I have to admit, much of the content in the MSDN Magazine goes whooshing over my head. But I know that some of you love nothing more than digging into coding, and would love nothing more than an evening of thread diagnostics (whatever that is?).
But did you know that you can download all of the MSDN magazines, free, as PDFs?
So you could, at this very moment, be enjoying the March edition, with news on Thread Diagnostics, Extreme ASP.NET, IIS Smooth Streaming and UI Frontiers (this month, all about MIDI Music in WPF Applications).
If you know what ‘contravariance’ means, then enjoy.
Archive of the MSDN Magazine
Every day is a day closer to the Office 2010 release (due on 12th May for volume licence customers, and June for consumers). And I know of quite a few UK schools that are widely using the free Office 2010 beta in the classroom already.
If you’re preparing for a rapid roll out of Office 2010, or even if you’re just looking for more information to help you consider your plans, then you’ll be interested in the free ebook from the Microsoft Learning team. It’s called “First Look- Microsoft Office 2010”, and over it’s 186 pages it talks you through some of the most significant enhancements in the Office suite. I’m impressed with the collaboration that Office 2010 encourages, and have got very used to doing things like broadcasting PowerPoint over the internet, and the options to save my files to my SkyDrive on the web, rather than on my local hard disk.
I’ve been using Office 2010 for over six months now, and there are key bits of it that I would definitely not be able to do without now. This ebook does a very good job of explaining all of that, and helping you and your teaching staff to get ahead.
My advice? Download it now and pass it around some of the keen IT teachers.
Quickly find all the other Office 2010 posts on this blog
In the Top Money Saving Tips, the ninth one was “Stop your email servers”. It used the example from the DCSF "’Securing our Future’ discussion guide, which prompted schools to look for efficiency savings – the example the DCSF used was London Grid for Learning, which is planning to save up to £11M a year by switching student email to Live@edu. That’s our free cloud-hosted email service, which allows you to use your existing .sch.uk domain name, but have run the servers etc at our data centre in Dublin.
Guy Shearer, Principal of Lodge Park Technology College, and Ben Nunney, who’s a Live@edu deployment specialist in Reading, did a great double-act presentation at BETT. Earlier this week, Ben and Guy relived the BETT moment by recording their presentation, and putting it up online.
So for the perfect introduction to Live@edu, then take a look at this presentation video:
Collaborating in the Cloud with Live@edu from Live At Edu UK on Vimeo.
Find out more about the Live@edu service
Watch the case study video on the Microsoft worldwide case studies website
Our technical team – some of whom you may have seen when they joined us on the stand at BETT – have put together a fantastic week of technical events from 12-16 April in London. Despite hosting them in a cinema, most of them were full within hours of announcing them, but if you’ve got the chance to get out of school during the Easter holiday, I’d recommend adding your name to the Wait List for the events – because you may get a chance to attend if there are dropouts, and the team will also let you know about the recordings available afterwards.
The subjects to be covered are:
You can find out more, and register yourself onto the Wait List on the techdays website. At the moment, there are still places available for the Friday, and the rest are Wait List only (check current availability here)
If you’re developing software, then there are still places available for some of the developer events – run in parallel, in another London cinema.
On a regular basis, the Bing team are adding more to the Bing Maps site. And the nice thing is that you can see see it all growing on the Bing Maps beta website.
Yesterday, I was looking up Culford School, in Suffolk, on the map – to show somebody why their cross-country route never leaves the school grounds (the benefit of a 500 acre playing field), and saw that Adrian Edgar, the IT Director at the school, has recently made a Photosynth of the main building. The reason that I know is that when you create and upload 3D Photosynth, and place it on a map, it is then visible on the new Bing Maps (see right – a little green pushpin). And it’s a simple click for the user to go from map view to 3D Photosynth view. (Here’s the direct link straight to the Culford School Photosynth)
Photosynth isn’t the only overlay – there’s a big pile of map overlays available, including recent tweets from an area, current traffic information, local events, newspaper front pages, webcams – and even the stars in the sky overhead (thanks to the WorldWide telescope).
You can see all of the overlays by clicking on the Map Apps button on the Bing Maps page
Whilst it’s great to see so much information brought together in a new way, there are always unintended consequences. I just zoomed into the map of Reading, where our offices are, and found out that Ben Nunney was tweeting during lunch yesterday – with geolocation switched on. Turns out he blamed me because he had a pudding yesterday. Somehow, you can’t help but think there’s got to better uses for technology?
In the Top ICT Money Saving Tips, the second one was all around using the power saving functions of Windows, to knock £10,000 a year off your electricity bill.
With perfect timing, the Windows team, over at windows.microsoft.com, have released a new video on “saving power on the go”, which is all about using the power settings on your laptop to stretch out your battery life, and reduce the power use. The video is a very simple walkthrough of what you can do (designed for normal people, not geeks!) and then there are also a series of short articles on:
Conserving battery power
Change what happens when you close your laptop
Power plans: frequently asked questions
Sleep and hibernation: frequently asked questions
A short list of hints on conserving battery power are:
Quickly find all the other Money Saving Tips on this blog
We’ve just issued the third edition of our accessibility guide for teachers, and it’s available as a download from our accessibility site. The site also includes a number of accessibility video case studies.
