With the release of SkyDrive, backing up files to the cloud has become easier than ever. SkyDrive offers 7GB free storage (25 GB free upgrade for loyal users.
As we all know, SkyDrive is available for Windows. If you have already installed and are using SkyDrive, you probably have noticed that one can easily drag-and-drop a file to a SkyDrive folder to sync file to the account.
But if you want to backup a large number of files by transferring files to your account, dragging and dropping files may take quite a while. So, what’s the best way to easily send large number of files to a SkyDrive folder?
The best way is to add a SkyDrive shortcut to the Send to menu. By adding a SkyDrive shortcut to the Send to menu, you will be able to send files in a jiffy.
Procedure:
Step 1: Navigate to C:\Users\UserName directory (“C” is your Windows installation drive letter and “UserName” is your user account name). Right-click on SkyDrive and select Create Shortcut.
Step 2: Open Run dialog box. To do this, simultaneously press Windows + R keys. In the dialog, type shell:sendto and hit enter key to open SendTo folder.
The only catch is that when you use the Send to menu to send a file to SkyDrive, the file will be stored in the root folder. In other words, if you want to send a file to the subfolder of SkyDrive, you will need to manually drag-and-drop the file.
Users who don’t mind adding multiple shortcuts to the Send to menu can add shortcuts of Documents and Public folders to the the menu.
Originally posted on Into Windows
Join thousands of student developers and start building Windows Phone apps with resources available on the Go Underground website.
Have you downloaded any of these apps built by students? If so, which one(s) have you downloaded and what do you think?
Posted on Microsoft Student
The anticipated wait is over and Office 365 for education is now available. So how can you get started using Office 365 in your school, college or university?
Below you can find a detailed guide of how to sign up for your 30 day free trial of Office 365 for education. Increase productivity in your education institution with free email, instant messaging, online document editing and viewing and lots more. Here’s how to enrol:
Gerald Haigh is a freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Microsoft Education Blogs.
Towards the end of April I went to Birmingham, to one of the nine Technical Seminars which RM ran in venues around the country this Spring.
They were primarily dealing with technical challenges schools face and how their ICT management product ‘Community Connect 4’, can help network managers solve them.
RM have been holding these seminars for twenty years now, covering successive generations of RM schools networks. At first they were small affairs, held in informal venues (yes, it’s true that some pubs were involved). Now they’re major events for over a hundred people at a time, and are often oversubscribed. So, you’d guess, they’re probably getting something right.
That’s certainly the opinion of the people I met in Birmingham, many of whom attend the seminars regularly.
(‘They’re not just about knowledge, I find them inspiring, ‘was the verdict of one network manager who’s been attending for ten years.)
Gill Rhodes, who manages the networks for three neighbouring primary schools in Oxfordshire puts it like this.
‘In effect they give cut down versions of their courses – the kind of brief overview which is what you often need. They bring you up to date, and add some of the latest tips. I always pick something up – and then there’s meeting people of course, and speaking to experts face to face.’
They’re also, it must be said, very friendly gatherings. As they’ve developed over the years, RM organisers and presenters have done a quite remarkable job of hitting and keeping just the right balance of information, informality and expertise.
Unsurprisingly, the people I met were all convinced of the advantage of using RM’s Community Connect to manage their networks. Ian Wilson, Assistant Head at Manor High School in Leicester says,
‘We know that a plain vanilla Microsoft network will deliver a lot of what’s required, but in my view Community Connect adds a set of education-specific tools which allow the network team to concentrate on high value education activities and not so much on lower value network activities.’
The case becomes even clearer when the network team is small and overstretched.
‘If you have a small network team, Community Connect makes life much easier,’ says David Greengrass, Network Manager at Uppingham Community College.
Gill Rhodes agrees.
‘I do a lot of my work remotely when I’m in one school and another has a problem. I couldn’t do what I do without Community Connect.’
The partnership with RM is also worth a great deal – everyone spoke well of the quality and promptness of their support.
The optional seminar sessions themselves – nine in all – covered a range of issues. Some, like the one on ‘Troubleshooting: Drivers’ were no-nonsense technical sessions obviously responding to specific needs. By no means all were like that, though. ‘Developing an Effective AV and Classroom Technology Strategy’ was very much about senior leaders and network teams picking their way through the forest of available technologies towards a position where effective classroom AV is at the core of teaching and learning. And in ‘Negotiation Techniques’, Gethin Nichols dealt with what can sometimes be an elephant in the room – the importance of building an effective relationship between the network team and the leaders of learning in a school.
