Originally posted by James B Marshall on the UK Education Cloud Blog.
Yesterday Microsoft launched the next generation of Office 365, but did you know this included Office 365 Education as well? We first launched Office 365 for education last June and since then we’ve heard inspiring stories from our customers including Kilmarnock College and the University of West London about how they’re succeeding with Office 365 Education.
Microsoft’s Anthony Salcito, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Education, has written about how the new Office 365 Education puts teachers in control, today.
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to education, Office 365 Education is available for free. Schools can access all of the features and benefits of Microsoft Office – apps and services – simply by signing up at www.office365.com/education. With free access to the transformative innovations built in to Office 365, teachers are unleashed to fully embrace the possibilities offered by technology. Educators who once felt boxed in by the rigid demands of their curriculum can now explore new ways to engage and motivate their students. And perhaps most important, young people can have at their fingertips the tools they need to become productive global citizens, using a platform that has already been embraced by universities, businesses and governments around the world.
Guest post by MCP community member Matt Griffin, Technology Analyst @ Apparatus – originally posted on Born to Learn.
I’ve had many people ask about my jump from school into working full-time in IT so I’d like to give you 5 tips from my experience that will help you make the transition.
Work while in school. If this isn’t possible do hands on work in your spare time. Its college, I know you have spare time. I’ll start with the disclaimer that I am not a normal college student. I worked two degree-related jobs at the same time I was in school alongside studying. By doing this, I was able to hone in on the exact thing I wanted to do in IT. I realized web development was not for me as I enjoy the Managed Service aspect with client/servers a lot more. I could not be happier with the result, having taken that route through school. Over the years I learned the best thing you can do to achieve good grades in school (other than studying) is working with it hands-on, and when you are paid to work with it hands-on, it becomes a lot more enjoyable.
Network, network, network! For goodness sake, network! Now you will hear constantly while in school that the most important thing to do is network. They recommend that you go to career fairs and talk with recruiters; I personally can’t say anything specific about that because I never attended a career fair, but I do know a recruiter at my current company who hits career fairs very hard to find new students that are eager to work. The way I focused on networking was being involved at work, and I’ll be honest I didn’t do a very good job networking until my last year of school when I went to a Microsoft TechEd event on a grant from my Nina Mason Pulliam Scholarship. After I went to Tech Ed I got involved with The Krewe and met tons of great people who were invaluable assets not just as friends but as resources who help me if I run into a problem at work and have no idea what’s going on.
Get certified! Even if it is something minor it’ll show motivation. One thing that I thought was pointless at first was certifications. While I worked at University College Technology Services at IUPUI I had the opportunity to become certified by having a couple hours a week dedicated to study and they offered to pay for the exam. I’ll admit I never took this super seriously until a pay raise was involved because I figured I would just end up with a certificate that says I can do my job. Well that is exactly what it is and I never realized the value in that until I became certified and realized how many doors it opens in your employability. Once I passed my first exam, I was hooked. It became like a drug and I wanted to keep getting certifications. In fact, within the last two years I’ve passed 11 exams and I already have the next few exams I want to take lined up and just need to dedicate time to studying.
Make sure your resume is sound! Get advice from multiple people and take that advice. I did take writing my resume very seriously throughout college because I knew that was everyone’s first impression of me, so I always took feedback on my resume and improved it accordingly. I actually have to thank my current job to a class I took while in school for Career Enrichment. The class helped build resumes, work on interview skills and required I do a mock interview at a local company.
Be prepared to be interviewed at all times. In that Career Enrichment class, we also had to do a mock interview and I was lucky enough that in my mock interview I had enough experience and apparently good enough interview skills that I was asked to come in for an actual interview. A couple weeks later I became an Apparatus employee. I’ve thought about this experience many times and I guess my major take away from this is that you need to always be prepared to be in a real job interview even if it is just for a grade at the time. I don’t mean wear a suit everywhere but you need to be presentable and most importantly an advocate for yourself.
Here's a chance for your students (or you!) to design a brand new character for the popular game Chimpact. The winner’s character will feature in the next Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 version of the game and get a credit - but just as importantly, the winner gets bragging rights over all their mates! The winner also gets a trip to the Yippee Studios to see their design turned into a real game character.
