March, 2008

It's a long time since I was in the Maths classroom, but that fear of simultaneous equations can still cause a sensation of panic whenever I think about them. And when I walk into a classroom and see a scientific graphic calculator, it nearly brings me out in a rash. (I have to admit that the Maths curriculum wasn't one of my high points).

Over time, things have come along to make life easier for non-maths-specialists (what did the generation before mine do without Excel?) - and Microsoft Maths is one such thing. In a nutshell, it's there to help advanced GCSE & A-Level students with their work, and can help to demystify some of the problem solving that students face. We include it in the software package called Microsoft Student (which I saw on the shelves of Staples recently), and schools can buy bulk licences from their normal software supplier.

But you wouldn't buy a bit of software without knowing what it does, would you? Here's some help

• There's a new site where you can walk through a complete demonstration of the software, including its use as scientific calculator, graphing calculator, equation solver and triangle solver. All running in Silverlight here.
  
• And even better, I've got a dozen free full-licence disks for Microsoft Math (as our trans-atlantic cousins call it) sitting on my desk for the first people to email me

Have a math-tastic Monday!

One of the current trends in schools is the compelling need for a "learning platform". Not only because one of the government's Harnessing Technology targets say you have to have one, but because it can help you to offer more flexible learning delivery. A basic learning platform is only the start of the story though - what many schools really want is to provide a way of supporting all of their projects and planned changes. For example, with the obligation for secondary schools to deliver real-time attendance and assessment information to parents by September 2010, there's a need to join all of these online projects together. (Oh please, please, don't tell me that as a parent I'm going to have to remember another half-dozen passwords and logins for different systems. My brain is already full with web passwords as it is!)

For the last 3 years or so, Mark A'Bear (one of my witty colleagues, in case he's reading this) from the UK Education team has been working with a long list of educational ICT providers to help them to integrate their systems onto SharePoint (which is the software behind the Learning Gateway). This means that one single web-portal can link together all of your different ICT systems, and your users can access them all in one place, with one password, and from home & school.

Each term, Mark hosts an event for schools to come along to our headquarters here in Reading, to understand that work, and to talk with the partners to understand how that integration can work. This term's SharePoint Showcase is on the 21st May, and Mark's already put together a big attendee list of partners who will be presenting:

Arc - eLearningForce - Digi-Link - MicroLibrarian Systems - K2 - Scholaris - Parabola - WinVision - eCopy - Business Insights Group - Nisai - ITWorx - Fronter - Cambridge University Press

As always, there's a packed agenda, and if you want help to improve a learning platform strategy, I'm pretty sure that you will leave with a number of ideas to help you with your planning. And the content is relevant whether you're using SharePoint already, or want to understand what it might be able to do with you. There are also a mass of schools where the local authority has chosen a SharePoint or Learning Gateway-based learning platform, and this session would help you to understand what you might be asking your local authority to provide in the future.

Book your place on our Events website

We're working on updating our UK Education website and we'd like to know what you think of it as it is now - what works and what doesn't? Apart from accessing the blogs, do you even visit it and is the information relevant to you?

If you don't visit the site, we'd love to know why; and if you do, whether it's what you'd expect from Microsoft in Education. Your opinions and suggestions are very important to us in developing the site - after all, it's there for you to get the information you need from us, so we want to know what you'd like and expect to see there.

Now, I know that you're all very busy people, so to try and tempt you into spending at the most 10 minutes of your time completing our survey, every survey entrant will be entered into a prize draw to win a free copy of Office 2007 for personal use.

So if you haven't already done so, you can complete the survey here and it will be open until the end of the day on Friday 28th March.

The prize draw will take place on Friday 4th April and the winner notified by email, so make sure you leave your email details along with your name and job title at the end of the survey. Good luck!

