Last week, as Twitter followers will already know, I spent the week in Atlanta, at our internal conference called MGX (Microsoft Global Exchange). As usual it was an amazing week, with astonishing organisation and conference content (could you imagine organising a 12,000 person, 4 day conference, for global delegates?). Of course, we learnt a huge amount, but sadly it’s an internal event which gives us an insight into the direction ahead. Of course, all the secrets are safely locked away in my head!
Normally everything that happens in the conference centre is away from public view, but at this year’s event a short video was released, of just a few minutes, when Steve Ballmer signed the Windows 7 Gold disk as it was finally released. And yes, I was one of the 12,000 people applauding and cheering it (in a very British way, of course!)
So if I can’t share anything from the conference, what can I share? Well, I’ve already said too much about the week’s cheese diet elsewhere, so how about fizzy drinks?
Well, I though that perhaps I could do a professional job on my visit to Atlanta’s World of Coke ��� with the “64 soda challenge”.
Here’s the scenario – they’ve assembled a big pile of drinks machines, containing 64 of the company’s drinks around the room – grouped by continent. I, and Mike (my Government counterpart, and photographer on this occasion) started on Europe, and worked our way through Asia, Latin America and North America. One cup. 64 fizzy drinks. And a burning desire to do this properly!
But before I tell you about the best, how about some of the highlights!
The drink from England was ‘Kinley Bitter Lemon’, which was a bit bizarre, because none of us had heard of it. And similarly, Beverly, from Italy wasn’t familiar to the half-dozen Italians that were with us. There must be a soft-drinks parallel-universe where people sit drinking Kinley all day, and eating Tunnocks Caramel Wafers (‘a million sold every week’)
Anyway, back to the important stuff. The most pleasing drink of all, and a clear winner for both Mike and I was the French one – Nestea white peach. I am a big fan of iced tea when abroad, so I think it’s time we campaigned for more availability in the UK too.
You may be wondering what drinking 60 sweet, fizzy drinks does for you? Well, compare the photo below (the ‘after’ shot) with the photo at the top of the article (the ‘before’ shot).
It may not surprise you to hear that I found it difficult to sleep that night!
A quick ps on the linking ability of Twitter On Saturday morning I tweeted “Last night managed all 60 soda flavours in World of Coke. Made careful tasting notes for blogging tomorrow (too much time on my hands)”. A bit later I got a reply via Twitter from their WorldofColaCola account saying “@RayFleming glad you enjoyed it! Be sure to pass on your blog post, I'd love to read your review! :)”. Let’s hope they feel the same now it’s written :-)
Who’d have thought it, not only would I be looking for the Moodle logo for the blog, but other strange things have been happening this week:
Let me go back to the beginning…
What we’ve released on Education Labs this week is a toolkit that allows you to integrate the Live@Edu services onto your students’ Moodle homepage. Live@Edu is our hosted mail and collaboration service for students, which provides a free 10GB mailbox, 25GB of general online file storage, and additional 5GB of online document storage for collaborative projects. It’s the service that the London Grid for Learning are using to provide their student mail services.
What the plug-in does is allow a student to see their live, real-time inbox and calendar on their Moodle home page, via a single login. And it also allows teachers to do things like send out student alerts – things like “Your homework assignment is due in tomorrow” with an easy step, and the system will handle the delivery of it to students (through email, mobile phone etc).
When I saw a brief demonstration of it yesterday, the bit that impressed me was seeing the email inbox on the home page of Moodle – not just a link to it, but the actual emails themselves. It is another step towards making your school Learning Platform the core of everything that your students and staff do.
You can download the Moodle plug-in from Education Labs, or watch the video of it on this page.
This project will only appeal to a minority of schools – you’ll need the technical skills to get it working (but then you’ll have needed those to get Moodle working in your school too) – and the majority of schools will choose a Becta approved Learning Platform, rather than building their own Moodle system (which hasn’t received the Becta stamp of approval).