This could be a great creative project for education, with exciting results for the winner.
Designing a brand new character for a game like Chimpact is great fun! All you need is your imagination, your tools of choice and a bit of patience – here are just some design ideas before the final version of Chuck was created:
In order to create a unique and entertaining new Chimp for Chimpact, here's a few things to consider:
We're not looking for a perfect, highly finished drawing - we're looking for great ideas that are fun! The competition closes on April 12th 2013
Your entries can be submitted by email in electronic format (JPG, PNG, BMP, PDF or EPS) or on a sheet of paper no larger than A4 and sent by post. Click here for more information.
The full details of the competition can be found at this website: http://www.chimpact.com/competition/
Good luck and have fun!
Microsoft Learning is running a Cloud Career day on Tuesday 12th March 2013 as a virtual broadcast. Speakers include Mark Russinovich.
As the cloud transforms IT, the need for qualified IT professionals has never been more urgent, and certification has never been more valuable. Registration is now open for Certified Career Day, an interactive LIVE event for IT professionals.
Attendees will join a Live Industry Panel Broadcast comprised of industry experts who will discuss how the cloud is redefining IT recruitment and the growing need for certification. Then, Microsoft Product Specialists will host Live Product Sessions—in-depth depth discussions on Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 that will .
Registrants are eligible to win an Acer Windows 8 tablet. Space is limited, so please register today at http://www.certifiedcareerday.com.
Guest post from Gerald Haigh. Gerald writes regularly for the Microsoft Education series of blogs.
Anyone – teacher, parent, student – who thinks degree level computer programming must be a boring affair should have been with me at Derby University’s Microsoft sponsored ‘Games@Derby Expo’ the other week. Held in the big atrium at the main Kedleston Road site, the Expo featured dozens of games and apps created by students so it’s not difficult to imagine the scene as crowds of students, high on success and enthusiasm, gathered round the big screens.
My main reason for being there, though, was focussed on one particular screen displaying Windows 8 apps created by final year students of both the Computer Games Programming and Computer Science degrees. The task, one of the assessments for a final year module, was to develop a Windows 8 application that met the Microsoft certification requirements for release to the Windows Store. (Some, in fact, have made it to the store.)
‘We left it deliberately open-ended,’ says senior lecturer Wayne Rippin, ‘Challenging the imagination as well as their technical ability.’
Before visiting the Expo, I had a long talk to Wayne about computer science at Derby. It quickly became apparent that Microsoft technologies have a key role to play in an innovative department focussed on producing creative, enterprising and highly employable graduates.
‘It’s important that the tools we give them are the ones they will use in industry once they leave University,’ says Wayne. ‘ Microsoft DreamSpark http://www.dreamspark.com allows us to do that affordably.’
In particular, he says, the department’s labs are, as Wayne puts it,
‘Set up with the latest Windows technologies. We’re very aware that when the students go out into the world that’s what they’ll be working with. We were among the first with Windows 7 and so we wanted to give students early exposure to Windows 8. For us it’s an implementation platform that enables us to try different techniques in practice as well as in theory.’
The module has proved a real success, he says. ‘Students like being able to use Windows 8 and to have an assignment that allows them to create an app that others can use.’
As he says, it clearly ticks the employability box.
‘Imagine a student with a Windows Store app applying for a job and being able to say, “I wrote that. Would you like to try it out?”’
Sixty five students from the two degree courses completed the app development module, says Wayne. ‘The overall quality was very good. At the Expo we’re showing thirteen apps, all of which have met the Windows Store requirements.’
Sixty five students from the two degree courses completed the app development module, says Wayne.
‘The overall quality was very good. At the Expo we’re showing thirteen apps, all of which have met the Windows Store requirements.’
Leading on from that, second year students are now studying an application development module, the platform for which is also Windows 8.
A considerable advantage here lies in the cost-effective availability for students of Microsoft’s ‘Azure’ cloud platform see http://www.windowsazure.com/education
As Wayne explains,
‘They can have their own webspace, virtual machines, everything in the cloud so we don’t have to deal with web hosting. For example they can have admin access to their own space where typically in a university situation if we provide webspace we can’t give admin access. Azure gives us much more flexibility and ability to do things as in the real world.’