I was chatting with Leighton Searle last week - Leighton's our Business Manager for Schools, which means that he seems to spend his week travelling up and down the country meeting local authorities and talking about their plans for the future. He was worrying about semantics when we met - should we be calling a spade a spade? And if we call it a "manual-food-growing-assistance-device", do we get a better result? This came from his conversation with James Penny. I'll let Leighton tell it his way...

James Penny, the Director of IT at the Girls Day Schools Trust doesn't describe the managed service he successfully provides to 29 independent girls schools as a ‘managed’ service – despite acknowledging that is exactly what it is. He describes it as an ‘enabling’ service, as this reflects the philosophy behind their approach. Considering that the greatest fear of many schools entering the Building Schools for Future initiative is of having a managed service imposed on them, many service providers could do worse than sit up and listen to what James has to say.

The idea of providing a service which enables schools to take a core, dependable set of technologies and build upon them to create the tools and resources which are relevant to them are key to the GDST’s ‘enabling’ service. A good example of this in practice is the GDST MyPlace portal. This provides a central Microsoft Learning Gateway service, fully integrated with rest of the core services (Mail, Instant Messaging, Video Conferencing, Active Directory etc.) which schools can take and customise as their own. The net result is 29 schools with access to highly resilient, integrated portal and Learning Platform which they can each adapt and customise as far as they see fit. 

Leighton's thoughts helped to solidify in my mind one of the issues I come across regularly - the dissonance between 'users' and 'service providers'. For example, the gap between an ICT managed service provider's service, and a classroom teacher's individual needs. And should we be aspiring to 'keep up' with everything that's new?" And this is where there's a great need for individual flexibility - so that teachers can do their own thing - not what a service provider lets them do.  Leighton continues...

The ability of individual users, not just institutions to make their technology their own by personalising it and framing their learning in a way that is relevant to them was a point Steve Moss from PfS also raised at the BSEC conference three weeks ago. He pointed out that many of the learning platforms schools are using today still resemble “teaching” environments rather than “learning” environments. Steve used the example of Moodle to illustrate what he considered a bland teaching environment which would not especially engage learners. I was really pleased to see him present Microsoft’s BSF showcase (you can see the video here) as an exemplar of the right way to go in the future. A visually engaging, integrated environment which learners can personalise significantly. Well the next iteration of that thinking and development is almost here, and I heard of the test modelling environments that are about to be unveiled in Knowsley and Kent which will seek to further explore the impact of technology and technology-enabled environments. Not only are we seeing an innovative look at business intelligence coming out of these working partnerships, providing teachers with a single, graphical view on multiple data sources to inform risk assessments and plan interventions, but we are starting to see technology applied to the physical learning space as well. I for one will be watching these developments with anticipation.

Smart Wall classroom or holographic guest teacher anyone?!

And that brings up another dissonance between 'users' and 'service providers' - between the ICT experience of students at home, and the provision in school. The gap may have been there for a while, but it is being written and talked about more frequently. Sometimes people refer to the 'digital divide', or 'digital natives versus digital immigrants'. But fundamentally, the question is "How far should we take the use of technology? And is a student able to bring their skills developed by the use of ICT outside of school, to the classroom.

So, here I am, in the middle of a long meeting, and feeling the need for a sugar-boost. Fortunately, our little shop in the office sells a range of snacks, and wanting to be reasonably prudent, I went for the "Healthyideas" milk chocolate brazil nuts. And reading the ingredients (as you do...) I found that last, alarming, ingredient was "shellac". Now, to me, that rang a bell - something to do with varnish. And a quick check on the Encarta website, revealed:

Lac, resinous substance secreted by the lac insect upon the twigs and young branches of certain trees, the chief of which are species of fig. Lac is a product of southern Asia, particularly northern India. The term is the same as the numerical lac (or lakh), meaning 100,000, and denotes the myriad insects that swarm upon the trees. The lac insect, Laccifer lacca, is of the Coccodae superfamily (see Scale Insect). Females insert their long proboscises into the bark of the twigs or branches, drawing their foodstuff from the sap. They exude a secretion that accrues and coalesces, forming hard, resinous layers that completely cover their bodies. The ovaries contain a crimson fluid called lac dye, resembling cochineal, once used as a dye

And this is in my bag of chocolate coated nuts?

