My favourite humbug phrase is “The Internet is down”. It’s a phrase people use, but it winds me up. Somebody walks in and says “The Internet is down” or “The Internet isn’t working”. I ask you? Like 3 billion nodes, millions of switches/hubs/routers, thousands of undersea cables. They’re broken? I can see it may come across as tetchy when I say “No. It is not. The Internet is fine. I think what you mean is that our connection to it may be down/broken.”
It happened twice this week, while at BETT. The first time was on Tuesday night, when I was walking back from Olympia to the hotel. I phoned home to say goodnight to my kids – and my eldest said it - “Dad, the Internet isn’t working”. Give me a gold star, because I resisted the temptation to correct her. Instead I had to talk her through counting green lights on the wireless router, and then I had to ask her to crawl under the desk and find the mains plug to reset it. Over 5 years with Zen Internet, this has only happened twice, and the first time was when a BT Exchange burnt down, so it’s the kind of problem I can live with – I switch on/off every 30 months is pretty good.
The second time was a little more serious, and a lot less professional.
On the first day of the BETT Show we were having a great time. The stand was packed with people. The Surface at BETT was drawing crowds. Jonathan Bishop of Broadclyst Primary School was having a wonderful chat with one of his pupils at school via video conference, and another in a hospital who was still being included in teaching and learning via a video link. And suddenly something went wrong. The video conference died, and for the life of us, the techies couldn’t solve it.
Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, was due onto the stand shortly, and was going to join in the video conference, and have a chat with the pupils. It would have been a nice moment. And that is when Gordon whispered in my ear “The Internet’s down”. This time I wasn’t even focused enough to correct the statement, instead I just asked “Can you fix it?”. (Following my previous logic, I can now see that it wasn’t reasonable for me to ask Gordon to “fix the Internet”)
It turned out that the Internet service provider at BETT, to all of the stands, had switched over their Internet provider mid-way through the morning, and suddenly all of the server gateways had changed. Everybody we spoke with had the same problem – their Internet connection suddenly died. It took us about half an hour to get everything reactived, and a little longer for the video conferencing as new IP addresses were configured.
Lots of kerfuffle followed, and the end result was that the Internet connection simply wasn’t stable enough to let us video conference reliably. And sadly the children down at Broadclyst school didn’t get the chance to talk with Jim Knight (and they’d shined their shoes specially). Instead, Jim had a hands-on demonstration of the Surface using Finquistics, which you can see on the Teachers TV website.
We made a few announcements in BETT week – and during the course of this week, I’ll make sure I write about them all (if you’re impatient, you can see them all here).
One of the most significant from a product/service perspective was that we announced the launch of the London Grid for Learning’s new email service. I’ve snipped some of the detail from the press release below:
LONDON — 14 Jan 2009 — London Grid for Learning (LGfL), a consortium of all London’s local authorities, has today launched Microsoft Live@edu services for up to one million students across London. This is the first network of its scale for schools, and the LGfL is the only network globally providing fibre optic connections to every school, positioning London at the forefront of 21st-century collaborative education worldwide. Branded “London Mail” by LGfL, the new service will incorporate 33 local authorities and 2,500 schools, and is the largest potential deployment of Microsoft’s Live@edu mail services worldwide. Schools will be making significant cost savings using the hosted service, as Live@edu includes applications such as mobile, desktop and web-based e-mail — encouraging students to collaborate, create online communities, and make learning and the sharing of information easier.
LONDON — 14 Jan 2009 — London Grid for Learning (LGfL), a consortium of all London’s local authorities, has today launched Microsoft Live@edu services for up to one million students across London. This is the first network of its scale for schools, and the LGfL is the only network globally providing fibre optic connections to every school, positioning London at the forefront of 21st-century collaborative education worldwide.
Branded “London Mail” by LGfL, the new service will incorporate 33 local authorities and 2,500 schools, and is the largest potential deployment of Microsoft’s Live@edu mail services worldwide. Schools will be making significant cost savings using the hosted service, as Live@edu includes applications such as mobile, desktop and web-based e-mail — encouraging students to collaborate, create online communities, and make learning and the sharing of information easier.
The Live@edu service has been around for a while, and is widely used across universities to provide their student email service, and this is the first implementation for schools in the UK.
