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There's been a lot said about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in schools, and plenty of commentary on blogs and the Twittersphere. It's a fast-moving subject, almost like 'building airplanes in the sky' – it sometimes feels like BYOD strategies and vision are being created as we go along.
And the debate has been joined by two pedagogical leaders who have produced a Microsoft BYOD whitepaper for schools. Bruce Dixon (from the Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation) and Sean Tierney (from the worldwide Microsoft Partners in Learning programme) have both been passionate advocates for 1:1 learning programmes for many years, and have just published their first 'Bring Your Own Device for schools' whitepaper. The aim is to examine the potential deployment models from teaching, learning and IT management perspectives.
As their introduction says:
The ongoing debate regarding the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model in schools warrants deeper analysis to help educators and institutions understand this provisioning model and its potential benefits and pitfalls for learning. This discussion paper sets out to investigate the myths and understand which questions should be addressed when considering allowing students to bring their own devices, and which option might be best suited to a school or system’s culture. It is intended to stimulate discussion around what constitutes best practice 1-to-1 learning.
As well as plenty of detailed analysis and debate within the white paper, there's also a handy table that helps to describe the different capabilities of the various devices that are available for a BYOD scenario:
It's a great way to classify the differing capabilities across a range of current and future devices.
I think that one of the best aspects of the white paper is that it talks about the alternative models – presenting five potential models, and discussed the benefits and considerations of each. It also goes into five key questions to ask to help you decide whether a BYOD model is right for your school. And then talks through consideration for planning and implementation procedures.
The conclusion section starts:
BYOD is a trend that needs to be carefully examined in an education context to ensure that the models we deploy are successful. At the heart of good 1-to-1 learning is equity to ensure that all students have equal access to technology-rich experiences, and simplicity to ensure that it is easy to manage and sustain.
and finishes with an absolutely key point:
Schools need to be vigilant and protective of the foundations of equity of access on which all of our education systems are firmly founded. With this in mind, all stakeholders – teachers, parents, students and principals – need to work through the tough decisions early to drive home the best outcomes for all students at all times.
You can either download the BYOD for schools whitepaper, or if you're in Australia, drop Richard Ryan an email and he'll pop a couple of printed copies in the post
For more info on Bring Your Own Device, here's a link to related BYOD articles
The free version of Office 365 for education includes web versions of the main Office software – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – in addition to the email, collaboration and communication capabilities included within the online Exchange, SharePoint and Lync services. Of course, that's great for editing and working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and the beauty of the web service is that we can keep updating them for you as we add new features – you don't have to take on the responsibility for updating software across a pile of machines.
You can see the new features being added in the future to Office 365 through the preview versions. And we've just released the preview for Office 365 Enterprise (which is the version that Office 365 for education is based on).
Here's an idea that you can use them for, that might save you bucket-loads of time.
Thanks to my colleague James Marshall in the UK, there's a good explanation of how you can easily create online surveys and questionnaires, and get the answers into a neat Excel spreadsheet. It's great for a range of scenarios, like:
The beauty of forms in the new Excel Web App is that they can be shared in a few clicks, and accessed on a variety of devices, making it easy for users with laptops, tablet devices, smart phones or pretty much any device with a browser to contribute. And you can make them public, so you can use them for parental surveys etc
Here's a screenshot from a survey that James published as an example (you can try it out on this link: http://aka.ms/vumdyw)
You can read James' post on how to create a survey in the Excel Web App over on his excellent UK Education Cloud Blog (plus loads of other useful Office 365 for education information)
The Microsoft Australia Partner Conference 2012 is in three weeks (4-6 Sept). To help our education partners get more from the three days, we’ve decided to get the whole Microsoft Australia education sales team up there, to give you the chance to have 1:1 meetings with our customer account managers. If you are working in particular parts of the country, or segments of the market, then booking 1:1 sessions with some of the team has got to be one of the best ways to get really specific advice to help your sales strategy. As we discovered last year, it's also a very big opportunity for you to ensure our account teams know about your solutions, and can talk to their customers about them.
