The TechNet roadshows are coming soon - in April and May the team will be on their way around the country, talking about (and showing) lots more of Windows Server 2008 and the other products launched this week. I know that the launch event in Birmingham in March was filled up very quickly, and there were a number of you that couldn't get a place.
So here's your second chance. The roadshow will be heavy on demos and light on PowerPoint (you don't hear that every day at Microsoft). We'll look at various scenarios, such as managing Windows Server 2008 and how Windows Server 2008 works alongside Windows Vista. There will be opportunity to meet the Microsoft Community, user groups and Most Valued Professionals, as well as experts with top technical information and real-world scenarios.
Places really are limited so register now:
22 April 2008, Cardiff
24 April 2008, London
30 April 2008, Manchester
12 May 2008, Glasgow
15 May 2008, Newcastle
I'm over in the US this week, with a number of our educational IT partners, and have heard about some of the things happening here that may be of interest to UK FE colleges. One of them, {Open Source} Heroes Happen Here, is for those who are using or developing Open Source applications which also link to Microsoft technology. And there's a free offer to American customers that you can also sign up for.
I immediately thought about all of the college Moodle users - often running it on top of a Microsoft platform - either Windows Server or SQL Server. With new versions of both due this year, then you might want to start evaluating how the new features in Windows Server 2008 can enhance your system. This is also interesting to all of you running Moodle on SharePoint.
In the US, there's an offer for a free 'Hero Hack Pack' - it's only being promoted over here in the US, but the web site will accept requests from the UK, so sign up quick while you still can, and get your own copy.
You sign up on this webpage - and they'll send you a pack with a free evaluation copy of Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, along with a 'Getting Started' guide on integration between open source and Microsoft technologies.
Go to www.opensourcehero.com and click the 'Order the Hero Hack Pack' button in the middle of the page.
You're probably already familiar with SharePoint, and some of its capabilities to support communication and collaboration for both students and staff. But what never ceases to amaze me are the other uses that people find for it in education.
Coventry University has 17,000 students, and has recently moved from a paper-based campus voting system (with long-winded hand counting of ballots) to an electronic one based on SharePoint. It makes sense to them, because their Active Directory contains all of their student community, and it also appeals to students, who seem to love anything web-based. Not only does Coventry save £1,000 per vote, but they also make it possible for students to vote over the web - increasing participation.
You're not going to have the same needs in an FE college, but one of the things it points to is another way of using technology to engage more with your students. It's an issue which comes up regularly when talking to colleges - with the student base being particularly fickle, and changing rapidly.
We've published a full case study on our global case studies database.
The case study left me wondering - just how many elections does a university run?
But up until now, it's been called Windows Live SkyDrive Beta. I've just received an email telling me that it's been officially released, and the size has been increased to 5GB of free storage!
Anybody can get a SkyDrive, as it's free - just sign up for it using your Windows Live/Passport ID, and you too can have 5GB of file storage online, with file storage areas for private, shared and public files. Gone are the days of moving files between home and work with a USB drive (which inevitably got lost somewhere between the two places).
Imagine - all of your students currently carrying their data around on a USB memory stick (and busily plugging them into USB ports all around your campus), could be using this. What would it cost you to give every one of your students 5GB of Internet-accessible storage on your network?
We include SkyDrive in our Live @ Edu service, which means that you could automatically provide accounts to all of your students, linked to their college email address.
More info on SkyDrive
My colleague Matt sends details of a Live Meeting event he's hosting online next week:
Microsoft Collaborative Campus Presentation On Tuesday 26th February at 9.30am we will be running a Live Meeting presentation to discuss the Microsoft Collaborative Campus as a way to connect students in a way that provides access to a vast breadth of online services such as mail, file storage and social networking capability. The presentation will be relevant to technical decision makers who are currently responsible for providing these sorts of services to students, and to business decision makers who are interested in understanding how technology can underpin these scenarios for students and staff. To request details for the meeting, and a URL to join the presentation, please email FE News
Microsoft Collaborative Campus Presentation
On Tuesday 26th February at 9.30am we will be running a Live Meeting presentation to discuss the Microsoft Collaborative Campus as a way to connect students in a way that provides access to a vast breadth of online services such as mail, file storage and social networking capability. The presentation will be relevant to technical decision makers who are currently responsible for providing these sorts of services to students, and to business decision makers who are interested in understanding how technology can underpin these scenarios for students and staff. To request details for the meeting, and a URL to join the presentation, please email FE News
The Partners in Learning (PiL) programme from Microsoft has been running for 5 years now (and 3 years in the UK), and has supported a wide range of educational projects in conjunction with government and educational agencies worldwide. In the UK, we've been working with organisations including the TDA, Childline, Becta and Futurelab on a wide range of (mainly school focused) projects (you can read about some of them on the schools blog, by searching on the PiL tag).