Students get a 10GB inbox, and they also get to use the latest Office webmail client – which is in effect the next version of Office. As Brian Durrant, the CEO of London Grid for Learning said in the press release:
Part of our responsibility within education is to bridge that gap between school and the world of work; London Mail gives students an e-mail experience in line with what they will use when they graduate. Amongst the 25,000 students we have been piloting the system with, we have enabled an increase in teamwork across schools, which is extremely positive. And, practically speaking, using this service has helped schools make significant savings. We estimate the average secondary school could save around £18,000 a year using London Mail, so across the 2,500 schools in London, it’s a multi-million-pound reduction in costs.
For LGfL and the schools, there are further benefits. Firstly the fact that we provide the core service free, means that you should be less cost for a better service. And secondly, we carry the full responsibility for running the datacentres and the backup and disaster recovery plans etc.
To comply with the Information Security guidance from Becta, we run the datacentres for the Live@edu service in Dublin, meaning that the student data is stored within the EU. For those who visited Olympia last week, imagine a data centre three times bigger than the Grand Hall, which runs this and other services.
Now that this service is live in LGfL, we’re not expecting a rush of individual schools outside of London to sign up for the service. Instead, we’re in conversation with some of the Regional Broadband Consortia over their email provision. (If you’re interested in the service in your school, you can find out more here, but rather than asking us to provide the service, we’d prefer it if you asked your broadband consortium what their plans are to update their email services!)
Email has become such a big tool for students’ lives, and the need for ever-more powerful email services is creating a demand for education establishments to provide more powerful services. Although most students aren’t going to need a 10GB inbox and 25GB of collaborative storage space on the Internet, providing it removes a few barriers for years to come!
ps You might also be interested to see what the press said about the announcement, on ComputerWeekly and Softpedia, and on Merlin John’s blog
Yesterday we were out and about on a West Midlands road trip with a gaggle of colleagues from the global education team. The aim of the trip was to see some of the things that are happening in UK schools, to inform our future directions and policies.
It was a little bit like a school trip, as I checked at each stage we hadn’t lost anybody on our way. The ‘Tour Party’ was:
It is unusual to be able to get a couple of days of time from all of these people, and it was really nice that we were able to spend that time visiting schools, rather than stuck in the meeting rooms at our offices in Reading. It has been a busy fortnight for the HQ colleagues from Seattle, as they were over for BETT, then onto other European countries. Finally, they landed back in Birmingham on Wednesday night, flying in from Portugal via Germany! They would probably have appreciated a break from the pace and energy of travel, but no let up in the Midlands.
We started our visit at Great Barr School, with a packed 3 hour agenda, sitting in lessons, taking maths tests (eek!), meeting teachers and governors as well as the leadership team and the IT team. It was good to be in a classroom to see the reality of teaching today.
Perhaps it’s because Geography was my favourite subject at school, but I really enjoyed sitting in a Geography lesson with Neil Morland. The lesson was one China’s ‘One Child per Family’ policy, and although it wasn’t an ICT rich lesson, Neil had created a PowerPoint presentation using pictures, music & text to get across an important message to introduce the lesson. When I watch people presenting in business, using PowerPoint, it is amazing how often I see them tripped up by the technology, or simply unfamiliar with what the mouse buttons do. Whereas Neil was confidently using a remote mouse pointer to pause the the PowerPoint and music, in order to discuss a point, before carrying on. I don’t know how many teachers have a remote mouse (or similar remote gadget) but it made a real difference to the way that the lesson flowed, and conversation could be constructed.
The biggest thing I noticed in the classroom layout was that every single surface was covered in learning resources. Not just the walls, cupboards and windows – it is the first classroom I’ve visited that you can’t escape from learning by staring at the ceiling – covered in national flags.
Another hour was spent wandering the school, dropping into lessons – into the science labs, the IT Support offices and the multimedia labs – and getting a sense of how learning is delivered in Great Barr, and how teachers are supported. There was one anxious moment (left), when a Year 8 Maths Group challenged us to a Maths Quiz, using Brain Trainer, to see who could get the highest score in 100 mental maths questions. Fortunately we had Anoop on our side, a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a holder of the President’s Gold Medal. Unfortunately, I was on our side too. And obviously the Year 8’s have had plenty of practice on their Nintendo’s – so in the end it was an unequal fight and we lost gracefully.
The other anxious moment was when we were in the corridors as the bell went (did I mention that Great Barr has 2,400 students and 350 staff?). The building guidelines that schools use – BB98 – define standard corridor dimensions for schools, and these are irrespective of the number of students. Even so, 2,400 students turning out on onto the standard narrow-corridors turned out to be okay – although we obviously had no choice about where we were going – we just had to go with the flow of the thousands!
