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Two years ago, I wrote about Lync case study on Marquette University in the US , who switched from a conventional PABX system to Microsoft's Lync system. At the time, the Director of IT Services at Marquette University described succinctly the benefit of choosing Lync, because in addition to a replacement...

Although this Australian case study is of a local government customer, rather than an education one, I think that it's relevant because there are so many aspects of a council that match education institutions: Hundreds of staff distributed across multiple sites (in Adelaide City Council's case...

My colleague, James Marshall, is a whizz with Office 365 for education . And he regularly shares information on his UK Education Cloud Blog on how to use the Office 365 cloud services to support education organisations (from both an IT management and user perspective). I really recommend following his...

Office 365 for education is our free, cloud-based service, that gives you email through Exchange, collaboration with SharePoint, and document services with Office Web applications (Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint - all running through your browser). You can use it for all kinds of things, from something...

It's always interesting to read about projects where IT costs have been reduced by the IT team of a university, and I've had this in my 'must share' list for a while. Coventry University saves £1m/$1.5m with virtualised network and management tools As there's a full case study on the Microsoft...

When I left the UK to move to Australia, we'd already had a few years of significant pressure on public sector budgets, and education had taken the hit alongside other sectors. At the time, there was a lot of talk about 'back office functions' as opposed to 'frontline services', and in many cases that...

Last week, when we announced the broad availability of Office 365 for education in Australia, I was overseas, so I didn't manage to post as much information up as I'd hoped. So I'm catching up now – today it's a first Office 365 for education case study in an Australian school. The case study, from our...

John Kleeman , founder of Questionmark , is a big SharePoint user, and passionate about the use of SharePoint for assessment in higher education ( you can read more about their work here ). So I follow his SharePoint and Assessment blog – I wanted to share one of his recent blog posts: A couple...

Next month’s carbon tax will cost Australian education institutions upwards of $50m a year (see ‘ How the carbon tax will affect education ’), and that’s money that won’t be easy to find. But the issue of managing energy usage isn’t unique to education – so what can be learnt from other industries? Our...

According to analysts, one of the drivers for IT changes in Australian universities services is the need to continue to drive down cost of delivering IT services. That’s not only for planned changes (eg new systems and services), but also for existing projects, where there is an opportunity to cut the...

After last week’s Lync case study, of the Open University saving $3m through implementing unified communications to replace their existing telephone system, here’s another university case study of doing the same thing – and this time it’s the University of the West of England (UWE) near Bristol in the...

The Open University (OU) is the UK’s largest university, and delivers its courses via distance learning to over 250,000 students. With 5,000 staff spread around the country, the OU decided to explore options to replace their existing PABX telephone system, as well as introduce new communications technology...

I know there’s a political debate about the carbon tax, and I don’t want to go near that. But I did see the stories earlier this week (eg this one on Sky News ) that the carbon tax is going to increase costs for NSW public sector organisations by nearly $50M, and figures quoted that the 2,177 public...

There’s recently been a lot of discussion within education about different models of ICT services. Individual universities have tended to use a mix of services provided on-premise and cloud-based services . And newer models of teaching and learning have accelerated the trend towards cloud-based services...

Some Free February Appy-ness with a new piece of free software for teachers from Microsoft every day in February. Many of these items are unknown heroes, but they all share two things in common: 1) They are useful for teachers or students and 2) they are free. Learning Suite This month I’ve shared Free...

Yesterday I wrote “ Why put assessment in the Cloud? ” about the project last year for students in New South Wales in Australia to complete the statutory Science examinations online - replacing a paper-based system that had been used for years. As well as the time-saving and paper-saving, one of the...

One of the often-quoted benefits of using Cloud computing is that you can provide for big bursts of activity by using the flexibility of massive datacentres being built around the world for this. And that if you want to use this service, you simply pay for the bit you use. It means that you can activate...

Some Free February Appy-ness with a new piece of free software for teachers from Microsoft every day in February. Many of these items are unknown heroes, but they all share two things in common: 1) They are useful for teachers or students and 2) they are free. Free Microsoft Office Add-in for Moodle...

Some Free February Appy-ness with a new piece of free software for teachers from Microsoft every day in February. Many of these items are unknown heroes, but they all share two things in common: 1) They are useful for teachers or students and 2) they are free. Mouse Mischief A simple idea: Let your students...

Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education… For a break I thought you’d like some ideas that don’t come from me. Instead, I thought it’s worth highlighting ideas from Chris Wejr , a school Principal for Kent elementary school in Canada. He’s written...

Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education… Looking at other sources of paper use around the school, then there’s an obvious opportunity to get rid of paper forms used internally. The obvious benefits of this aren’t restricted to saving paper...

Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education… Get rid of school reports on paper, by providing electronic reports to parents Although many schools are already doing this, there are plenty that still provide parental reports on paper. And don’t want...

Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education… In some schools it’s the students that use too much paper. They’re doing a project, and then they want to print out a draft of their work (or even a draft of the first paragraph of their work), to see...

Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education… Make printing more difficult When I first started work, printers were only just making an appearance and they were noisy, slow and produced very low quality print. I remember the day that I used the...

Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education… Send homework assignments electronically You know that your students now have enough electronic devices in their pockets to sink a Sydney Harbour ferry - so how about using that as an excuse to cut the...