Shame I'd already eaten half the packet. But better - I've now shared the other half with others in the room. Thanks Encarta

We're working on updating our UK Education website and we'd like to know what you think of it as it is now - what works and what doesn't? Apart from accessing the blogs, do you even visit it and is the information relevant to you?

If you don't visit the site, we'd love to know why; and if you do, whether it's what you'd expect from Microsoft in Education. Your opinions and suggestions are very important to us in developing the site - after all, it's there for you to get the information you need from us, so we want to know what you'd like and expect to see there.

Now, I know that you're all very busy people, so to try and tempt you into spending at the most 10 minutes of your time completing our survey, every survey entrant will be entered into a prize draw to win a free copy of Office 2007 for personal use. 

You can complete the survey here and it will be open until the end of the day on Friday 28th March.

The prize draw will take place on Friday 4th April and the winner notified by email, so make sure you leave your email details along with your name and job title at the end of the survey. Good luck!

Every year Becta run the ICT Excellence Awards, which aims to identify (and reward) schools throughout the UK who, in Becta's words are "approaching ICT in outstanding or innovative ways, benefiting their whole community both inside and outside the school building".

Becta align the awards with their own Becta Self-Review Framework and the ICT Mark. This year, in addition to recognising the school, they are also focusing on those individuals leading change within their school and making an impact across it. There are 8 national awards for primary and secondary. Additionally the 'Support for Schools' category will reward those organisations supporting schools in their use of ICT.

The deadline for entries is 30th April. You can find details on the Becta web site

There always seems to be a bit of a flaw with these competitions - they rely on schools and individuals putting themselves forward. Which means it tends to be "self-promoters' who enter, and often win. But I come across good schools all the time who are surprised that what they are doing is exceptional- or at least, not being done by other schools. So let me urge you to enter yourself. or your school. Especially if you've found other schools are interested in what you're doing

Last week, I was talking to a customer at the NAACE conference, and we got onto the subject of "Learning Essentials"...or at least I got on to the subject, because it turned out that he had never heard of it. And so I asked another customer, and got the same shoulder-shrug.

Shock! Horror! We give things away and nobody's heard of them!

So let me try and right that wrong.

Learning Essentials is a free add-on for Office, which contains a set of tools to help teachers and students. Things like curriculum templates, and toolbars for Word, PowerPoint and Excel to help students and teachers get started on projects and stay organised during them.

• Teachers get things like handout and presentation templates, marking rubrics, bibliography tools, maths symbols, and a simple "Create Test" wizard.
• Students get tools, templates and tutorials to help them get past "Blank Page Syndrome", language tools and templates, and tips and tutorials for managing projects and producing high-quality work.

It even includes a facility to create SCORM content. At this point I can hear you thinking "Wow" with that slightly sarcastic tone, so let me tell you that is a very good thing, because it's becoming the established standard for content within Learning Platforms, and the Government say we've all got to have one of these, and they want teachers to create learning resources for students available from within and outside of school!

You can find out all about Learning Essentials on the worldwide Microsoft education website, which includes links to download. It works with Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP (that pretty much covers everybody!). If you want to see what it can do, then take a look at the Learning Essentials Tour.

At the NAACE conference I ran into an old friend, Sheyne Lucock, who is the General Inspector for BSF (Building Schools for the Future) and ICT at Barking and Dagenham Local Authority. Sheyne has always been somebody who's done things "his own way" - not concerned about what way the crowd is going, and very focused on what is right for his schools in the area. One of the most visible examples is what they chose to do under the DfES ICT Test Beds project, when they ignored the mandate to put an interactive whiteboard into every classroom, but instead put a massive display screen with a wireless digitising slate and pen.

Sheyne's new role (and job title) now focuses work on BSF,  where local authorities are responsible for the programme of rebuilding or renovating all of the secondary schools within their area. Some local authorities have an attitude that suddenly they are able to grab back some of the control over schools that they have had to give up over the last 15 years. I've even heard some authorities saying "We will decide what will happen - because they are our schools; they don't belong to the head teacher". Well, not every authority has that attitude, and Sheyne represents one of those. I had the chance to talk to Sheyne about how they were designing the ICT service for their BSF schools - and his story is a fascinating insight into how to share a decision-making process across a wide group of people, all with their own individual views.

Sheyne, what's the background to your BSF project?

The BSF programme's ICT assumptions are that there will be a managed service. When I and my colleagues started our view was opposed to managed services. Which was the same mind set as the schools. We felt that having that common starting point was actually critical to start work. As an authority, we felt we'd been innovative and had kept a lot of in-house expertise, and we didn't want a managed service to be "done to us".But I realised that the starting point was to put myself into the mind set of everybody else in the game.

Our secondary schools had always been responsible for their own ICT strategy, procurement and management. But in practice they relied on the local authority a huge amount - they adopted the authority wide email system, server platform, Internet service and filtering services - because that was what their choice was, rather than because we forced it upon them. The schools all chose their own server platforms - and with our support, all choose the same one. As an authority, we operated a low-level central support team - a kind of second-level collaborative support network, rather than a formal service to schools with a set of Service Level Agreements. It matched up with our schools mindset of collaboration.

So you're in this nirvana - and along comes BSF with its monolithic, managed services approach.

At first, it was quite scary and challenging - because we could see the big programmes , like the Dudley and Northern Ireland managed services, which had been designed to replace, rather than supplement, the existing ICT strategy. Our schools too were nervous - they feared losing their autonomy. And so the secondary school head teachers unanimously voted against the idea of a managed service.

But as an authority, we knew that we couldn't opt out of a managed service contract for BSF - unlike other authorities, we didn't have an existing service arrangement or procurement framework. As a blank canvas we had no justification to being allowed to do things differently from the BSF model.

So what happened next - you had no choice?

Yes, it was clear from the BSF programme team at Partnership for Schools (PfS)that if we wanted the BSF programme to go ahead in our authority, we had to accept a managed service for the schools' ICT - as part of a normal BSF project. And the stakes were high - we had all of our schools in a single wave of BSF, we had to convert all of our schools in one go. We knew we couldn't fight and win against a managed service - so instead, we focused our energy on what we could influence to get the best outcome for all of our schools. We wanted to make sure that we effectively worked with our schools, to get a managed service that matched and improved upon the service our schools have already.

For us, it meant changing our local authority team, and the schools mind set - that if we worked on defining clearly what we wanted, we'd have a chance of getting it. And we knew we had to make that an inclusive process - in fact, we wanted the schools to own the process and for the local authority team to be the facilitator for it. We wanted to be clear that we weren't making all the decisions regardless of the school.

How did you get started on this process?

We identified a head teacher who was very independently minded in relation to ICT and who probably took most control of his school's ICT and their procurements - and asked them to be the representative of all of the secondary head teachers, and to be the head teachers' ICT champion. We also wanted a Governor ICT champion - and recruited a chair of governors who we knew was very opposed initially to a managed service.

What that meant was that we had the arguments and debates amongst a smaller group - especially of those most opposed. We knew that if we could convince ourselves, we stood a good chance of convincing the other schools and representing the case most effectively to them. We were designing for schools that weren't going to open for at least 2 years. At this point we didn't involve managed service providers, because we felt that we were designing a service that didn't yet exist.

It took three weeks for us to prepare to meet all of the head teachers. We presented our view of how the managed service could work, ensuring that we had clarity of what we could influence. For example, we didn't really feel that we'd be deciding on the core service infrastructure - like the network points, servers, wireless etc - because that would be the service provider's decision. But we knew that we could influence how the system was accessed - what kind of access devices; the mobility of the devices; how we wanted the system to offer personalisation for individual schools.

