Each day I’ll write a short piece about each one of the money saving ideas in my BETT 2010 presentation.
Are you old enough to remember the first time that you realised that you needed a room to put the server in? Rather than just leaving it in the corner of a classroom or the technician’s office?
Those days are long gone now. Every secondary school has now got a Server Room, some of which are converted broom cupboards, whilst others are purpose-built, purpose-cooled spaces. And the average secondary school has probably got ten servers sitting inside them, because they’ve simply grown like topsy.
That’s exactly what Steve Gillott at Wootton Basset School had – 13 physical servers, with 13 support contracts, and 13 lots of electricity and cooling usage. And recently, Steve’s been saving money by turning 13 into 3 – by running virtual servers instead.
The bit that makes it very worthwhile to read more is the savings that he’s made through doing it:
In total, it saves £47,744 this year, and £23,744 every year after. Which is the equivalent of an NQT every year.
Which school wouldn’t want to save that kind of money?
You can read all about Steve’s project case study on the website of Clarity Advisors, who are his Microsoft partner.
This week’s TES ran the headline “Off-the-wall ideas for a brave new world of global connections”, over an article about our thinking on touchscreen displays. Richard Vaughan’s story concentrates on where we may end up in the future, with students using touchscreens as big as walls to link classrooms all over the world within the next decade.
It actually feels like we’re in the middle of an evolution now – as technology changes rapidly. The last decade has seen a race to install Interactive Whiteboards in classrooms, which support didactic teaching, and last year at BETT we showed the Microsoft Surface, a table-sized interactive computer that demonstrated how you can draw students together to collaboratively solve problems – and the huge crowds on the stand also showed the motivational effect of new technologies, not just on students!
This year at BETT, we’ve gone to the opposite extreme – to individual touchscreens on computers – bringing a similar kind of interactivity and interface at a significantly lower cost.
And the TES article looks forward to where we may go in the future:
So you could have a school in England interacting with a school in India, using the touch wall to write and have real-time translation working. With real-time translation we can open up more access to learning any time, anywhere. The role of the teacher and of the school will change.
You can read the whole article on the TES website, or flick to page 25 in this week’s newspaper (8th Jan).
And if you are at BETT 2010, drop by our stand for a look at the Dell touchscreens we’re using – and also keep an eye out for the massive 72” touchscreen display on the PhiHong NLighten Technologies stand (Stand V2) which gives you an idea of where things are going. We’re going to be able to take their display to some events in the next couple of months, so hopefully it’ll be coming somewhere near you soon!
It wouldn’t be the first day of BETT without a press release or two, so let’s get the ball rolling…
Kristen Weatherby, who runs our Partners in Learning project in the UK, and is also responsible for our Teachers blog, was pretty pleased this morning to announce our competition for teachers. It’s a very simple idea for teachers – record a short video demonstrating how you use any of our products to support teaching and learning in your school, and enter to win a classroom full of netbooks.
Of course, the idea behind this is to give an incentive for more teachers to share their ideas with other teachers. Whenever you go to conferences and events, some of the best feedback of the day is reserved for sessions hosted by teachers, where they talk about what they do in their own classrooms. And hopefully this competition can stimulate more sharing, but help those people who are rarely let out of the classroom to go to training or conferences.
Here’s a bit of detail from the Press Release attached:
Press release Innovative Teachers’ Chance to Win 20 Windows 7 Netbooks for Their School Microsoft competition offers teachers opportunity to highlight innovative ways of engaging students LONDON – 13 January 2010 – Microsoft is today launching a competition for teachers to win 20 Windows 7 netbook computers for their school. The competition, which runs until March 2010, requires teachers to create inspirational ‘how-to’ videos for other teachers, showcasing how they use Microsoft technologies in the classroom. “This is a great way of providing a platform for teachers to showcase the innovative ways in which they engage students in classrooms and to share these ideas and best practices with other teachers across the UK”, says Kristen Weatherby, Partners in Learning Manager at Microsoft. “Education is and always has been a big priority for Microsoft and we are committed to making it as easy as possible for teachers and students to embrace the incredible learning opportunities that come with advanced technology.” The competition is run as part of the Partners in Learning Network, which is the next generation of the Innovative Teachers Network (ITN), a global network expected to serve more than 2 million teachers and school leaders this year. The network has evolved to include advances in social networking technology that will help teachers and school leaders share ideas by connecting them with one another in professional development communities. For the competition, Microsoft is providing teachers with free tools to help create the videos, which include free artwork and music found on the Partners in Learning Network site. Video requirements are simple: ‘How-to’ videos must focus on Microsoft technologies used in the classroom Teachers must be from England, Scotland or Wales It is no longer than 4 minutes It is no larger than 20MB It follows the easy template provided online Competition entries close on 29 March 2010 All the information for the competition can be found on the Partners in Learning Network site: http://uk.partnersinlearningnetwork.com. Non-members can join the free community online and immediately benefit from communities, shared lesson plans, learning programmes, opportunities to collaborate with like-minded colleagues plus loads of resources and a number of free tools.
