Yesterday was a great day - I’d been looking forward to it for a while, because I went to visit the Microsoft Research offices in Cambridge – our European centre for research linked to universities across the whole of Europe. The meeting (for colleagues from UK education team) was hosted by Andrew Herbert who’s Managing Director of the UK side of Microsoft Research (MSR). To put it simply, I was feeling like a child back at school – all of these great brains in the building, a certain feeling of awe, and an expectation of learning great things. And the day didn’t disappoint.
Microsoft Research has around 1,000 researchers worldwide – the main labs in Redmond house 400, and Cambridge (the first overseas lab) now has 140. There are also international labs in Bangalore and Beijing. And in Beijing, they are actually recognised as a PhD awarding institution – in effect, being seen as a research university, not simply as a commercial organisation.
We started off talking skills. One of the things that surprised me is that in Computer Science at university level, computing qualifications are not as critical as mathematics ones. At Cambridge University, for example, you need maths and higher maths to get into computer science, not computing qualifications. Whereas IT skills are important to employers and in daily life – things like email, searching, data handling. Generally the deeper IT skills - eg programming - are less well covered through schools today.
* Declaration: I learnt IT in an age when “J>103” meant something to everybody in the IT classroom. (Just lost all people under 38 and international readers!)
Which means that some of Andrew’s work involves reaching out to schools, through a series of projects:
If you want to know a little more about the work of the Microsoft Research team, take a look at their nice brochure (PDF)
But I bet whilst that may be interesting, it’s not fascinating. I bet you want to know “What cool stuff did you see Ray?”.
During this year, the readership of this blog has been climbing steadily. And I've become more curious about you, the reader. In my head I have an image of the person who reads the blog, but it's about time I checked with you! Over the next few weeks, I'll ask a little bundle of questions so that we can get to know each other better (and once you've voted, you can also get an idea of your fellow readers). If you're reading this in an RSS reader, you're going to have to pop over to the blog to answer the poll and see the results
Yesterday, Jason Burton and I went along to the Capita One conference in Leicestershire to talk about “Business Intelligence” and “Information Rights Management”. In real English, that means "how do we turn this mass of data into real information” and “how do we keep some control over how people distribute it”.
The audience was a wide range of local authorities from England, from the teams that run the central local authority education systems. Jason, who’s from our local government team, doesn’t normally work in the education area – he’s more usually with the Corporate IT teams of the local authorities (and the differences between ‘corporate IT’ and ‘education ICT’ are many!)
There were three parts to our presentation – a quick quiz on the new Information Handling rules from Becta, and then a jaunt across Business Intelligence (the ways that you can provide reporting to individuals within an organisation, where they can delve into data themselves, without having to give them access to all the individual data) and Information Rights Management (how Office can help you to manage who sees what, and what they do with the information you share with them).
In amongst all of the serious stuff about data sharing, the bit that made me happiest was discovering the “Do Not Reply All” function in Outlook – so that I can now set that for any email. That is brilliant. Now, if only I could find a way to remove the Reply All button from other people’s Outlook menu for all of their emails…
The presentation is below. A little later today, I’ll add a couple of links to related web pages (sorry, rushing out to catch a train right now!)
(If you’re looking at this through an RSS reader, here’s the link)
ps Do you think I should turn my Quiz slides into a web quiz for Christmas – one to share with the head teacher?
Remember “Fun with Statistics”, the blog post where I noted that prisoners are given 8.5m2 of cell space whilst school pupils are given 4m2 of teaching space?
Seems I’m not the only one who’s noticed disparities. I was catching up with the EduGeek forums today, and came across this marvellous post titled “BSF Prison”. It’ll either make you laugh or cry.
At first I thought it was a misprint – but no, it was correct.
Essex have issued their tender notice for the £1,000,000,000 (Billion pound!) contract for their Local Education Partnership (LEP) – which will be responsible for building and running their first waves of BSF schools and the Primary Capital Programme, with options for it to be extended to all of their BSF schools, new Acadamies and the full Primary Capital Programme.
For all BSF schools in Waves 4, 5 and 6, the contract covers construction, managed ICT services, facilities management (described as “soft” and “hard”, which I guess covers buildings management as well as services such as catering etc). And it seems to cover the same for the Primary Capital Programme (which has just had its first wave of funding announced). The potential additional components described are Waves 7, 8 and 9 of the Essex BSF programme, Academies, future Primary Capital Programme Design and Build projects, managed ICT services for secondary schools not in Wave 4, 5 and 6, managed ICT services for primary schools, other Children and Young Peoples services, build & run buildings delivering Local Authority services and school improvement related services. All for the next 15 years.