In the conversations during the hour, we learnt a lot about the students and the school. 85% of the students have a broadband connection and computer at home, compared to 53% nationally. And that every teacher has their own laptop and every classroom has a projector (is there any school in the country where this isn’t yet true?)
After the tour, we all made it into one of their conference rooms, where we were able to spend some time discussing the school’s ICT strategies and how it was being used to support learning. There were some things that jumped out from this discussion - as this was a fast-paced discussion that kept changing direction, I’ll summarise some of the key bullets:
Technologically, Alex and Dan talked about how they want to provide support for students using ICT at home. One of their aims is to take advantage of the high broadband usage to provide Internet telephony (using Office Communications Server, which is now my default phone system when sitting at a desk). The other is how they can help students personally use ICT more in their learning, and using OneNote for supporting learning. (If you don’t know about OneNote, read Mike’s OneNote in Education blog)
Finally, after three hours had passed in a flash, we had to jump in a minibus to get to our next visit. Without a shadow of a doubt, we had all learnt a lot more than we expected at Great Barr School, and as we drove away, the buzz was already starting about what could happen if lots of other schools were making similar changes at a similar pace.
This post refers to the pilot of the Home Access Programme, for 2009, which has now finished.
There's now an updated blog post all about the Home Access Programme Suppliers for 2010, which is much more useful to you!
A little earlier I got my “Dummy’s Guide to the Home Access Programme” done, which I realised I had to do before I could start this next subject.
It was only an hour ago, so you’ll remember the basics:
On Monday Becta announced the suppliers who had been approved for the pilot programme. Their announcement is here, but the summary info is that the approved suppliers are:
So this means that from the end of next month, parents in Oldham and Suffolk (the two trial areas) will be able to go to these suppliers to get their approved Next Generation Learning @ Home packages (Name change number 3? We’ve gone from Universal Home Access, to Home Access Programme, perhaps to Next Generation Learning @ Home?)
I know it’s a pilot, and the purpose of the pilot is to learn things, but one of the early learnings I’m hoping to spot is that some of these suppliers will create partnerships with retail suppliers. I don’t want to stereotype the bottom 15% of income households, but I’m willing to bet that 99% of them have never heard of these suppliers. But they have heard of the main supermarkets, the mobile phone suppliers and the major electrical chains. So perhaps we’ll see these packages offered through these kind of stores. These families don’t have a computer, so they’re not going to be ordering online. And I think it’s unlikely they will turn to the school for advice (again, trying to avoid stereotype, but the demographic research implies that typically these families will not have a lot of contact their local school). So that means the scheme really does need these computers to be on the shelves at their local Tesco or Comet, or another local retailer they would be confident walking into.
* Now for some fun. If this programme does away with “the dog ate my homework”, what are going to be the new excuses that your pupils will come up with, when they have to submit their homework online. And I’m not talking about the real ones, like ‘Couldn’t get a 3G signal’, or ‘The Internet wasn’t working’. I’m looking for the truly creatively inspired ones. Pop them into the Comment box below (you’ll need to register or login), and I’ll give a prize to the most creative by next Friday (small print, small print, and some more small print. Not valid in Quebec).
Having lived through BETT last week, I had to relive it again this morning when Mark A’Bear showed me his Photosynth of the BETT stand. He’d snapped 278 photos of Olympia, and Photosynth had them stitched them together into an explorable photo model.
It’s just like being there – but without the noise, crowds and freebies.
I couldn’t help noticing that CNN had created a big inauguration Photosynth too, were they had asked members of the public to send in their photos, and they’d then popped them all into Photosynth to make a massive diorama that you can browse around and explore. And on the main Photosynth site, there are piles of others, some created by individual people from a single perspective, others by groups of people together. And they’re all overlayed on a map of Washington so that you can navigate amongst them.
This is a big step for social networking and digital photography, because it is more than just people sharing photographs on a site like Flickr or FaceBook, but actually ties the images together to create perspectives that no single person could have seen.
I wrote a little earlier about the LGFL decision to switch LondonMail to the Live@edu service. But I didn’t really explain the context behind the move that is going on for us, towards a range of cloud-based services (don’t ask me why everybody says “Cloud-based services” instead of “on the Internet”, but I guess it sounds trendier, so I’ll copy it too).
Within Microsoft we talk about “Software + Services”, and although you’ll find that phrase used externally too, I think it would be better to describe what it is we’re doing – which is basically moving from a model of software on computers, to a mix of software on computers and web-based services, and integrating them together to deliver a completely different experience. It leaves you free to build an IT system where your services are delivered partially from in-school IT and services from the web.