Innovative Teachers’ Chance to Win 20 Windows 7 Netbooks for Their School
Microsoft competition offers teachers opportunity to highlight innovative ways of engaging students
LONDON – 13 January 2010 – Microsoft is today launching a competition for teachers to win 20 Windows 7 netbook computers for their school. The competition, which runs until March 2010, requires teachers to create inspirational ‘how-to’ videos for other teachers, showcasing how they use Microsoft technologies in the classroom.
“This is a great way of providing a platform for teachers to showcase the innovative ways in which they engage students in classrooms and to share these ideas and best practices with other teachers across the UK”, says Kristen Weatherby, Partners in Learning Manager at Microsoft. “Education is and always has been a big priority for Microsoft and we are committed to making it as easy as possible for teachers and students to embrace the incredible learning opportunities that come with advanced technology.”
The competition is run as part of the Partners in Learning Network, which is the next generation of the Innovative Teachers Network (ITN), a global network expected to serve more than 2 million teachers and school leaders this year. The network has evolved to include advances in social networking technology that will help teachers and school leaders share ideas by connecting them with one another in professional development communities.
For the competition, Microsoft is providing teachers with free tools to help create the videos, which include free artwork and music found on the Partners in Learning Network site. Video requirements are simple:
‘How-to’ videos must focus on Microsoft technologies used in the classroom
All the information for the competition can be found on the Partners in Learning Network site: http://uk.partnersinlearningnetwork.com. Non-members can join the free community online and immediately benefit from communities, shared lesson plans, learning programmes, opportunities to collaborate with like-minded colleagues plus loads of resources and a number of free tools.
Inspiration for this competition came out of last year’s 2009 Summer Camp in Reading, where a group of Innovative Teachers contributed over 35 short videos – and may well be the catalyst that launched hundreds more!
Read more about the competition over on Kristen’s blog
At the BETT Show in London in January 2010, I have the luck of telling the story in our theatre called “Top 10 Money Saving Tips”. Of course, I had a few weeks to prepare, and a lot of help from individual schools who looked at their use of ICT and pointed out how it had helped save their school money.
The reason for doing the presentation was that we all know that there’s a bit of a budget crunch going on – and 80% of network managers in a recent survey reported that they’d had their ICT budget cut. But I’ve come across many examples of where a bit of spending on ICT had save a heap of spending on another part of the school budget. So I had one really simple goal: To help the ICT team in school to explain to the leadership team how they can help out the rest of the school. And this isn’t chicken-feed stuff – the very first idea I talked about was saving nearly £45,000 in one school. And plenty of the ideas were saving money in other budgets – like knocking up to £20,000 of the school electricity bill, or £40,000 of the reprographics and printing costs.
I hope that what I’m going to share will help you move the conversation FROM “I need £5,000 to upgrade some software” or “Can I go on a training course costing £1,000” TO “If we invest £5,000 now, we’ll save £10,000 by the end of the year” which is the kind of thing that head teachers like to hear!
Every day, starting tomorrow, over the next two weeks I’ll share one of the tips each day, and hopefully build up a helpful stock of ideas for you to think of for next year. They are grouped into three money saving strategies:
And a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation is that there’s at least £150,000 of real savings to the school budget coming in these tips.
Here’s the list of what’s coming (they’ll turn into links each day):
Need the list quicker? Well, see you on the BETT stand every day, at 1 and 4:30!
It’s only a day away – and still a lot to do to get ready! However, I have managed to get together the freebie list from our stand – mainly because I know that there are some people who plan their BETT visit around scooping up the freebies, so here’s the list (in all cases, you’ll find these things on the main Microsoft stand, just inside the Grand Hall).
Not coming to BETT? I’ll grab a pile of each of these on the first day of the show, and get them out to the first 100 people from the UK that drop me an email with your name and address*
While you're here, let's have your thoughts in the Comments - What has been the best ever BETT freebie?
* Give me a few days to get it all in the post – it ain’t going to happen this week!
Nothing like taking things right up to the wire – and this year we’ve excelled ourselves in making last minute changes to our BETT stand, in order to find a way to fit in all of the latest news onto our stand and into our theatre. But as the fitters start building the stand down at Olympia, we’ve realised now is the time to finalise everything else. And that means that we now have the final theatre schedule, and yet again I think we’ve got a line-up with a good mix of teachers and Microsoft presenters.