But if you are using Moodle already, this project is a step in the right direction to help integrate a range of your ICT services together, and builds on the work we did a couple of years ago to help the integration between SharePoint and Moodle.
This is just a quick one for Monday morning. Last week, when I talked about Information Security, and Becta’s guidance, at the Learning Gateway Conference, there was quite a bit of interest in the two-factor authentication that would be required for all teacher access to sensitive data from outside the school (eg if they are accessing your MIS and Learning Platform from home).
It’s a subject that’s way beyond my technical abilities, so I went to see what information I could find (that was intelligible to me!) and found an article on our TechNet site about our use of Smart Cards.
The way it works for me (as a user) is that when I login via our VPN connection from home, I have to also put my Smart Card into my laptop. So it means that even if somebody had my username and password, and even my laptop, they couldn’t access our internal systems without also having my Smart Card (and of course, this works because I don’t keep my Smart Card in my laptop bag. Ever. Honest.)
The article is all about the use of Smart Cards by Microsoft IT (the people that keep our network running and secure). It includes information about the problem, solution design, the deployment and shares the lessons we learned along the way. So if you are in a school or Local Authority, and thinking about how you improve your Information Security, then it makes a relevant and fascinating read.
Read the full story online, or download it.
It is also based on the previous, rather than the next, versions of our products, which makes it much more likely to match your own current IT environment!
If you want to read more, there’s a whole section devoted to sharing our stories of how Microsoft IT implements security
Two weeks ago, I wrote about their new case study that Monkseaton High School had produced with us, and yesterday I opened up the Sunday Times and saw them again, on page 5, under the headline
School’s out as pupils learn at home on ‘Facebook’ site
It’s got to be the most unusual way I’ve heard OneNote being described recently, but then one of the challenges we have is that OneNote is so flexible it can be used in so many different ways – making it almost impossible to describe easily. (We have exactly the same problem with SharePoint – if you can almost anything with it, how do you describe it succinctly?)
The article is describing the way that students and teachers at Monkseaton used shared notebooks in OneNote to learn within and outside of the classroom, and how it appeals to students because it is as naturally multimedia as they are outside of school.
Paul Kelley, the Head Teacher at Monkseaton, is quoted in the article as saying:
Because the pupils use Facebook and MySpace at home, they are familiar with this technology. They take to it like a duck to water and seem to feel more comfortable learning in this way
The article is a very simplified version of their story – we’re producing a video, which should be published very shortly, which shows some of the ideas the article mentions. I’ll post it as soon as it’s ready.
In the meantime, you can read the article on the Sunday Times website (or in the paper, if like me, it takes you until mid-week to get through it all!)
If you want to get a feel of what kind of school Monkseaton is, then take a look at their Prospectus or their website – it' definitely demonstrates an image which is radically different from many others.
Following on from the Good Blogging Guide series last month, I’ve been keeping an eye on things which might change or supplement the advice. Today, I’ve come across something that adds a new dimension to the ‘blogging code of practice’ section.
The UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has a a Head of Corporate Digital Channels – Neil Williams – who has shared some of his advice on the strategy for the use of Twitter by Government Departments. Unlike some of the examples I gave in the Code of Practice, which has 2 or 20 words, it is longer – at 20 pages – but partly this is because it contains more context to the ideas.
Neil has shared the whole document – including key objectives and measures of success; risks and mitigations – that provides an excellent reference. Although it was written thinking of central government departments, it provides a good starter for educational users.
As a new Twitter user myself, it also gives useful hints on tools to use to enhance engagement with other Twitter users.
You can read all of Neil’s advice here
After a little bit of prompting, and a few requests, I’ve pulled the chapters of the “Good Blogging Guide” into a complete PDF booklet.
You can now download the whole thing as a PDF and read it at your leisure, and share with colleagues.