I was particularly interested in two sessions that dealt particularly with CC4. One, ‘CC4 Management Tasks’, run by Matt Edwards, might have been a bit technical for me in parts, but I thought it a very clear statement of what Community Connect, and particularly CC4, is all about, which is making the network team’s life easier.
Matt started by listing eighteen basic network management tasks, common to virtually all schools, ranging from ‘checking backups have worked, through ‘resetting passwords’ and ‘fault diagnosing computers’ to ‘creating and supporting package installation’.
He then set about methodically looking at teach task to see how, with CC4, it can be made easier, or automated, or are effectively administration tasks that someone else could be doing. Talk to any seasoned CC4 enthusiast and they’ll soon tell you that the ease with which they can manage routine tasks is in fact one of the main attractions. At BETT this year, I shot a short video clip showing Darren Williams, of the Abbey School, Reading, making exactly that point. In the clip, Darren, who has his own school’s Management Console open on his laptop as he speaks, uses the same phrase that was the main theme of Matt’s presentation.
‘It’s made my life much easier’.
(You can see the video on Merlin Johns ‘Agent4Change’ site at http://www.agent4change.net/people/five-things/1339-gerald-haighs-five-things-to-think-about-1.html
The other CC4 session I was interested in was ‘CC4 The Future’, also run by Matt Edwards. Here, Matt was keen to emphasise the ‘future-proofed’ nature of CC4,
‘The focus of CC4 is very much in line with what’s going on in the industry,’ he said. -- To support BYOD (bring your own devices). To support remote access to services. To support use of new software and hardware technologies.’
Part of this approach, he explained, is to offer a subscription model for users, whereby licenses are paid for annually rather than up front.
As well as reducing the up-front expenditure, Community Connect Subscription customers will be entitled to future product enhancements, new server and client operating systems when available, CC4 updates, maintenance fixes and future Community Connect versions. They will also be able to add clients or
servers to their network without having to increase their subscription.’
(Quite like Microsoft’s own subscription licensing models in fact, was the thought that crossed my mind as Matt spoke.)
For me, though, what was most exciting about Matt’s look into the immediate future was the prospect of CC4 working with Windows 8. Matt has clearly made himself very familiar with Windows 8 and spent some time showing its features to his audience. Developments are still going on in this area at RM, but there’s a clear determination to make sure that all of the innovative features of Windows 8 including the Start Screen, Metro Apps, ‘Swipe, Slide and Zoom’, are exploited to the full. And just to comfort those in the audience whose brows were furrowing by the second, he said,
‘The key to using Windows 8 in my opinion is to get your head around the concept that the Start screen (Metro look) has simply replaced your old fashioned Start button.’
As Matt went on with his description of Windows 8, a question was forming in my mind, and just as I’d decided to tackle him with later, he answered it like this.
‘Although I do not currently have a great deal of detail on how the new Start screen will work with CC4 policies and security, I can reveal at least one little Windows 8 CC4 secret - we are currently developing CC4 specific Metro apps that can give you fast, direct access to management areas of your CC4 network.’
In other words, as network manager you’ll find specific CC4 functions accessible via individually labelled CC4 apps on the start screen.
He was able to show one example – an app called ‘RM Users’ which will come up on the Start Screen and allow direct access, without going to the management console, to all CC4 user groups.
As you’d expect, there was quite a buzz about this afterwards, and some network managers were clearly worried about what they saw as a big change from the Windows environments that they’d lived in harmony with for so long.
But thus has it ever been.
I guess the very fact that these questioners take the trouble to attend RM Seminars in order to keep up with trends and provide the best possible service to their learners shows that they’ll be quickly won over.
I have no doubt that there’ll be much more on Windows 8 in the Autumn Technical Seminars.
Frankly, I can’t wait.
Following the release of Office 365 for education, we are sharing a recent webinar we held held which shows how students see Office 365 and how they can utilize each part of it.
The webinar was attended by over 50 colleges thanks to JISC, and it demonstrates how teachers and faculty can get the most out of Office 365. It also gives some ideas for teaching plans.
The webinar shows how IT administrators can go from nothing to setting up their establishment as well as how to mazimise the use of Office, SharePoint and Lync. The webinar shows how Office 365 for education gives anytime learning to everyone.
You can view the webinar below.
Decide on priorities Your aim is to save some money for the school by making good decisions about ICT. It’ll be important to show how that can be done. So it’s time to decide where to start.