The Accessibility: A Guide for Educators has been updated to include information on Windows 7 accessibility features, and current assistive technology product recommendations for teachers
This guide provides information about accessibility and accessible technology to help teachers ensure that all students have equal access to learning with technology, specifically:
Download the Accessibility Guide for Teachers
Do you read the Windows magazine? It probably shows up on the shelves of your local WH Smith, and larger newsagents. I’ve managed to lay my hands on some spare copies of this month’s magazine, so if you’d like to grab one of them, then just drop me an email with your postal address, and I’ll stick one in the mail. Sorry, they've all gone! (And this month’s edition includes a DVD with our free anti-virus solution for home use - Microsoft Security Essentials. Fortunately you can download it free - see this info).
So for now, you'll have to make do with the Official Windows Magazine website
hI’ve blogged about software licensing before, and have hopefully managed to explain the various options and the cost saving possibilities – especially in number 12 of my Top ICT Money Saving Tipsh and in “Get the best deal on Microsoft software”. So, having done that ‘top-down’ stuff – explaining licensing from the MS point of view - I thought it might be an idea to reinforce it from the other direction.
To make sure that I didn’t confuse the story with too much inside knowledge, I asked Gerald Haigh to take another look from a school’s perspective. Gerald was an ideal choice as he looks at ICT from a school leadership perspective – he writes for TES, NCSL and The Guardian, as well as writing books on school leadership. So here’s Gerald’s story, passing on some thoughts from conversations with two people – Richard Gibbons from one of our Authorised Education Resellers (AERs), Bechtle and Nyall Monkton, who’s ICT Manager at Dean Close School in Cheltenham.
Richard, who’s a mine of information about licensing, reminds us that the fundamental choice for school ICT managers is whether to buy Microsoft software licences outright with money up-front – ‘perpetual licences’ – or to pay an annual subscription instead. The most common outright purchase scheme for schools is Academic Select, and the subscription scheme is the Schools Agreement. Richard says that schools aren’t always clear about the choice, because software is most often sold as a perpetual licence without schools realising there’s a choice. Schools Agreement can be, in his words, “a well-kept secret”.
That’s a pity, he says, because although he’s careful to not to be dogmatic, it’s pretty clear he believes that most schools he deals with are better off with Schools Agreement. It comes with Software Assurance included, for one thing, which means they’re entitled to upgrade to whatever is the latest version of the software. In today’s fast-changing world, says Richard that’s significant.
“Network managers will ask me before they buy if there’s a new version of some software coming. They’ll postpone a purchase just on the strength of a ‘maybe’. But with Schools Agreement they can buy what they want now, safe in the knowledge that they can upgrade.”
There are other benefits, too. Schools Agreement means you get the Enterprise version of the software, with all that means in terms of extra features, says Richard,
“The one that’s key for schools, with new and stronger legislation on data protection, is BitLocker Drive Encryption in Windows 7.”
(The array of extra benefits available with different licensing arrangements is helpfully set out currently in a post on Richard’s blog)
Then, for many schools, removing the big up-front payment for the licences will make all the difference to their ability to provide staff and students with the latest software. That was very much the case for Nyall Monkton, ICT Manager at Dean Close School in Cheltenham, one of Richard’s customers. Nyall, arriving at the school in May 2008, wanted to move quickly to give his students up-to-date ICT, and he wasn’t happy with the forest of perpetual licences that he had to manage. (He has a thick wad of them to show to visitors who ask him why he made the change)
“I came from a business environment and I was used to corporate subscription licensing. Richard explained there was something similar for schools.”
Moving to Schools Agreement, with a much reduced initial cost enabled Nyall, with Bechtle’s support, to roll out Windows 7 quickly (he was one of the earliest adopters in Summer 2009), as well as opening up a number of other possibilities, including giving all of his students a school email address with the aid of Microsoft Exchange.
“It gives them a much more business-like image when they’re contacting universities for example.” (As he points out, with a particularly lurid example, sixth formers’ personal email addresses don’t always promote a scholarly image.)
Really, though, for Nyall, the bottom line is that the Schools Agreement is just a lot more businesslike, akin to what he was used to in the commercial world. He’s freed from the task of keeping tabs on his pile of separate licences, and there’s a real sense of control.
“It fits the way I manage my budget. I know what I’m going to spend across everything – PCs, servers, printers. Year on year my budget remains almost the same. But if you buy licences outright you have less control over costs – one year they’re fantastically high, and then three years where they’re low.”
The consistent annual payment makes it much easier to work with school governors and finance committees, who understandably don’t like to find big spikes in expenditure at what to them can look like random intervals.
All that said, why aren’t more schools using Schools Agreement? Richard Gibbons says, “It’s a mindset thing. People like to feel they own something. But really they should show due diligence and study the alternatives.”
And that fits, in a way, with Nyall’s contention that there’s a need for network managers to be more aware of strategy and planning.
“I came from business and I had that instilled into me. That’s often lacking.”
So how do you feel about that? Should network managers be more business-minded? Or do they have quite enough to do already, just managing their networks? Is the answer for school business managers to be more aware of the issues around budgeting for ICT, and the choices between perpetual and subscription licences? Gerald told me about a call he made when researching this piece. He left a voicemail for a school business manager, hoping to talk to her about the school’s software licensing policy. When the call came back, it was from the network manager. Presumably the business manager felt that was the kind of thing that had nothing to do with her. Despite it being a big annual outlay for the school. Food for thought there maybe?
There are a number of different options for perpetual and subscription licences, and the main ones for schools are: Perpetual: Academic Select Subscription: School Agreement and the Subscription Enrolment for Schools Pilot (SESP). SESP is similar to the School Agreement. Whilst School Agreement is simpler, the the SESP is more flexible.
There are a number of different options for perpetual and subscription licences, and the main ones for schools are:
You can find out about all of these by starting on our main UK Education website, in the Licensing section