Jane Mackarell is the new Microsoft Account Manager for New South Wales Department for Education and Communities (DEC). In a 1:1 session, Jane will be able to share information on the way that the new NSW DEC licensing will help partners to implement new solutions at a lower cost to the customer, and what software is available to each school and TAFE licensed in NSW. NSW has 2,176 state schools and 11 TAFEs Mark Tigwell , the Account Technology Specialist (ATS) for NSW education, will also be at APC to meet with you.
Trudi Grant is the Microsoft Account Manager for Victoria’s Department for Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD). Although she's on holiday during APC, the other member of the team, Emilio Parente, the ATS for Victoria Education will be at APC and available for meetings. During a 1:1 session, Emilio can share how our current agreements can be used by partners to offer new business solutions to DEECD, and how the licensing model reduces the cost of these solutions at DEECD, school or TAFE level. Victoria has 1,548 state schools and 18 TAFEs.
Lance Baldwin, the Account Technology Strategist for the Queensland Department for Education and Training (DET), will be available for meetings, as Mark Kenny, the previous Account Manager has moved on to a new Microsoft role. Lance can provide a good overview of the Queensland state education market, and insight into the ICT projects that we have been involved in. Queensland has 1,235 state schools, and 13 TAFEs.
This year we have made changes to the way we manage our university accounts, which has increased the amount of account management each university customer will get. It means that we've now got three account managers covering higher education – rather than just one! Two of the account managers – Joseph Alvarez and Ken Rankins - will be at APC, and between them they'll cover the accounts of Lucy Segal, who'll be travelling overseas that week.
Joseph Alvarez is the Higher Education Account Manager for the 14 larger universities across Australia (yep, you guessed it he's friends of the Frequent Flyer clubs!). Joe also works closely with CAUDIT (which is an industry wide group of the IT Directors/CIOs of all universities in Australia), so has a great insight to share on the current trends in higher education and the practicalities of our licensing arrangements for universities.
Ken Rankins is the second of our Higher Education Account managers that is going to be at APC too. Ken is the account manager for a dozen of the universities around the country (Lucy manages the other 11). Although Ken's worked in the Microsoft Education team for a while, he's new to the world of universities, so he'd really appreciate meeting up with partners already working with higher education customers.
If your business is working with a number of universities, then you'll probably want to meet all of the account managers at APC. Or, if there are just one or two universities that you want to talk about, then let me know which ones, and I'll schedule a session with the specific account manager(s).
Vanessa Gage is the account manager for Catholic Education across Australia. Most of our work on this is done with the peak bodies for Catholic schools around the country, and Vanessa will be able to share how the schools across each of the Catholic consortia are able to access their respective Microsoft licensing programmes, and what schools are already licensed for (this is especially useful if you're looking to support schools to roll out cloud or on-premise infrastructure projects)
Ken Rankins gets to appear twice as he is also our national sales lead for all 2,815 private schools. His team work with the larger schools individually, as well as with the peak bodies for private schools. The importance of this group of schools is that most of them make their own independent decisions about ICT procurement.
As many partners know, it can be tricky to get time with our Account Teams during the year, and they are rarely (if ever) all together and available. So this is a great networking opportunity, to learn more about the Australian Education marketplace, as well as to put faces to names (on both sides!)
If you are going to be at the Australian Partner Conference 2012, then you can book 1:1 meetings with the relevant members of our Education Account Manager team in advance. It’s simple to do - Just email me, and let me know:
Not booked for APC yet? Do it here
You know when you have been using something for a while, and you think that everybody else has heard of it too - and then you find out it's not as widely known as you think? eg because I use it all the time, I'd assumed that everybody knows that "Windows Key + E" launches Windows Explorer.
Well, here's another thing I've known about for ages, and assumed other people did too:
Microsoft Academic Search is a free service developed by Microsoft Research to help academics and researchers quickly and easily find academic content, researchers, institutions, and activities. Microsoft Academic Search indexes not only millions of academic papers, it also surfaces key relationships between and among subjects, content, and authors in a manner that highlights the critical links that help define scientific research. It makes it easy for you to direct your search experience in interesting and heretofore hidden directions with its suite of unique features and visualisations. The difference to a normal search engine like Bing or Google, is that the scope is limited to scholarly materials only – making the results much more relevant. But despite the limited scope, it still indexes over 35 million publications, from 19 million authors!