Fortunately, my colleague Steve Clayton, has worked with CommonCraft (the animations-on-paper-to-describe-complex-ideas people) to produce a video about what this all means. It’s not been written explicitly for education, but it all makes sense in the context of schools.
I’ve love Common Craft videos, because they take a complex idea and break it down into plain English. Some of my favourites are about podcasting, blogs, wikis and web search strategies.
According to government research for the DCSF, 90% of pupils have computer and internet access at home. Even amongst primary school children, it was 88%.
The research was part of the “Parental Involvement in Children's Education” report, published in 2007, and page 25 gives the statistics for Internet access.
There’s an interesting breakdown by social grade in Table 2.3, but even amongst the most disadvantaged groups, the access is still over two-thirds:
Social grade % with internet access at home AB 97% C1 93% C2 87% D 81% E 69%
Social grade
% with internet access at home
AB
97%
C1
93%
C2
87%
D
81%
E
69%
The report is on the web here, and you can find Jim Knight’s parliamentary written answer on the subject here
I came across this through one of my RSS feeds on TheyWorkForYou. I use it to watch for news and announcements in parliament about education, and often it comes up with interesting nuggets. The RSS feed I use (this is the link) provides all of the answers Jim Knight provides to MP’s written questions.
After spending last Thursday morning at Great Barr School, our merry band hopped into a minibus straight over to Shireland Collegiate Academy, on the other side of northern Birmingham, in Smethwick.
I’ve written about Shireland before on this blog, and their development of a Learning Gateway which is used not just within the Academy, but by over 100 other schools. To avoid repetition, I won’t repeat any of those stories – but you can read it all for yourself in this article, or download a set of PowerPoint slides from BETT 2008.
Our visit gave us the chance to spend some time in class, and then meet the developers of the Learning Gateway. Anoop and Michael got the chance to chat with three ex-Shireland students (Natalie, Stephen & Ian), who had been hired by the team to develop learning resources on behalf of the schools who are using the Gateway. This is an employment model that I have seen before – successful students being employed by their school to provide ICT support services. Not only is it good for them, in continuing to build future employability, heads have told me that it is also motivational for other students still in school, as it is an aspirational goal for current students. Fr
Meanwhile I was chatting with Ryan Guest, one of the team responsible for running the Gateway for Shireland’s academy, and got the chance to ask about their measures of success. If you’re running a Learning Gateway in a school, what are the ways that you measure your own success? I’m not sure if Ryan intended that I should share his answer, but I thought it would be useful comparison if you’re doing the same in your school. First and foremost, the success measure is learners’ attainment (and exam results). Of course, that means you may only know once a year if you’re being successful, so the everyday measures that are used are:
A little later we met a head of a local primary school that had used the Gateway to keep in touch with parents whilst the pupils were away at a residential week. Travis Latham, who’s Head of Shireland Hall Primary School, told us about the way that a simple blog on the Gateway had engaged pupils and parents, with some parents logging on several times a day to get updates on how their children were doing. It made me wonder if it was a trojan horse for improving the engagement of parents with school work, as well as encouraging them to get more involved in the use of ICT to support learning.
Heading towards the end of the afternoon, we then got a chance to talk with a parent and to find out their views on home-school learning links, then a group of students who’d made it into last term’s 100% Attendance club. Once a term they have a reward meeting, with cakes and doughnuts to reward all of those in each year group that had attended every session. And this group of Year 8’s were given the chance to ask any questions they wanted of the visitors. I’ve been involved in a few of these now, and know that some questions will always come up every time - “Have you met Bill Gates”, “Did you design the XBox” and “How much do you earn” are favourites. This time around, with Anoop in the room (“Yes, I used to work directly for Bill”) the answers were a little more exciting, but next time we really must take somebody from the XBox team on tour!
The thing that happened in this session, that has never happened before, was that the 100% club wanted to collect autographs from their visitors. I can’t imagine that they’ll ever have the same cachet as a footballer’s signature, but they’ll have something to talk about for the next couple of days.
Finally, we had to jump back in the minibus to get to New Street Station, ready for our trip down to Devon. Armed with another set of interesting stories and different perspectives, we left with a debate going all the way back to the station (this time the discussion with the leadership team about different pools of data in the education system led us to a debate about what we could do to help all schools could effectively use their data sets to raise performance).