I was reading the worldwide 2007 PiL Progress Report. With case studies themes of professional development, the developing world, ICT skills, innovative learning, collaboration and leadership, it appears there's something for everybody. Amongst all of the examples of projects around the world, there was a profile of a couple of UK specific parts that I thought you'd be interested in, as they're relevant to teacher training. What grabbed me was how the UK education system, and the changes we're undergoing, are described to a worldwide audience:
The Enquiring Minds programme, which was designed by Futurelab, and which we support (not least with a a £1M PiL grant), was profiled within the report in the "Innovative Learning" section. I'll quote the author of the report:
The British education system has produced some of the greatest writers, scientists, and thinkers of the modern world. In recent years, however, educators and policymakers in the UK have begun to question whether the country's highly structured national curriculum and focus on examinations are developing the knowledge and skills that students need for the 21st century. Enquiring Minds, an innovative new approach to learning designed by UK research organisation Futurelab, and supported by a US$2 million grant from Partners in Learning, looks beyond test results toward a different goal: enabling children to become effective researchers, innovators, and creators of knowledge
The other article on the UK was about the Education Evidence Portal (EEP), which is a website designed to help teachers, and teacher trainers, find research on effective teaching and learning practice. Again, I'll lift directly from the introduction of the report:
A growing volume of research is identifying more effective teaching and school administration practices, but finding that information can be a major challenge for teachers, administrators and policymakers. As part of a government effort in the UK to support such "evidence-based practice," Microsoft UK is providing funding and technical support to help create an Education Evidence Portal and an E-librarian service that will enable educators, teacher educators, school administrators, and policymakers to quickly find the data they need to improve the quality, efficiency, and accessibility of education scholarship.
I'm all for this - it always strikes me that there's plenty of research going on, but it's difficult to find. So I went there and put in "whiteboards", and on the first page of results, got five research reports published by Becta on their contribution to teaching and learning, three Teachernet articles (including a "how to use whiteboards" article, and a Q&A) and one research report from the Economic & Social Research Council. That's pretty good, but what amazed me was that I didn't get anything else. No adverts for whiteboards, no sponsored links, no link to ebay to "Get great prices for whiteboards". Only quality educationally-relevant results. There's even a downloadable desktop search toolbar. Personally, I wish I'd discovered the EEP website years ago.
You can download the full Partners in Learning 2007 Progress Report, or read individual sections of the report on the website. Case studies from around the world include stories about what is happening in Brazil, Argentina, India, Colombia, Estonia, Hungary, Eqypt, Singapore, Australia, Cambodia, Thailand and the US.
We have launched a programme called "Microsoft DreamSpark", which allows university and college students to download a range of free development and design software resources to help them in their studies. The suites available include Visual Studio (described as "the Swiss Army knife of computer programming"), which is the kind of toolset which can help you programme everything from a computer, to a mobile phone, or a web page. It also includes the major applications in the Expression design suite - including Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design & Expression Media. And for development work, there's also SQL Server & Windows Server.
From today, these are available to more than 6.5 million FE & HE students. Last year's survey co-sponsored with Intellect, the British Computer Society, and The City University, London demonstrated that the "Knowledge Economy" (is that a Microsoft-ism?) is the fastest growing part of the UK economy, and there's a real need to ensure that students have the chance to get the technical skills they may need to operate within it.
Whilst it's easy to think that this will only be of interest to technical students, there's plenty of other areas affected - things like design, where digital design is one of the fastest growing areas; and the ability to manipulate and analyse masses of data seems to spread across most subjects.
Students don't need to get additional validation or accreditation from their university or college to do this download - they can download as long as they have an Athens ID (that's pretty standard for all university students and most college students) or an ISIC card. (For more on student verification, take a look at Ed's blog)
There's more about this on Channel 8, and you can also read the press releases on PressPass
At the moment, this is available in 10 countries, including the UK.
I know it's half-term/study/reading week next week for most of us, but just in case you’re thinking of catching up on some of the things you don't get round to in term time, this Live Meeting could show you a way to change that. (It’s bliss isn’t it, when the corridors go quiet?)
Happening at the usual time of 3.30pm on Thursday 21st February, this session will reveal how System Center 2007 can make IT management a whole lot easier. Something I'm sure you'll agree is a must, with all schools facing increasingly dynamic IT infrastructures under pressure from recent government policies to transform education through the use of ICT.
So, how can you ensure that your school is making the best use of the technologies and functionality available while also making the day-to-day management of the infrastructure easier?
By using System Center 2007 you can simplify the management of the systems and applications your school is already running, and also capture and share knowledge and best practice to help your IT staff decrease downtime. This can lead to enhanced service delivery, which in turn can help to reduce costs and increase your teachers’ confidence in using ICT within the classroom.
This Live Meeting will cover what’s new in System Center 2007, including System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operations Manager, and show you how it can help to make your IT management a much simpler and effective process.
Steven Audis, Education Technology Adviser, will be presenting once again, so register now and then all you need to do at 3.30pm on Thursday 21st February is logon to view and listen to the meeting online.
Salford Software is hosting an event on 2nd April at the Microsoft offices in Reading to explore Microsoft Live @ edu (one of the services that's part of Collaborative Campus)
The agenda presents an information packed half-day, offering you the opportunity to hear more about Microsoft Live @ edu, and learn from the experiencesof a Salford customer who've implemented the service. Join us and find out what challenges they were facing, why the solution was implemented and how it is helping to enhance the student’s learning environment. Colleagues from Salford Software and Microsoft will be discussing Collaborative Campus and the associated services, including implementation and requirements.
The Microsoft Live @ edu service is part of Collaborative Campus, promoting and supporting the exchange of knowledge, learning and ideas between students and staff by using Collaborative workspaces, blogs and email to create an enhanced user experience.
We'll be running two sessions, one during the morning and another after lunch. Places are free but limited and allocated on a first come first serve basis. Book your place on the Salford website.
Last year, we hosted a series of events called "Exchange on Tour", which focused on Exchange 2007, and our other communications tools, such as Office Communications Server, Live Meeting - all of which are designed to support a single unified communications infrastructure. We're running some further events in March, specifically for customers in education and government.
Which means that as well as looking at the technology, and what it enables, we'll also ensure that we're looking at key issues to public sector organisations - things like green emissions, Gershon efficiencies and helping to facilitate mobile working.
For now, you can save the dates in your diary:
Drop us an email and we'll reserve a place for you, and send you further details of venues and agendas.