I had a quick look at some of the student apps shown at the Expo, such as Kevin Chandler’s ‘London Transport Info’ which pulls together published feeds about buses and trains in the Capital, integrating it all into something really useful. A nice touch is the live tile on the start screen that keeps up to date with problems. I also saw Christopher Morley’s ‘Project Smash’, a game which adds a twist by incorporating live weather information as one of the variables to be negotiated. And, too, there was Karn Bianco’s mind-bending ‘Sliding Blocks’ and Luc Shelton’s ‘Meme Factory’ for creating internet memes. I had a chat to Luc at the Expo about his app and he explained that there’s already plenty of activity around memes on the internet, and what he wanted to was to produce something very functional, using the features of Windows 8.
‘For example I made use of the Charm Bar – sharing, searching, settings, so that users can customise the experience.’ Thinking about the independent learning aspect of the task, I wondered if he’d had to ask for help at any point. ‘Once, I thought I’d got to email Wayne,’ he said, ‘But I decided I had to persevere on my own.’
‘For example I made use of the Charm Bar – sharing, searching, settings, so that users can customise the experience.’
Thinking about the independent learning aspect of the task, I wondered if he’d had to ask for help at any point.
‘Once, I thought I’d got to email Wayne,’ he said, ‘But I decided I had to persevere on my own.’
That self-driven approach was evident in each of the students I met, as was the determination to exploit the available technology. Luke Chester’s app, for example, ‘Memory Bank’ is actually a multi-media scrapbook, a place to drop thoughts, ideas, photographs. Like Luc, he’s exploited the Charm Bar as well as Bing Maps and GPS. What makes this app particularly attractive is the Windows 8 feature that allows it to be brought up while another app is being used, so it’s possible to add a very quick thought that occurs as it always does, when you’re in the middle of something else. Luke’s Memory Bank app is now available on the Windows Store - http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-US/app/memory-bank/8b08e5b2-f358-430e-a8c8-eabdf50dd69a
The students view
With schools in mind, I asked some of the students about their back stories. I found that Luc Shelton, for example, had arrived via an FE course that armed him with the right number of UCAS points. Karn Bianco did humanities at school, and kept all of his programming interests to his spare time. Now he’s found what he was looking for.
‘I wanted problem solving, and I didn’t get any of that at school.’
In fact it’s important not to miss the pedagogical lessons that emerge from a course that’s run like the undergraduate programming degrees at Derby.
‘There’s no such thing as teaching to the test here,’ says Wayne. ‘We encourage independent learning. The student who sits and just listens to the lectures will pass, but if they want to get a good grade, they have to really demonstrate their ability to learn for themselves.‘
Open ended assignments play a big part in this, he says.
‘We give them the minimum standard they need to pass and then to get the top grade they almost need to wow us. Really there are no constraints.’
The thought is echoed by Dr Tommy Thompson, who leads BSc Computer Games Programming.
Describing the project leading up to the Expo, where students had been given twelve weeks to develop a game to show, he says,
‘In the real world it would take two or three years. Some of them put in a ridiculous amount of time. There was an interesting moment when students asked me whether I thought I had overworked them. But they conceded that the problem really lay with their own expectations.’
From the teacher’s point of view, says Tommy, it’s an ideal position to be in,
‘They want to be here. They have a passion for the programming.’
That means, though, that their expectations of teaching are high.
‘We have to meet that, and always try to throw something at them that they’re not expecting.’
I was interested, too, in Tommy’s insight into who are the successful students and the fact that it’s not necessarily about technical ability.
‘There are some in all years who, regardless of ability, have a fantastic maturity of general approach to taking the curriculum seriously.’
Very clearly, what gives the teachers on such a course the necessary high credibility with their students is their record of long-term and continuing engagement with the industry. Tommy puts it briefly and clearly when he says,
‘We don’t just look at the application, we look at the code, and we’re people who’ve looked at code for a living.’
This, in turn, means that courses are run with a continuing eye on employability. Both degrees are sandwich courses and, says Wayne,
‘Some students set up their own company during their placement year. The thing that’s changed for software development is the way the app stores have made it easier and cheaper to publish applications and make them available to a wide audience, so it becomes an interesting exercise to set a goal of producing a publishable app.’
