The UK Higher Education Blog

ZipApp - Create your own Windows 8 App

2013-05-24T07:30:00Z

Got an idea for a Windows 8 app for your class or institution but don’t know where to start? ZipApp can help.

ZipApp gives you the ability to simply add some data or hook up one of your existing online services, such as Twitter or an RSS feed, to create a Windows 8 app that complies with store rules, without the need for in-depth coding knowledge or experience.

To get started, and build an app in only 10 minutes, firstly go to ZipApp.co.uk and sign in with a Twitter, Google, Facebook or Microsoft Account. Once you are signed in you will be able to create a new app. It will ask for some basic information such as the App Name, and a description etc. You are then on your way to being able to share your app in the Windows Store.

When you build your app you get the source code so you can extend the application to your hearts content. Furthermore, with dozens of templates that are available, you can be confident that you will be able to find a design that compliments your institutions branding etc.

Additionally, you can sell your app, add advertising or give it away for free. Flexibility sits at the heart of ZipApp!

Get started today by visiting www.zipapp.co.uk. Let us know your ideas for an app or post a link to your app in the store in the comments below.

Create your first Windows 8 BookApp

2013-05-23T07:30:00Z

Following a recent conversation with a colleague, I just wanted to quickly share an interesting new eBook app builder that would be perfect for educators across the sector.

BookApp for Windows 8 allows you to quickly and easily create and post your own eBook style app to the Windows Store. To get started, simply download the free MyBookApp template and you are only a few steps away from publishing your own books to the world.

Windows 8, Visual Studio Express 2012 (free download) and the MyBookApp template are needed to get started. You will also need to follow the instructions on the site to actually create your app.

To learn more and to download the MyBookApp template, visit their website and get started today.

We would love to hear about any books you post to the store (post a link to the book in the comments below)

Enhancing Flipped Classrooms with Microsoft IT Academy Tools

2013-05-22T07:30:00Z

Originally posted on the Born to Learn Blog.

Most teaching models in high school and college follow the age-old standard: first, lecture the students, telling them what they need to know; then, send the students home to apply what was taught to a project or a paper.

This approach was developed in the days when the educator was the only source of knowledge, before mass-produced books, the internet, eBooks, computers, multimedia and mobile devices made it possible for each student to have the entire world's knowledge in their pocket. Back then, educators held the knowledge and students listened to their lectures because there was no other way to learn new concepts and ideas.

But the hard part of learning is not listening to the lecture. The hard part is doing the work: practicing and performing the new task until you master it. This is where most students struggle because, as their questions arise, guidance is needed and educators are not available around the clock.

Many educators have come up with a new way to teach that takes advantage of information technologies. They have turned the old approach upside down, bringing the practice and performance into the classroom; and leaving the lecture-listening for homework. This way, they can support their students when they need it, and students can help each other figure out the tough parts. We might describe this as the F.L.I.P.P. approach:

Farm out the

Lecture as homework, then,

Inside of the classroom,

Practice and

Perform the tasks to build skills

While this isn’t a particularly new approach, some teachers are finding great success with it; so I wanted to share what this could look like in a Microsoft IT Academy member school.

Let's take a simple example, like teaching a skill that's required in the Microsoft Office curriculum: opening and editing a PDF file with Word. Under the old approach, we'd teach it this way:

First, in class, the students would sit and watch as the educator lectured them and showed them on the big screen how to open a PDF file with Word. An educator would stand up in front of the students and show them how this works best with documents that are mostly text, and how some older PDFs won't open at all. As students watched, the educator would demonstrate how to use the editing and formatting features of Word to work with the content of the PDF until it was formatted correctly. The educator would show them an assignment for homework to be completed outside of class. The assignment would call for them to open a series of PDF files, edit the content, and practice these skills on their own until they were able to perform the tasks as they would on a certification exam.

An educator following the FLIPP approach, on the other hand, would teach it this way:

Find and assign the appropriate course and lesson from the Microsoft IT Academy eLearning library that shows students how to edit PDFs with Word. Using the Lesson Plan as a guide, the educator might also include online tutorials from Microsoft, a page from the Wiley Microsoft Official Academic Courseware (MOAC) book, or a page from a book sourced by searching through the eReference library. The educator might develop his or her own narrated screen recording of the process, as well. Students could study these resources on their computer, on their mobile device, or on their tablet.

Let students work with resources for homework. The educator could simply use the reporting capability in the IT Academy eLearning system to track the usage and progress of students and utilize the other resources as optional learning materials or post as assignments in an alternative Learning Management System. The educator might additionally assign students some simple editing exercises.

In class, the educator presents them with some difficult PDF-editing projects, which call for full mastery of the skill. These projects may be found on the IT Academy member site, in the MOAC curriculum, sourced from other educators, or created from scratch. The educator observes the students as they work, helping them as necessary. The educator might pair a more advanced student to work one-on-one with a student who is having difficulty, or assign different parts of the project to a group who would work together to complete the project.