It's really useful for searching – but it's the visualisations that make it come alive. Like the ability to navigate geographically through organisations and authors, or graph authors and co-authors, or quickly search for conference 'call for papers'
The range of visualisations that are available are:
And finally, there's a Windows Phone Client for Academic Search, that allows you to search by author, title, keyword etc.
This isn't only useful for researchers and academics, because if you're a teacher in a school, you can quickly use this to check out current research on a specific topic. For example, a quick search can reveal the latest research papers published on "Interactive Whiteboards" (233 papers) or academic research papers published on "Bring Your Own Device" (1 paper, published in 2004!)
Find out more about Microsoft Academic Research
Last week I posted a series of blog posts of Office 365 for education videos, produced by my colleagues in the US, sharing some of the things that Office 365 makes possible. And I realised that it would be helpful to stick them all onto one page, rather than four separate ones.
They were created to help people not using Office 365 for education, to show them what is possible, and I think they would be really useful for schools, TAFEs and universities who are rolling out Office 365 to staff and students – they make great introductory videos for training – allowing you to start a session by demonstrating what users will be able to do at the end of a hands-on training hour!
So here's all four videos:
Office 365 for education has Outlook and Lync built in, which enable instantaneous collaboration and communication between students and teachers, with email, IM, voice and video calls between users.
This short video, produced by my colleagues in the US, aims to describe the whole process in just two minutes:
Office 365 for education means that students and teachers can be productive on the go by having access to class calendars, documents, and assignments all on their mobile devices.
This short video, the second in a series of four, aims to describe the whole process in less than two minutes:
With Office 365 for education, you can collaborate from anywhere through SharePoint class websites. Students and teachers can simultaneously work together on the same document and share project and assignment information through their class site.
This short video describes the whole process in just one and a half minutes:
Office 365 for education enables teachers to give online presentations so their students can learn from anywhere. These presentations can be interactive with the students and saved for future viewing.
This short video, the last in a series of four, aims to describe the whole process in less than three minutes:
The Microsoft Tag team are the people responsible for helping people develop innovative ways of using QR codes to engage consumers, pedestrians students…well, just about anybody with a smartphone. In simple terms, you create your own tag, and then anybody with a smartphone can scan it and be linked to websites, downloads, or other information.
One of the projects they describe on their Microsoft Tag blog is where the Co-op bookstore and PayPal in Australia have used it to help university students purchase text books, by taking out most of the leg work. Students scan the QR code without having to go into the book shop, and the books are shipped via next day delivery. I'd love this for my kids too, if I could just have a page of QR codes to scan for my children's extensive book list, rather than having to type them all into another website.
Here's the video of the project (buzzword bonus, the video contains the phrase 'omnichannel retailer'):
And that got me thinking. What about using some of these QR code ideas to engage students?
There's lots of other ideas waiting to be found on the Microsoft Tag blog, or just hop over to the Microsoft Tag IdeaBook
Learn more about Microsoft Tag, and how you can create and use your own
Here's my example of a Tag in use – scan the QR code on the right to get a big pile of technical ebooks free. It took me just 2 minutes to create it and add it to this blog post, from the Microsoft Tag Getting Started page. Imagine if instead of technical books, you used this to give your students a big pack of revision guides!
Each working day I spend between 5 and 8 hours working with my current computer. And it was only last week I realised my setup was quite different to everybody else, as I looked around the meeting table. Almost everybody else was using a laptop, whereas I've made the leap from laptop PC to slate PC permanently. So I thought I'd share it with you:
Up until May I was using an HP laptop – which I was very happy with. Good performance, nice graphics, and plenty of storage etc. And because I thought of myself as a power-user, I didn't think I'd be able to cope with a less powerful computer – and that seemed to include all the early slate PCs, which were good to demo with, but not something I'd considered as my every day PC.