The enterprise aspects aren’t neglected either.
‘A key thing about this university is that a lot of the staff have real industry experience so a lot of the advice we give is not just about the programming. It’s about how to set up a company, creating business plans, and so on’
This was one visit that gave me a lot to think about. I’m pretty sure, for example, that what’s happening in computer science at Derby, and no doubt at other universities such as UCL (we’ve covered their work extensively already) carries lessons for teachers of every level and subject about independent learning, motivation, creativity, and credible, real-world-relevant teaching.
Guest blog post from Lisa Drakonaki from Salford Software.
Four Lancashire based further education colleges, Accrington & Rossendale, Hopwood Hall, Morecambe & Lancaster and Nelson & Colne have come together as the “Lancashire Colleges Shared Services Partnership” to create a shared virtual environment between colleges via the creation of a private cloud.
The project has so far saved the colleges £90,000 collectively by rolling out Microsoft Office 365 for education, sharing hardware and by sharing an IT operations director across two of the four colleges.
Having received AoC funding of £120,000 they decided that they could do more with it working collaboratively than separately. All members of the teams have clear roles, hosting the helpdesks and backing up data. Even if one of the colleges decided to pull out, they can all continue to operate independently, data is replicated across the four colleges.
Microsoft Office 365 for education gives the students the resources that the colleges couldn’t have provided economically prior to the implementation – more storage capacity in the cloud and the ability to access their data from anywhere on mobile devices.
Salford Software is working with the consortium to deliver Microsoft Office 365 and bring a cloud solution to all four colleges under one implementation. The rollout will deliver Microsoft Office 365 services to 5000 students.
More information is available via the press release on the FE Community website and IT Director.com.
Guest post from Kimberly Voltero, Microsoft.
THE NEXT GENERATION OF DEVELOPERS BEGIN WITH YOU
Faculty Connection (microsoft.com/faculty) is your online source of curriculum resources for teaching computing technology concepts using Microsoft technologies. The Faculty Connection provides relevant materials and applicable tools—from syllabi to lecture presentations and from videos to labs and assignments aligned to ACM Knowledge Areas.
It’s all here to help make your classroom more engaging and your students more successful.
FIND IT ALL IN ONE PLACE
Faculty Connection is where you will also find pointers to many Microsoft resources, programs, and grants relevant to technology educators. Assembled here are events and offers from Microsoft Learning, Microsoft Research, and other Microsoft product groups to help maximize Microsoft technology learning in the classroom. Some examples are:
CURRICULUM RESOURCE AREAS
·
PUT A COURSE TOGETHER—FAST
Our Resources Kits can easily assist you in developing course materials. Find links to curriculum materials and rich resources such as presentations, labs, exercises, software tools, research talks, source code, and more. http://aka.ms/xpnzrh
TEACH WHAT THEY CRAVE
Windows 8 Application Development—This new interactive resource kit provides curriculum materials, training resources and software tools for teaching programming and application development using Windows 8 technologies.
Phone Application Development—teach the fundamental concepts and design guidelines of mobile computing using top professional developer tools and comprehensive training resources. Inspire students to create apps for Windows Phone. http://aka.ms/xc5wy3
Game Development—the next great games are in your students’ minds. Teach programming using games. Find free courses, tools, XNA Game Studio software, and even code examples here: http://aka.ms/tjhcpn
Operating Systems—everything you need to teach and experiment with an innovative and industry-leading OS that differs significantly from the limited UNIX-like systems available for study today, including presentations, tutorials, projects, videos, and hands-on labs with Windows Kernal source code. www.microsoft.com/windowsacademic
Cloud Computing—Introduce students to and educate them in the new computing paradigm using the Windows Azure platform for development, labs, and projects; take advantage of free and long-term access to top cloud resources. http://aka.ms/tioxvb
FACULTY CONNECTION NEWSLETTER
Each quarter, the Faculty Connection newsletter reports interesting Microsoft developments to computer science educators. Discover the newest and most popular curricula and be invited to connect with Microsoft experts at Microsoft and relevant industry events. Register now
Microsoft is committed to helping you enable the next generation of innovators with software, tools and resources. Visit www.Microsoft.com/Faculty for more information, or contact me or the rest of our faculty team with your suggestions and comments by email to Faculty Connection Help fchelp@microsoft.com.