Practice their craft with many different examples and projects typically found in business, the arts, or any other real world scenario, and expect that by the end of the lesson, each and every student would be able to competently edit PDFs in a variety of scenarios.

Perform the PDF-editing task with the level of competence required on the certification exam.

The Microsoft IT Academy benefits fit very nicely to a FLIPP environment. Many teachers have been adopting this approach with success - understanding the resources available, and that students may learn best on their own time, at their own pace, and when receiving teacher guidance when its needed most.

If you are not yet a Microsoft IT Academy member, learn about the importance of Microsoft IT Academy from other members.

If you are a Microsoft IT Academy member, sign In and go to Getting Started.

Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing

2013-05-21T08:00:00Z

As part of our ongoing commitment to add value to the education community we serve, we are thrilled to be working with Janet to provide additional support and services to their user base.

Janet provides and develops a network infrastructure to support world-class research and education to over 18 million end users and helps academic institutions to better communicate, collaborate and co-operate, globally.

With the Janet network now peered with the our datacentre, both Microsoft and Janet can build on this strong and unique foundation to add additional services that reduce costs and help make the community more competitive.

With the Cloud Services for Education agreement service already helping institutions, such as Goldsmiths, save in excess of £20,000 in legal due diligence, we are excited about the next stage in the evolution of our work with Janet which is focused around Azure.

The press release from Janet below covers these exciting developments in more detail, but in essence, with our joint dedication to the sector, Janet and Microsoft is able to offer improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects.

A launch event for the strategic agreement, where a formal signing of the agreement will take place, is scheduled for the 21st May at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the full press release from Janet is shown below.

We look forward to sharing additional updates and successes associated with our work with Janet on the blog over the coming weeks and months.

Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing

More than 18 million students, staff and researchers at institutions across the UK could start to benefit from a faster and more secure connection when using their institution’s cloud-based IT services, thanks to a new peering arrangement between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’s research and education network.

This new agreement enables improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects. Janet has recently become part of the Jisc group, the UK’s champion for digital technology in research and education.

Connecting the networks privately eliminates the need to traverse data over the public internet. This enables a high bandwidth connection for students and staff to use Windows Azure. Bandwidth is managed, ensuring high-speed delivery with no delay or latency.

The move to peer the Microsoft Windows Azure data centre to the Janet network comes as part of a new strategic alliance between the two organisations, being signed at Goldsmiths, University of London on Tuesday 21 May (press welcome to attend by prior arrangement).

Professor Anne Trefethen, Chief Information Officer, University of Oxford: “In the UK, higher education institutions are fortunate to have high speed network services as provided by Janet. The capability afforded by Janet’s peering with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud with high-bandwidth secure connections creates new opportunities for researchers and the University community as a whole.”

Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University Paul Watson comments: “Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise research by offering vast compute resources on-demand. At Newcastle University, we already have over £20M of research projects that are supported by the cloud. However, one of the major barriers holding back further cloud adoption is the time it takes to transfer large datasets from the lab to the cloud for analysis. This new link between Janet and the Azure Cloud removes this barrier, and will allow a far greater range of research projects to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing.”

The alliance agreement also means any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365, negotiated by Janet.

An early beneficiary of this arrangement is Goldsmiths, which is also one of a select group of institutions responsible for initiating work on the alliance. Basem El-Haddadeh, Director of IT Services at Goldsmiths said: “The work on Office 365 will save the sector considerable time and money in legal due diligence and speed up adoption of Office 365. We’re really pleased with the roll-out at Goldsmiths and our staff and students are already enjoying using the new system. I’m looking forward to the benefits the strategic alliance can bring.”

“Through the peering and strategic alliance, we are demonstrating our commitment to UK research and education institutes’ increasing desire to access cloud technologies and we are complementing our world class fibre network with Microsoft’s leading technologies to support the sector,” said Dan Perry, Director of Product and Marketing at Janet.

Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft Ltd said: “We are delighted to be working with Janet to provide additional value-added products and services to the research and education community. We have a long-standing relationship with this sector and are looking forward to more collaborative working with Janet to grow our offering.”

END

ChronoZoom Named Top Educational Resource at 2013 SXSW Interactive

2013-05-21T07:30:00Z

Originally posted on the Microsoft Research Connections Blog.

When Microsoft Research teamed up with the University of California Berkeley to create a digital tool for exploring the history of everything, we knew we had the potential to build a killer educational app. After all, a tool that can reveal the cross-currents of history, revealing the interdependencies that cut across disciplines, geographies, and cultures, would offer a major advance in the understanding of Big History—the history of not just humanity, but of life, Earth and, ultimately, the cosmos. Moreover, it would provide researchers with a tool to derive unique insights based on multidisciplinary connections between vastly disparate data sets.

On March 12, the resulting tool, ChronoZoom—a dynamic, zoomable timeline that starts with Big Bang and ends with modern history—won first prize in the Educational Resources category of the 2013 SXSW Interactive Awards. As described on the SXSW website, the SXSW Interactive Awards competition “uncovers the best new digital work, from mobile and tablet apps to websites and installations, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow's interactive trends.”