One imperative, and it’s more to do with management than technology, is to weigh the balance between going for quick immediate results on the one hand, and laying the foundations for longer term efficiency and savings on the other. A good example of playing the longer game is found in our Microsoft® Case Study of West Hatch High School. http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000008128 It begins with the governors agreeing, in 2008, to commence a six year ICT transformation project starting with a complete rebuild of the network infrastructure. That, clearly, tells of vision, leadership and long term commitment. Four years on, with no sign of stopping, story after story now comes from West Hatch of the effects on learning, efficiency and, yes, cost-saving, of that early decisiveness.
Sometimes, though, it’s necessary to demonstrate a quicker impact on the budget, and another story, from Islay High School, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukschools/archive/2010/10/21/reducing-the-school-printingbudget-by-two-thirds.aspx tells of a drive on paper saving – “No printed handouts or memos” – that cut paper and printing by an astonishing eighty percent from 2006 to 2007. Money saved was spent on student and staff netbooks.
Clearly, we can’t tell you what your priorities ought to be. There’s something to be said for a quick demonstration of what’s possible, but it’s more than likely that the long haul has to start in the background, too. It’s the planning that’s important, with a transparent whole-school collaborative approach and a strong steer from leadership.
Green, lean and far from mean
Trying for cost savings almost by definition addresses the increasingly important ‘Green’agenda along the way. The main contributor here is a reduction in the use of electricity, but there are savings to be made, too, in the use of paper and the consumables involved in printing and copying. Reducing the amount of hardware in the school, and extending its life also help make a positive environmental contribution.
Many schools are highly active in seeking to reduce their impact on the environment, signed up in many cases to organisations such as ‘Eco-Schools’
http://www.keepbritaintidy.org/ecoschools
Where this is the case, the drive for cost saving will both support and be informed by those responsible for the environmental effort, and there’s much to be gained from working together to ensure that nothing’s missed on either side.
To help your school further with cost saving, we have partnered with the Guardian to make our new 'Cost Saving in Education' eBook exclusively available within their Teacher Network until the end of September 2012. The eBook can be viewed/downloaded directly via the Guardian's Teacher Network download centre.
The Generation App website, from the Windows Phone team, is a really well structured guide to developing apps for the Windows Phone. And ‘well structured’ means that it talks you through a 30-day plan to design, build, test, distribute and monetize applications for Windows Phone – and connects to all of the resources you will need in the form of training, documentation, tools etc.
For students, it’s almost like a ready-made advanced course, and where you’ve got students who are already programming, but want to move onto advanced projects, this seems like just the perfect resource.
Visit the Generation App website
Originally posted on The Education Blog
Great for academic institutions that are ready to take advantage of the cloud. Office 365 offers free email, instant messaging, group video and voice chat, and online document viewing and editing.
We’ve got a great video that shows how Office 365 for education has enabled the University of Massachusetts and the National University of Ireland to work together in a curriculum environment.
You can view the video here.
Anthony Salcito, Vice President Worldwide Public Sector Education at Microsoft, interviews Amy Rosen, President and CEO of NFTE, Networking For Teaching Entrepreneurship. Learn more at www.dailyedventures.com and www.nfte.com
 
This weekend, students from 75 countries have been competing at the Imagine Cup worldwide finals – each team aiming to win in the finals tomorrow. It's a massive event – hundreds of students showcasing their technology innovations and ideas for making the world a better place.
Sadly, the Australian Team StethoCloud didn't make it into the six finalists for the Software Design competition, but the six teams that go through are now pitching their ideas to the judges aiming to take the cup back to their country on Tuesday night. Some of the problems the finalists are trying to solve are:
I spent Friday at the Sydney Convention Centre, volunteering to greet the teams as they arrived. (Fortunately, I didn't get the Sydney Airport volunteering stint, where my colleagues got to greet the arriving teams in Koala costume from 6AM!). It was a great experience, meeting all of the different students, and helping them to get started in the conference centre with their bag of goodies. I was really surprised by how international universities have become, with students from one country studying in another on the other side of the world. And I certainly got to test my world geography – by the end of my shift, I'd spoken with student teams from 46 different countries. And all the teams are getting a flavour of Sydney right now – with teams heading over to Taronga Zoo (eg), or climbing to the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge (pic).
For a flavour of how the Imagine Cup is going, there's a great Imagine Cup photo stream on Flickr, and you can follow the action on Twitter, by looking for tweets using the #imaginecup hashtag. The global winners get announced tomorrow evening, so the excitement will be mounting right up until then.
Visit the Imagine Cup website
Originally post by Ray Fleming