Not only do we have the dynamic duo of my colleagues Mark and Matt back to do a little crystal ball gazing in technology terms, but we’ve got a hearty line-up of innovative teachers talking about the practical things that are going on in their own schools:
And finally, colleagues Chris & Leighton are going to run through Office 2010, and the Office Web Apps, which will be available later this year. (Oh, and there’s the little matter of me getting my “10 ways to save the school budget” presentation finished in time!)
Here’s the full timetable – as you can see, a big run of snappy presentations no more than 20 minutes long. And every one is repeated twice a day, so that you can see them all, and get time to visit the rest of the stand!
AM
PM
Subject
Speakers
10:15
13:50
Touching the Future
Mark A’Bear & Matt Fox
10:40
14:15
How do you get students to pay more attention?
Kathryn Furness, Monkseaton High School
11:05
14:45
Creating a future Connected Learning Community
Alex Pearce, SharePoint MVP
11:30
15:10
Creating learning opportunities
Dave Garland, saltash.net
11:55
15:35
Windows 7
Simon Brennand, Philip Morant School
12:20
16:00
The future of Office in school and at home
Chris Rothwell & Leighton Searle
12:45
16:25
Tales from a Connected Learning Community
Mike Herrity, Twynham School
13:00
16:40
10 ways to save the school budget with ICT
Ray Fleming
13:25
17:05
Live@Edu: Collaborating in the cloud
Guy Shearer, Lodge Park Technology College
I’m looking forward to some of you in person later this week!
If you aren’t yet an IT Academy, then it’s definitely something to look into for 2010. I’ve written about it before – in this blog post – and I think it is a programme which works very well for secondary schools. (In a nutshell it allows you to offer Microsoft certifications to your students, staff, and to your local community. Many schools who do it use it to generate revenue, as well as supporting engagement with the local community and local employers).
Now the IT Academy team have announced dates for their “Licence to Learn Tour 2010”, in partnership with OCR, the SSA and Zenos.
The events, in February, have got some very cool venues – the Manchester United Stadium on 2nd Feb, Millennium Point in Birmingham on 3rd Feb, and HMS Belfast in London on 4th Feb. (Even cooler, but more difficult to justify the trip, is the Dublin venue – the Guinness Storehouse on 5th Feb!)
The content, with guest speakers speakers from Microsoft, OCR, Zenos and Prodigy Learning is designed so that you can:
Places are limited – to register or find out more visit www.licensetolearntour.com
If you can’t wait until February, or you want to know whether it’s worth the trip, you can meet the IT Academy Team on our stand at BETT, or on their own stand M20
Like you, Microsoft believes strongly in the importance of ensuring the Internet is a safe place for young people and adults alike.
My colleague Karina leads a lot of our work on online safety. As well as being part of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS), we’re also a partner of CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) and a number of our staff are trained by CEOP as volunteers to visit schools and educate children through presentations, using the Think You Know resources.
Through doing this work, we’ve realised that there’s a big gap in knowledge amongst parents, and that they need a lot more help. This year, in addition to the CEOP trained volunteers, we also have other volunteers who are invited by schools to talk with parents.
To support European Safer Internet Day and the launch of the new digital code for children “Zip it, Block it, Flag it” Microsoft is offering all UK schools the opportunity to host their own parents awareness session. These virtual sessions offer your school the opportunity to host a parents evening with a presentation led by a Microsoft volunteer to inform and educate parents on the technology their children are using and how they can keep them safe when online.
About the Presentation
The presentation will be a live webcast that you can join from your school at no cost. All you need is to connect to the Internet on a screen or whiteboard and your parents will be able to see the presentation and you can submit questions from them should they have any.
The presentation itself talks about the benefits and safety concerns of the Internet as well as introducing basic information on how technology such as social networking and instant messaging is used by young people. It is designed to build confidence for parents in understanding the technology as well as a providing guidance and practical advice to safeguard their children and where to go for help.
The presentation will take place on the 9th February 2010 at the following times:
Running A Session
The session will be streamed over the internet, when you sign up you will receive the following:
To book to host a virtual parents presentation for your school please book a place by January 28th 2010 by calling Karina Gibson on 0118 909 2803 or drop her an email email stating which session you would like to join.
If this date doesn’t work for you, but you know that you’d like to do something for your parents, then it’s worth dropping an email to Karina. Although we don’t have volunteers all around the country, and they are stretched quite thinly, we are always willing to see if we can accommodate requests for talks to parents or students.