If you’ve been following the last few posts, you’ll know that we’ve been enjoying a trip around a few schools in the UK with a group of high level Microsoft executives from the US who have been in Europe for a couple of weeks. So far they’ve attended the Learning & Teaching World Forum, with 60 Ministers of Education, and had a series of high level meetings with governments around Europe. And now they’re back with us in the UK, taking a road trip to visit some schools. And so far everything’s been going well – a day visiting Birmingham.
The next stage of the trip didn’t quite work out as planned, and who knows, there may be an email in my inbox a little later today advising me of the need to pack my bags! Let me explain…
We arrived at New Street Station in plenty of time, and we had our pre-booked First Class train tickets in our hands. As you may know a platform at New Street isn’t the best place to kill half an hour waiting for a train, but it went quickly as we talked about the day’s visits. When the train arrived, it was chaos. It had only four carriages, despite running from Manchester to Exeter at peak hour. The First Class carriage was packed solid, with bags and people lining the carriage. And people already comfortable in all of our seats. It took us a while to sort that out, and get ourselves settled down. The rest of the two hours were okay – apart from having to suffer for the first 45 minutes to Cheltenham under the glower of the people who’d been sitting in our seats. (I can see their point of view, they too had paid for a first class ticket, but at least we had booked our seats. And the chap sitting in my seat insisted I produce all of the booking paperwork showing the seat number, despite the sign already on the seat, so by the time I’d finished that, my sympathy had waned a bit).
Our hotel turned out to be quite close to Tiverton Parkway, so we left the train there.
Tiverton Parkway is one of those stations that is set in the middle of dark countryside, alongside the motorway. No bright lights anywhere near it. And it was absolutely hammering it down.
Fortunately I’d pre-booked a minibus to meet the five of us, but it wasn’t waiting at the station. So I called the helpful chap Id spoken with on Wednesday evening. Unfortunately, the helpful Devonian had noted it down for an hour later, so the minibus was on the other side of the county, and there wasn’t another suitable sized vehicle, or a pair of smaller vehicles available. Aargh!
Either everybody was going to have to wait in the bus shelter for half an hour or we could get a car that was too small in 5 mins. (As you can see Michael at this point was still enjoying the novelty of having his travel arrangements sorted by us, rather than the “Executive Travel Team” that normally co-ordinate all the arrangements of the top level teams from Seattle).
This was an easy decision – send the normal size cab, and I could despatch everybody else to the hotel, and then I’ll follow on later. As far as I was concerned, that would mean that everybody would be happy – and a half-hour penance in a bus shelter would mean I’d feel the pain of not having checked on the minibus booking on the way down in the train.
But the others had different views. When the little MPV turned up, absolutely everybody insisted that we’d find a way to fit all of us into it, and I wasn’t allowed to send them off. Instead, we had a game of sardines in the back for the 15 minute trip to Cullompton.
This got recorded onto a series of photos (stitched together above) – I fear it’s so that when my next Performance Review comes up there’ll be documentation to discuss!
I will, of course, point out that absolutely everybody was smiling in the photo (well, not me, for obvious reasons) and that it’s the moments like these that make trips memorable.
Every now and again I come across a bit of information that I’m not sure about. Like this from a written answer in Parliament:
The Next Generation Learning campaign sponsored by Becta is designed to raise the awareness of parents or carers, employers and learners of the benefits of the use of technology in education and to drive greater demand for it. It demonstrates how greater engagement with parents or carers can increase a learner's potential, how effective use of technology can improve schools and colleges, and how to ensure children are safe online. Becta funding for the campaign for the 12 months April 2008 to March 2009 was £3.1 million. Funding for 2009-10 and 2010-2011 has yet to be confirmed but Becta expect this to be in the region of £2.5 million per year. There is no commitment to fund the campaign beyond this period at this time.
The Next Generation Learning campaign sponsored by Becta is designed to raise the awareness of parents or carers, employers and learners of the benefits of the use of technology in education and to drive greater demand for it. It demonstrates how greater engagement with parents or carers can increase a learner's potential, how effective use of technology can improve schools and colleges, and how to ensure children are safe online.
Becta funding for the campaign for the 12 months April 2008 to March 2009 was £3.1 million. Funding for 2009-10 and 2010-2011 has yet to be confirmed but Becta expect this to be in the region of £2.5 million per year. There is no commitment to fund the campaign beyond this period at this time.
Is that good or bad? £3.1 million to promote Next Generation Learning this year, £8m over three years. I reckon it might be good – after all:
And if it makes a difference to how parents & schools see ICT in schools, it is a good thing. But is it making a difference to how parents or schools feel?