But then I got my hands on a Samsung Series 7 Slate PC with all the bells and whistles I needed, and I'm running it with the released version of Windows 8. The one I've got (the sexily named XE700T1A-A05AU) has all the key ingredients I wanted:
Here's my typical desktop setup, with a second monitor plugged into the docking station, and a normal desktop keyboard and mouse. So it means that whenever I'm at my desk, I've got the perfect setup with a big screen, and then I can just grab it from the docking station and walk to a meeting just carrying the PC and a pen, without all the other stuff. So my bag is a lot lighter than it used to be.
With this setup, I've got something that works as a great desktop computer, and then is good for carrying to meetings. And if I'm using it at home in the evenings, then I tend to use it with touch and the new Windows 8 apps (for things like reading Twitter and blogs). The portability is a big bonus in our Sydney offices, where every desk is setup as a hot desk – I can sit at any desk in the building, and there's already a large monitor, keyboard and mouse ready to go.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Windows Intune for education, and the relevance of its new features to education customers. Of course, listing a set of new features with a single bullet point probably isn't enough to help you to understand how those features would actually work in an education network. For example, one of the new features I wrote about was the ability to deploy software applications with Intune - "Software application downloads – to allow you to make internal apps available to your users automatically on their mobile devices". But what does that actually mean you can do?
If you really want to understand the capabilities, then can I recommend reading the Windows Intune 2012 Getting Started Guide, which has been updated for the June 2012 release.
In the case of the software downloads I mentioned above, there's a detailed section on what is and isn't possible:
Working with Licensed Software
Windows Intune enables you to deploy and install licensed software applications to managed computers or make these applications available to selected user groups. In addition, this release of Windows Intune lets you upload licensed software and make it available to selected user groups. After you upload the software and make it available to selected user groups, users to whom the software is targeted can sign in to the Windows Intune company portal or the Windows Intune mobile company portal and view the licensed software applications that you have made available for them. They can then select the software applications that they want to download and install on their devices, and you can track software adoption across your organization. For example, after you make a mobile device application available for employees, you can monitor the number of users to whom the application is targeted, the number of users who attempted to install the application, and view details about each of the users
And, like other sections, it includes a screenshot of how it looks.
The sections in the Getting Started Guide include:
Download the Windows Intune Getting Started guide here
It was only last Monday that I was telling you why I'd switched from a conventional laptop to a Samsung Series 7 Slate PC as my main computer. And now they've gone and made me feel like I'm so out of date:
They held an event yesterday to announce a trio of Windows 8 PCs - ATIV Tab, ATIV Smart PC and ATIV Smart PC Pro – and a Windows 8 Phone.
I saw this picture, and now I'm looking at my existing Samsung Slate thinking:
"Well, it was good knowing you…"
Find out more about the Samsung ATIV range
A few weeks ago we made the customer preview available of the new version of Microsoft Office. And one of the many changes that's immediately apparent is the focus that it has on the cloud – and that includes the ability to build cloud applications that integrate with Office, and a marketplace (the Office Store) to make those apps available.
For education customers and partners, this is good news. Really good news. What it will mean is that customers will be able to add custom applications to their installations of Office or SharePoint easily, without having to do lots of fancy customisations themselves. And create a market for education apps for Office…
I think that over the next few months, building up to release, there are going to be people around the world working away on apps that support specific processes in education – whether it's to handle a process such as submitting information, or lookup information, or publish information. Here are some of the simple ideas that occurred to me within two minutes:
Many of these scenarios are actually possible today already in Office and SharePoint. But the ability to have a simple, single-button way of doing these things through an app would make life much easier for staff, students, and potentially parents (oh, imagine a "permission" app, where all the parent does is read a permission form and click a button to say "Yes", instead of the constant flow of paper that seems to flow between schools and parents and back. Somebody please create one, if only to make my parental life easier!)
I believe that we'll see three major sources of Office cloud apps for education customers:
Hopefully, if you're still with me, I've got you interested in the idea – and you want to know where to get more information.
Rather than repeating details from elsewhere, this is where I'm going to send you over to some other places to get the detailed info. The first starting point is the Apps for Office and SharePoint Blog, which has is publishing increasing amounts of information on how to develop and use these apps.
I'd recommend starting on these blog posts: