A few years ago, you couldn’t go to an education conference without hearing all about learning styles (Auditory, Visual, Tactual, Kinesthetic & Verbal). Now it’s as though it never happened – conferences are talking about personalisation, policy and Every Child Matters. Even though it’s no longer trendy, there are plenty of people still working on improving learner engagement in education through developing a better understanding of the influence of learning styles, and how they can be exploited.
If you’re interested in learning styles, it is definitely worth a read – with some excellent background on learning styles (based on the Dunn and Dunn model) , along with an analysis of how tools in Office can help a student. It also refers to www.learningstyles.net, where you can take a personal Learning Style assessment
I learnt something about my own learning style (and why I learn in that way) from the booklet. For example
Some people learn best when they have new and difficult information presented to them step by step in a logical sequence; they are called analytics. Others (most people) learn best when they have new and difficult information presented in large chunks on the basis of which they can then investigate the details themselves; they are called globals. Finally, there is a group of people, called the integrated, who do not prefer one way rather than the other; they can approach new and difficult information both analytically and globally.
I’m clearly a ‘global’ – I really like investigating and coming to my own conclusion, because then I feel more of an investment in the result. As I continued through the guide, it made even more sense.
You can download the booklet from here
We seem to be busy at the moment, getting our customer case studies published on Microsoft’s worldwide case study website. This is partly a reflection of the fact that UK schools seem to be leading the world in their adoption of ICT to support learning (Of course, each country thinks they’re doing better than the rest, but we really are! Shh, don’t tell the rest of the world, we might offend their sensibilities. From what I hear, Australia’s running us a close second)
Anyway, back to a small village primary school in Devon… I wrote about them earlier in the year, but now their case study has been published on the worldwide site, they merit another mention. This case study is all about their use of ICT to enhance learning, and focuses on how they have used some of our products to encourage pupils to work collaboratively. By sharing work and ideas through a portal site, pupils are involved in many kinds of innovative initiatives, including using videoconferencing to work on projects with pupils from a school in Holland.
Jonathan Bishop, the Deputy Head at the school, knows that technology is an end to a means. When talking about their choice of Windows Vista, he said:
It is important to place an operating system within the context of what we want to achieve. The extra features and media-focused environment give us a better experience and more learning opportunities.
You can read more about it on the main worldwide case studies website
A colleague published a new story on the worldwide Microsoft case studies website earlier this month, on Norwich School, who had expanded and replaced their email system. They wanted to encourage their staff, students and parents to their email system more, to help information to flow around the school, and to and from parents.
They gave all parents their own email account too, to be able to email staff, and put in place a simple set of rules to define who could email whom. And by mixing users with Outlook, and Outlook Web Access, they could provide anytime, anywhere access. As Steve Banyard, who’s the school’s Network Manager put it:
We wanted a system we could manage ourselves and that everyone could use with confidence. Above all, we wanted to manage user access to ensure that e-mail was there to support teachers and students, and that there was no risk of the system being abused.
There’s a green bonus too – the school is now using less paper because documents are accessed online. Their previous printed newsletter that used to go to 800 parents each term is now e-mailed to everybody.
You can read their whole story on the Microsoft case studies website
If you're an ICT teacher, you'll be familiar with the following scenario.
Watching a video this week, which we'd made with Cambridge University on their use of SQL Server, made me realise these resources could be useful for schools in a completely different context.
If you're teaching about relational databases, this video would help to illustrate how the 'relational' bit is going further - in this case, to relate century's old data to modern mapping data.
Find out some more about the project in this earlier blog post. Video: Microsoft Cambridge University SQL Server 2008 A higher quality version of this video is on the right hand side of this web page
Find out some more about the project in this earlier blog post.
Video: Microsoft Cambridge University SQL Server 2008
A higher quality version of this video is on the right hand side of this web page
Which got me thinking...is there a way for you to find some of our other videos? I’ve tried looking, but can’t find one. I’ll keep looking though. Perhaps you can suggest some?
In my job, I know that I spend a lot of time in front of my computer reading and writing emails. But some tidying up of my Inbox yesterday led me to some interesting observations
Last year, I wrote 8,405 emails. That’s an awful lot - if I only worked 250 days a year, that’s 34 a day (gosh, when do I get any work done?).
I wondered what they were all about, so I tested some words, to see how many emails I’d used them in. And then tested the antonyms (well, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ aren’t antonyms, by you may see what I’m getting at).
Word Frequency Frequency Word Learning 1,845 565 Teaching Interesting 319 14 Boring Office 2832 910 Home Blog 1661 869 Talk IT 5,431 70 Human Sorry 829 673 Problem
So what does that tell you about my life?
And finally, what does it say about me, when I say “Sorry” in 1 in 10 of my emails.
What does your “Sent Items” say about you? It’s easy to find out – use the Outlook “Search Bar”
And it pops the answer in the bottom left hand corner of the window
If your teachers and students (and friends and family) are always asking you how to do something on the computer, even though you know you showed them at least three times already, you won't be alone - statistics from a recent ICM survey carried out on our behalf show that almost half of all adults in the UK feel that their basic computer skills need improving.
The same survey revealed that 21% of parents don't feel their computer skills are effective enough to help their children with their homework, and even more worryingly, 18% don't feel confident in their ability to protect themselves and their family online - 12% had never heard of online safety tools or best practices. With the kind of threats and issues there are online today, as well as the opportunities open to those with good digital skills, this is obviously something that needs to be addressed quickly, and something that the Government is taking seriously, with David Lammy MP, the Minister for Skills, attending today's launch of the Digital Literacy Curriculum to discuss these issues and more.
We're hoping that the latest version of our Digital Literacy curriculum can help to improve these statistics and provide people with the skills they need to succeed in today's digital world, while also giving you back hours of time not spent answering the same basic questions! This course is designed to help out those 47% who feel that their basic computer skills need improving and to give them the confidence to use computers in their everyday life.
The curriculum is split into the following 5 modules:
The course can be completed online, and for those with a computer at home it's simple enough to work thorough with some help from friends and family. Otherwise tutor support is available at learndirect or UK online centres, as well as Microsoft IT Academies. So for those teachers, parents, students and colleagues that you know that need to improve their digital skills, point them in the direction of the Digital Literacy curriculum web site. You can also add a link to it from your intranet and parent portal to ensure that those that need it most can access it, and need never ask you how to attach a document to an email again.
The partnership with OCR also means that you could offer a certification for parents/students/staff at the end!
So what happens when the NUT strike, and some of the local schools are closed in Reading? Well, the office gets a little quieter and a little busier. Quieter as some parents take a day off to look after their children. And busier as some parents bring their children to spend a day in the office with them (or, in these days of flexi-remote working, some of the day in the office).
Our offices, in Thames Valley Park, are more child-friendly than a typical office – we have an on-site nursery, the canteen has a children’s corner, and the Health and Safety team have been around and done their audits with an eye on safety of all visitors, including children.
And then there’s the child-friendly side of our products and services – so we have things like Xboxes on display in the foyer, with all of the latest games, for visitors to play with.
Which makes our office busier on a day like today, with various children walking around the building with a parent who can’t avoid an office-based meeting. And the Xboxes in the foyer are busy today. For other parents, they’ll be working at home, connected to the network via VPN, doing double-duty as a parent!
The fact that both of these things happen is an indicator of some of the changes that are happening in today’s information economy – where people don’t need to be in a specific place to get a job done, and use technology to time-shift (and place-shift) their job. One of my colleagues wrote “New World of Work” (download) which addresses some of these changes – and it is some of these changes that are starting to impact upon the world of education too. But, for today, education is having a very visible impact on our office!
Two emails arrived at the same time last week, which reminded me to write about the issue of data security.
The first email was Becta's ictadvicealert email (sign up here), which reminded readers about their information security guidance for schools- as they put it "What your school should be doing to protect personal information and minimise the risk of data being misused". I took a look at the guidelines, and thought it was worth repeating the five key bullets here:
School management teams should take urgent steps to ensure data controllers in their institutions follow this guidance:
The second email was from a colleague working in the Government team of Microsoft, about the work we've been doing with the CESG. CESG are the Information Assurance (IA) arm of GCHQ and are based in Cheltenham. As the UK Government’s National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, they're responsible for “enabling secure and trusted knowledge sharing to help government organisations to achieve their business aims". The CESG worked with us to create the Government Assurance Pack (GAP) configurations of Windows Vista and its BitLocker functions.
According to John Widdowson, CESG Director, “Our early collaboration with Microsoft has made it possible for CESG to endorse the rapid adoption of Windows Vista by the UK Public Sector. This means that the benefits of the product, which raises the bar in terms of information security, can be realised some 15-24 months earlier than would normally be expected.”
BitLocker Drive Encryption is our full volume disk encryption component, supplied with Windows Vista Enterprise. CESG, after examining our source code and development methods is in a position to deem BitLocker Drive Encryption suitable for protecting the majority of UK Government data on a hard disk. This assessment of BitLocker addresses the needs of approximately 80% of government information security requirements. The general examination of Windows Vista has enabled the development of a UK Government-specific configuration of Windows Vista, using tailored group policy and Microsoft best-practices, known as the Government Assurance Pack (GAP).
1) The advice about information security guidance puts the onus firmly on the school’s data controllers (is that you?)
2) Sensitive and personal data leaving the school premises must be encrypted
3) The BitLocker encryption in Windows Vista Enterprise/Ultimate versions meets the standards of CESG, part of GCHQ
Read & watch more about BitLocker here
How good is that – I get to write “encryption”, “GCHQ” and “teacher” in the same article? But if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.
If you join the MSDN blog community, you get a couple of extra nice features.
One is that you get the chance to comment on any of the blog articles. It's not because I want to know who you are - unless you tell me in your public profile, I can't see that info anyway - but to prevent 'comment spam', which is a direct equivalent of email spam, where thousands of comments are dumped onto the blog redirecting readers to amazing, once-in-a-lifetime offers...
The second reason to join the community, is if you want to subscribe to this blog by email, to get new articles into your inbox whenever they are published.
To sign up for email alerts, use this page, and you'll start receiving new posts as soon as they are published.
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Why on earth I'm writing this on Monday morning, I have absolutely no idea. It's bad enough that it's Monday morning. But writing about licensing? Am I mad?
(Well maybe - watch the comments flow from my colleagues!)
The reason to write about this now, at the beginning of term, is that it's the beginning of the summer term. You may have just finished a few ICT projects, while school was quiet. And you've got a few months ahead before the summer - when the BIG ICT projects tend to go ahead (in these days of 24x7 learning, there's still a quieter period for most schools in the summer holidays).
Many schools don't know how much and what software, they are using on their school computers. Now, that's a sweeping generalisation, which I'm sure has just prompted dozens of "Yes I Do", but look at your extended estate of computers. For example, do you know what software teachers might have installed on the laptops you gave them under "Laptops for Teachers", or pupils under the "Computers for Pupils" scheme? Once you've handed them over, do you know whether they're downloading this and that, installing a few extra things they think will be useful? And through that, turning your best-laid-licensing-plans into dust? And on top of that, are you sure that you're licensed correctly? You may be over/under-licensed thanks to the activities of your staff/pupils.
You may remember a while ago I wrote about Parago, which is a web-based software suite which allows you to monitor hardware and software changes to a PC, whether they are in school or at home.
Tim Roots at IT Vision, has introduced a special offer for readers of the blog, of 50% off prices for the subscription service for the first year*. Normally, an annual site licence would cost a secondary school £850, so this blog offer would save you £425. For primary schools, the offer makes the site licence a more affordable £125 a year. More from Tim...
Parago® is a low cost Internet based asset management system developed in conjunction with schools and authorities and is now used in approximately 1000 schools. Through an easy process of downloading from the web the Parago® Agent discovers the specification of your PCs and all installed software. This includes PCs out of school and it even updates you when new software is installed. This gives you the ability to manage your school's software by identifying what is licensed and most importantly what you really need.. saving you money! What's more, Parago® enables you to manage all your other school assets in the same database.
If you want to know more about Parago, then take a look at the website. If you want to find out more about the offer, then drop an email to Tim at IT Vision. (Don't change the subject line - it'll ensure that you can get the blog-reader discount)
Well, no. At the end of the day, the school (and ultimately the governors) are responsible for proper licensing of the ICT system at the school. Both local authorities and Becta provide advice to schools about licensing. On the IT Vision website, there's an excellent article about Software Asset Management, which has some of those views. The quote that caught my eye was about the Computers for Pupils (CfP) scheme:
Stephen Lucey, executive director of Becta explained to IT Vision: “Your particular concerns of licence issues with regards to CfP are well made. As the device is actually owned by the school the licence issues are the responsibility of the school. Your concerns have been taken on board, and as a result the Local Authority guidance, in respect of CfP, is currently being updated to reflect this and a number of other areas of interest including topics such as Internet safety."
And taking a local authority perspective, the article quoted Andy Jackson, from the Children, Young People and Families Directorate of Birmingham Local authority
Schools have a Duty of Care to know what software is on every school owned computer. Expecting a school to carry out a regular manual audit on every PC, especially on student and teacher laptops is unrealistic. Parago was a cost effective solution to our problem under our Computers for Pupils (CfP)/ User Home Access (UHA) initiative.
* Aha, you say. There's an asterisk - so there's small print. The offer is limited to the first 1,000 schools that apply only, using the MSP1000 code on the email subject line