Originally posted on the Born to Learn blog
Cloud computing is no longer the latest buzzword—it’s the new reality for global business. As cloud technology rapidly evolves and matures, enabling innovative products and services, organizations face a critical need for a skilled, cloud-enabled IT workforce. As revealed in a recent Microsoft-sponsored study by IDC, cloud-related skills represent a good portion of the IT growth opportunities worldwide through 2015, punctuating the opportunity—and demand—for the training and certification that Microsoft IT Academy provides to academic institutions.
Microsoft collaborated with IDC to gauge the correlation between the demand for cloud-related jobs and the gap in IT skills needed to fill the positions. As the research reveals, demand for “cloud-ready” IT workers will grow by 26% annually through 2015, driving 14 million new jobs by 2015 with 7 million IT professionals working in a cloud-related IT role.
The demand for skilled cloud professionals is coupled with a distinct gap in the skills needed to fill positions—a challenge already resonating throughout the IT industry. IT hiring managers report today that the lack of trained and certified job candidates is the core reason they failed to fill an existing 1.7 million open cloud positions in 2012. Over the next few years, as organizations concentrate technologies in the cloud, solving the IT skills gap will become imperative to stay competitive and to solving the IT skills gap is imperative to reduce costs and stay competitive.
Training and Certification: the Keystone for Solving the IT Skills Gap
The IDC study reports that training and certification will play essential roles in preparing IT professionals for the evolving IT organization. In anticipation of the evolution to the cloud, Microsoft recently reinvented training and certifications for Microsoft server and cloud platform technologies, including Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Windows 8, and Office 365. These certifications are providing the cloud-ready skills and validation hiring managers are looking for, both in professionals transitioning to cloud technologies and a new generation of job seekers.
Microsoft IT Academy is helping to fill the pipeline of new cloud-enabled workforce by providing training and certification for academic institutions worldwide. Microsoft IT Academy program is helping students develop the necessary cloud skills needed to succeed, whether it is the business skills of Office 365 or deeper technology skills. With more than 13,000 IT Academy members in more than 130 countries Microsoft is providing the training and certifications to help over 7.5 million students to obtain the skills they need for the jobs of tomorrow.
Read more:
Hello all,
My name is Kieran Porter and I am the new Internal Further Education Business Manager. I have been lucky enough to get the chance to speak to quite a few of you already and I’m really excited for the coming year in FE!
January was a tricky month for us all with the snow and there were definitely some takeaways to think about. It was interesting to see that, although measures have been taken to prevent downtime in Education, a lot of people still had a day (or more) off and some Colleges were closed for days at a time. This leads to the question - why are we still not prepared for this?!
The proliferation of connected devices, combined with the variety of services such as Office 365 for Education & Lync, can provide a powerful solution to deliver remote learning scenarios & it is getting much easier to provide the tools for anywhere, anytime teaching and learning. I think we will see a lot more Colleges adopt these new ideas in the coming year with new Cloud Services & Devices.
If you want to find out more about how Microsoft is helping Colleges throughout the UK adapt to the new ways of working, please join us on the following online Webinars in conjunction with our Education partners;
Webinars
Office 365 for Education – In Conjunction with Cloud Business
What is Office 365? What does it mean for education? How do we migrate from other services?
Virtualisation – Desktop Strategy in Further Education – In Conjunction with Risual
Desktop strategy in Further Education. Bring your own Device.
XP to W7/8 Migration in Education
This session is designed to help guide Colleges on how to migrate to Windows 7/8 from XP and the value of doing this for the College.
Lync in Further Education – How to teach and learn anywhere anytime – In Conjunction with Risual
Risual will be discussing about how Lync messaging, video conferencing and voice can enhance the teaching and learning experience and Collaboration in Further Education.
CRM in Education – Why? – In Conjunction with Crimson
In this session Crimson will be discussing the value of CRM in education and how this can save money and time as well as improve productivity.
To register for any of the above listed webinars or for any further information on them then please email me; v-kiepor@microsoft.com
A full range of Office 2013 quick start guides are now available to download via the Office Blog. A selection of these can be viewed in full below. These can also be downloaded via our SlideShare account.