ChronoZoom was developed to make time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources. It thus serves as a “master timeline,” tying together all kinds of specialized timelines and electronic resources, and aspires to bridge the gap between humanities and the sciences and to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past. With the planned addition of in-browser content and authoring tools, we hope to enable educators and researchers to build timelines; explore rich, multidisciplinary contextual spaces; and to tell and share stories based on authoritative data.

Donald Brinkman, Roland Saekow, and Michael Zyskowski accept the 2013 SXSW Interactive Award for Education

The prestigious SXSW Interactive Award for Education recognizes the educational value of this amazing open-source product. Moreover, it honours the multidisciplinary team that came together to make ChronoZoom a reality: software engineers, program managers, and project leaders at Microsoft Research Connections in Redmond, Washington, and students and professors at Moscow State University in Russia and at UC Berkeley and University of Washington in the United States. This distributed team developed cutting-edge HTML5 and JavaScript code and implemented services on Windows Azure to create a rich, visual database full of historical events and timelines.

The ChronoZoom project is part of the Outercurve Foundation’s Research Accelerators Gallery. The Outercurve Foundation, a non-profit, open-source foundation, provides software IP management and project development governance to 22 open-source projects. Developers can get involved by visiting the source code project on GitHub.

In his acceptance speech, Michael Zyskowski dedicated the award to Lee Dirks, who strongly believed in and supported the ChronoZoom project.

I encourage you to experience the power of ChronoZoom for yourself. But be forewarned—it can be addictive!

—Donald Brinkman, Program Manager, Microsoft Research Connections

Learn More

TouchDevelop eBook now available

2013-05-20T07:30:00Z

The UK education team are huge fans of TouchDevelop. If you haven’t come across this before, TouchDevelop is a programming environment that runs on iPad, iPhone, Android, PC, Mac and Windows Phone and allows you to create scripts by simply tapping the screen on your mobile device. You do not need a separate PC or keyboard and scripts can perform various tasks similar to regular apps. It even works offline!

Any TouchDevelop user can install, run, edit, and publish scripts. With over 26K scripts already available, you can share your scripts with other people by publishing them to the TouchDevelop script bazaar, or by submitting them as an app to the Windows Store or Windows Phone Store.

The video below shows TouchDevelop in action.

To help both teachers and students start their TouchDevelop journey, a new eBook is now available as a free download.

For teachers, it walks in detail through all of the screens of the TouchDevelop app, and it points out similarities and differences of the TouchDevelop language compared to other programming languages that the teacher might already be familiar with.

For students and enthusiasts, the book can serve as a handy reference next to the phone. The book systematically addresses all programming language constructs, starting from the very basic constructs such as variables and loops. The book also explores many of the phone sensors and data sources which make creating apps for mobile devices so rewarding.

The full eBook can be downloaded via the following link - Download the book.

We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals to be Hosted by Doctor Who

2013-05-17T07:30:00Z

For the last few weeks, thousands of students in dozens of countries all over the planet have been competing in the Imagine Cup Local Finals. They've formed teams, dreamed up big ideas, and then set to work making amazing software. This July, we're going to send several hundred of them, the best of the best, to St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals.

At the awards ceremony on the 11th July, finalists will be joined by Doctor Who, Matt Smith, who will be hosting the finals, itself.

The Imagine Cup awards ceremony will be streamed live, and as a short taster for the finals, Matt asks the question: What’s next?

The Daily Edventures Web Show is now live!

2013-05-16T11:30:00Z

The Daily Edventures Web Show is now live! Celebrating the best classroom educators from all over the world, the Daily Edventures Web Show will share the best ideas and practices in education today in a fun and engaging TV show format. Each episode will address a different theme, such as game-based learning, one-to-one,accessibility or building teacher capacity.

Catch the latest episodes at Daily Edventures and, in case you missed it, you can watch the pilot episode below.

Got an idea for a future show? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We look forward to hearing from you!

Tablets in Education: Surface Pro

2013-05-16T07:30:00Z

In another great tablet in education video, Mark Reynolds gives us a sneak peak at the Surface Pro. Scheduled for launch in the UK before the end of May, in this short video, Mark discusses some of the Surface Pro’s unique features such as pen input, great build quality, full manageability and the ability to run both Windows Store and legacy X86 apps.

Mark also demonstrates the difference between both the touch and type keyboards.

Not long now

Tablets in education: Acer W510

2013-05-15T07:30:00Z

In the first in a series of device orientated HeadsUp videos, Mark Reynolds gives us a detailed, but non-technical, overview of the Acer W510 running Windows 8 Pro.

The Acer 510 is a highly portable dockable tablet, with 9 hours of battery life, that is available via Shape the Future for £395 and includes Office.

We will be releasing additional videos via the blog on an ongoing basis. If there is a specific device you would like us to feature, just leave your request in the comments below.