For all BSF schools in Waves 4, 5 and 6, the contract covers construction, managed ICT services, facilities management (described as “soft” and “hard”, which I guess covers buildings management as well as services such as catering etc). And it seems to cover the same for the Primary Capital Programme (which has just had its first wave of funding announced).
The potential additional components described are Waves 7, 8 and 9 of the Essex BSF programme, Academies, future Primary Capital Programme Design and Build projects, managed ICT services for secondary schools not in Wave 4, 5 and 6, managed ICT services for primary schools, other Children and Young Peoples services, build & run buildings delivering Local Authority services and school improvement related services. All for the next 15 years.
What this means is that if you are in an Essex school, the local authority is starting the process to find a partner to deliver all of the buildings and ICT services for all of the schools.
This same pattern is happening all across England, but this is the first £1BN contract announcement that I’ve seen.
If you’re sitting in a school today, running or using an ICT service, it’s worth keeping up with these developments, as they could fundamentally change your role. You can see the full Essex tender notice here
Yesterday, I wrote about the Innovative Schools videos – four schools, two hours of video, 187 pages of supporting documentation and hundreds of ideas.
The question from day one of the project was “How do we make this digestible?”. You know the situation – somebody has a great series of videos, so they pop it onto a DVD and then post one to every school in the country. I’m pretty sure that within reach of your desk, you’'ll have one of those DVDs in a folder – from an acronym organisation like Becta, NCSL, DCSF, QCA or SSAT – which you feel you really must get round to watching some day. But you haven’t found the time yet – even though it arrived two terms ago!
Well, we wanted to avoid that. So we won’t be giving away DVDs at BETT, or sending your head teacher a folder for her to pass on to somebody else.
Instead, we’re going to let the resources sell themselves. We’ve put together a great trailer video, which gives a bit of an insight into what’s in the full videos – it is designed to appeal to those who are itching for change, as well as those who aren’t. It will hopefully sell the idea that change can be good and can help raise standards. And it will challenge those who think that they can resist change!
But you can judge that for yourself. I’ve been fortunate to present this video to a wide range of people in 1:1 briefings, and have seen a range of positive reactions. But letting you watch it is the ultimate test:
(If you’re not using Silverlight – shame – then here’s the direct link)
Does it get you interested in the rest of the work? The whole website is open for you to explore…
If you noticed any similarity to Shift Happens in a couple of the student statements, then you’re not mistaken. When I created the UK version of Shift Happens, I hadn’t really understood how many people would be downloading it, emailing me, and showing it at conferences. (If I had known, I’d have changed the iPhone photo for sure!). But given the way that Shift Happens went completely viral – and the way that the slides I’d added for the UK Education audience have been referenced in so many other places – I thought it was worth developing the story further. I don’t know yet if this video has the same power as Shift Happens, but one of the lessons learnt is that it, and the rest of the material, doesn’t emphasise Microsoft – that’s one of the reasons we’ve branded it very differently. We have tried to be very balanced, and present a great school story – it is definitely NOT a Microsoft story.
Last week, we announced the availability of the Innovative Schools video case studies. Although they were on the web earlier in the year, we weren’t ready to tell everybody about them until we’d completed all of the work on the website. But now, that’s been done, so I can tell you all about what’s there...
Earlier in the year we were asked to produce a series of ‘deep case studies’ for use by schools around the world. The goal was to go way beyond our normal style of case study, which looks at what schools have done, to focus on how they had done things – what were their stories of success and what lessons had they learnt on their journeys.
We identified four UK schools who’d been using ICT in innovative ways, and who had learnt lessons worth sharing. The schools were chosen for their differences – urban & rural, successful & less successful, primary & secondary – to ensure that whatever your situation, you would be able to find things which are meaningful for you. The schools we chose are:
And then we started work – with a film crew, an education journalist, an education researcher, and a small team from within Microsoft – to record the schools’ stories.
We received fantastic support from the schools, who made available staff and students, and even arranged for parents and governors to be interviewed. We ended up with nearly 40 hours of interviews, and then had to start the hard task of boiling their whole story down into reasonable size chunks – reducing 40 hours to a couple of hours (and even now, I want to find a way to also share some of the things that ended up on the cutting room floor).