Chapter One – Writing for your audience Chapter Two – Have an objective Chapter Three – Getting onto page one of Google Chapter Four – A blogging Code of Practice Chapter Five – No lawyers please Chapter Six – When (if) things go wrong
Chapter One – Writing for your audience
Chapter Two – Have an objective
Chapter Three – Getting onto page one of Google
Chapter Four – A blogging Code of Practice
Chapter Five – No lawyers please
Chapter Six – When (if) things go wrong
If you prefer to still read it online (which does make it easy to disagree or add your own thoughts via comments) you can get to all via this Good Blogging Guide page.
Following on from the Sunday Times article last week, and my post about the written case study three weeks ago, I’ve now also got a copy of the video that was made a few weeks ago.
This video explains some of the background to the Sunday Times story, and you can hear from teachers and students about the way that ICT is supporting their learning, and helping to connect teachers more interactively with students – in ways which allows students to connect and work collaboratively with other students.
It may be a little early to write this, but I’m aware that some of you will be starting to think (perhaps subconsciously) about starting next term well. And for many schools this will mean the day before the pupils arrive – the INSET day.
For the benefit of readers outside of the UK, INSET stands for “IN-SErvice Training” – a day when the school is open, but the pupils aren’t in, and it is used for whole-school staff training. They’re also known as “Baker Days”, named after Ken Baker, once the Education Minister, who enshrined the right for teachers to get these training days.
Somebody in your school will be thinking about how to engage, enthuse and inform everybody in your school, and I thought that I’d share a few of the resources we have available.
It’s easy for me to forget all of the videos that we have made (and it’s certainly easy to forget where they all are!) so here’s a list of videos that might make excellent INSET training materials.
This list is of video INSET training materials – in a few or so I’ll do a list of presentation and other materials which you might find useful too.
If you need high resolution versions of any of these videos, then drop me an email or send me a tweet and I’ll see what I can do
During BETT week in January quite a few colleagues from the worldwide education team visited the UK. After BETT was over, whilst some came on a roadtrip with us (see the stories from the trip), others headed off to individual schools.
Jeff Daniels, who’s our ‘Worldwide Industry Manager for Schools’, went north to visit Monkseaton High School just above Newcastle, and spent some time catching up on their epic journey of educational transformation. I’ve previously mentioned their Spaced Learning project, and the media have relayed plenty of others (remember Laura not getting into Oxford?).
One of the things that Jeff heard was about their use of data to build a holistic picture of each of their students, and the way that is used to engage with all areas of their learning, as well as to add specific interventions.
As Paul Kelley, the Headteacher said:
We can use technology to collect data quickly and intervene early to personalize education for students. Then we can actually bring the technology into the learning environment, the administration, and the business of running the school, and bring it all together to support the whole student, the whole child.
He came away deeply impressed by what he had seen, and wanted to capture their story for other schools outside of the UK to read, and so he commissioned an American writing team to interview them and document some of their work.
The resulting article looks at the story from the perspective of Paul Kelley, the head, as well as individual classroom teachers.
It’s been structured under 5 headings, making it easier to dip into the bit you might be interested in:
You can read the full Monkseaton story on our worldwide case studies website
The Windows Team have announced, via The Windows Blog, more information on the various availability dates for Windows 7. Whilst the consumer product launches on 22nd October, it will actually be available earlier for customers using our ‘volume licensing’ schemes – like the School Agreement and Select Licensing.
The very good news in their blog post is that customers who have bought their existing Windows licences with Software Assurance – which includes every school with a School Agreement – will be able to get the full released version on 7th August.
This ‘thank you’ to School Agreement customers means that some schools can roll out Windows 7 this summer, whilst the rest will have to wait until Christmas or beyond, when the classrooms are quiet enough.
Full details of all of the dates are on the Windows 7 team blog
It may seem adventurous for a school to roll out a brand new operating system very early, but this time things are very different – over 2m downloads of the Windows 7 beta, and millions of people running it means that we’re releasing a pretty mature product which has already had significant amounts of real-life testing. The old adage of “Wait for Service Pack 1” doesn’t seem to apply in the new release model, where the Beta and the Release Candidate are both widely available for public use.