creative learners through using ICT so they will be effective global citizens. The current version of the ICT Competency Framework for Teachers is a 2011 update of the original version published in 2008, and is the result of the successful continued partnership between UNESCO and CISCO, INTEL, ISTE and Microsoft.

Sometimes these types of documents can be quite theoretical and dry, but a lot of work appears to have been put into this to make it accessible to readers - for example, there are three tables which clearly illustrate the three levels of competency discussed, with examples from a teacher’s everyday life (on pages 10, 12 and 14). On their own, they’d make a great discussion resource for a professional development day or training course.

Common mistakes when developing teacher competency with ICT

In many sections, the ICT Competency Framework for Teachers also lists a set of common mistakes. For example, when exploring the use ICT to enhance teacher productivity, it lists three common mistakes as:

• Trying to use all the available tools
• Using ICT for a critical task when beginning to learn how to use ICT
• Not persevering despite initial mistakes

Download the ICT Competency Framework for Teachers

Download the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (PDF)