One way that you could judge the quality of the result is the words of Jim Knight MP, Minister of State for Schools and Learners when he commented in our press release
Innovation is core to ensuring that the UK education system is positioned at the forefront of learning globally. By focusing on the journey made by each school through the eyes of teachers, pupils and parents, the Innovative Schools case studies are an extremely useful tool to excite and inform the education sector about what is possible while providing a forum for the discussion of best practise online. With resources like this, we hope that all schools will be able to incorporate IT effectively, building on the success of those that already do. The four schools being profiled by this programme should be very proud of these achievements and the fact that they will encourage others to follow their lead across the world.
We decided to focus on nine chapters, and each school’s story is broken down in this way to make it easier to use:
The results, which you can see on the Innovative Schools website, is a series of videos featuring the voices of head teachers, deputy heads, classroom teachers, students, parents, and local authority staff. It is schools telling their own stories, and sharing the lessons that they have learnt along the way – and their approach to innovation.
Over the next fortnight, I am going to write more about these case studies, and what can be learnt through them, but for the moment, pop over to the website, and take a look at one or two of the materials there.
These stories are good to watch/read if you want to know what other schools are up to, and especially useful if you are looking to convince others in your school of the need for change, or to have a dialogue about what change could look like. There are so many individual interviews that I could pull out to look at, but for the moment, just take a look for yourself. I’ll start pulling out my highlights tomorrow!
I had a look back at my blog statistics this morning, and thought you might be interested to see the Top 10 blog posts from this blog – just in case you missed any of them
Feb 08
How robust does a laptop for education have to be?
View
I can’t vouch for these being the absolute best of my blog posts – but I do remember them all as being interesting ones to write!
Anyway, happy reading.
Woke up early this morning. I don't get a daily newspaper delivery, and it was absolutely bucketing it down - hence no trip to the newsagent. So instead I settled down with my TES to catch up with all the latest news. And suddenly I found myself staring at a reference to this blog - in the "5 things to think about this week" section.
Somebody at the TES has obviously been reading the blog, and referred to all of the Information Security posts that I've been writing recently. So, if you've arrived via page 37 today, then welcome!
If you're looking for the information security information, then start on this page - it's got the latest posting, plus a link to all of the other blog posts about information security. Mind you, if you're reading this at the weekend too, get yourself a cup of tea first - it's a long read!
And if you want to skip straight to Ed the Fed's article, jump here. (Ed the Fed is the Microsoft UK Chief Security Advisor, and as his nickname suggests he's got an interesting background that means his advice is robust!)
Whilst we're on the subject of the TES, which drops through my letterbox every Friday, here are my thoughts, for what they're worth: What I like about the TES: The Magazine (even as a non-teacher) The "5 things..." section The stories about the latest teacher who's ended up in front of the GTC (this week's is astounding!) The analysis (this week, the Jim Knight article is great, and you know something's going right when the unions praise a minister!). What I don't like about the TES The FE section never seems to tell me anything really useful. I wish I could get the version without the Job Ads, because my bin is always full with those on a Friday night. They really haven't managed to re-capture the Ted Wragg moment - the back page which always made me smile
Whilst we're on the subject of the TES, which drops through my letterbox every Friday, here are my thoughts, for what they're worth:
I go away on holiday, and suddenly tons of things get announced. Hurrah. I should holiday more!
Alongside all of the Windows announcements (the first public view of Windows 7 and the new cloud-computing platform, Windows Azure), we also previewed the Office Web Applications which will be included within the release of the next version of Office in early 2010.
For schools, this seems an important development, as it will mean that you will be able to have complete transportability of documents and work (with complete fidelity*) between home and school, regardless of whether your students have Office at home or not, or have an older or more recent version than you use in school.
First Look: Office 14 for Web
I don’t think that moving to web-based Office applications is the right thing for everybody, in all circumstances, because a lot of what students (and teachers) do today involves a rich mix of media and data, and it would be wrong to assume that everybody is online all of the time. But it provides another element of flexibility. It’s still a year away, but the Beta will be available sooner, and we’ll all get the chance to play with it and see what it can do.
* With complete fidelity: This is something that I think is quite important to students & teachers. If I create a document where the pictures all line up, and it looks perfect, I don’t want to transfer it to another piece of software which makes it look different. Sometimes (but decreasingly) I get that experience moving between Office 2003 & Office 2007, but I have seen some wild changes moving between different applications which use .odt, simply because there doesn’t appear to be a standard way to implement an open standard! What the team demonstrate on the video above is that one of their clear focus areas it to ensure that when you move from the Office suite to the web suite, and back, it retains all of the information, and all of the formatting is consistent.