Retrospectively, it was a good decision - to focus on what we could influence rather than what we couldn't.

We asked the head teachers to nominate a member of the senior leadership team - somebody with a pedagogical brief, and with an interest in the schools' ICT. This team had responsibility to become the communicators to the schools, and to understand their schools' needs and expectations of the new ICT service, and work with us to define the specification.

So how did you create your requirements?

The PfS team provide a standard "Output Specification" (309 pages in two handy zip files), which describes a core specification for the ICT service, which we are expected to personalise to our authority. What we added to this was the individual requirements of all of the schools - following workshops with stakeholders in the schools, including the staff and some of the students.

We created a "local authority" column - into which we put the common requirements from all of the schools. And then had a workshop were all the non-common things were discussed, and we agreed on all of the extra things we needed to include from the schools' list. It meant that at the end of the day, we had an agreed list of the whole authority's requirements, and there was nothing left in the individual schools column - except for one area

What was it?

The single area of differentiation was the end-user devices - some schools want students to have individual devices, whilst others wanted a desktop model (they assumed that they could take advantage of the devices that every student seems to carry around today).

Some of us had been to Seattle in 2007, and saw various interpretations of "the future". We felt that one of the major 'Wow' factors was the screen size - yes, you can watch a video on a personal device like an iPod or a mobile phone, but watching it on a large screen creates a wow. And we wanted to give the flexibility for individual schools to create that 'wow' in whatever way they wanted it.

How did you resolve the disagreement?

Well, we had another workshop! The second workshop was used to re-confirm the decisions and documents agreed at the first meeting. And then we handed out the access devices sections from all of the schools - to allow schools to compare to other schools, and allow them to pick up ideas from other schools. From that we created three focus areas - interactive classrooms, learner toolkits (including fixed and portable devices), and finally personal teacher devices.

Again all of the schools were able to compare notes, and to choose an appropriate model for them. We've ended up with more standardisation in the "interactive classrooms" section. On the others, although there were different models chosen by the schools, they ended up in three main models. Interestingly, no schools wanted all of their children to have mobile devices which would become their main device - where they did want mobile devices, they didn't see them as the main device for in-school use.

What have you learned through the whole process?

The key thing we have found is that schools have got to own the process, and the local authority has to be seen as supporting the process. Our schools will end up with what they have collectively asked for. The stronger the agreement, the higher the quality of the service that they'll get. We know that where there is a common agreement, we'll be able to procure more effectively for the schools. Everybody is in it together - both the authority and the schools were in the process and the decision making together. And this meant that at no stage did we have to tell schools what they could have - it was all arrived at through joint agreement. The power of sharing the grid of each school's requirement was that every school could see exactly where they stood in relation to the others, and helped them to clarify their requirements such as the mix of large display screens and interactive whiteboards..

The final step was to get all of the head teachers to sign off the procurement specifications, and the governors to sign off the funding proposals.

You've got all of your schools in agreement - what happens next?

We'll soon be going into the procurement stage, in the summer, when the potential suppliers will get asked to provide the services that the schools have defined. We know it's going to be a difficult process, but I know that we've got all the schools behind us. If suppliers start to tell us that we're asking for the wrong thing, then they've got all of the head teachers to debate with!

What do I think about this?

I think that the approach taken in Barking and Dagenham is an obvious approach to including the schools effectively in the BSF programme - my question to you is - is your local authority as inclusive? What are your experiences? Do you feel that you are going to be given enough say in your BSF developments?

The popularity of Learning Gateway and SharePoint in Education continues, and a growing number of Microsoft Partners now have applications that integrate with SharePoint. In the past year, we've run a series of events to provide a chance for schools to get up to date with new technology changes,

On May 21 at Microsoft, Thames Valley Park we will be hosting another SharePoint Showcase. We expect that at least 19 partners will demonstrate their SharePoint applications. The provisional agenda for the event is:

All the previous events have been full, so register soon.