Things are changing fast

Two numeric examples of how fast things are moving forward in education ICT these days:

Windows 7 is being rapidly adopted in schools

The chart below shows the visitors to this blog this month. Which shows just how fast Windows 7 is being adopted, and displacing Windows XP (the Windows Vista number has been dropping a little, with people moving to Windows 7, but the Windows XP users are moving faster)

As most readers of this blog are from UK schools, and most network upgrades happen over the summer holidays, I’m guessing we’ll see Windows 7 beating Windows XP by the start of the new term.

Microsoft’s cloud is being rapidly adopted across education, around the world

I saw this Tweet yesterday evening:

The press release it links to lists a few of the numbers around the move to cloud services. Outside of education, 13 of the top 20 global telecom firms, 15 of the top 20 global banks, and 16 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies are now using Microsoft’s cloud services. And over 10,000 customers in more than 40 countries have chosen the Windows Azure platform in just nine months.

And in education, over 10,000 universities, colleges and schools in more than 130 countries are now using Microsoft’s Live@edu cloud-based email and collaboration service, serving 11 million students, staff and teachers worldwide. Today’s announcement was about the University of Georgia, which is moving 85,000 students, faculty and staff to our cloud based email, calendar and documents service. Dr. Barbara White, chief information officer at the University of Georgia, put the reasons pretty clearly:

	With Live@edu, we believe we will have a best-in-class communications and collaboration infrastructure including full-featured e-mail, increased storage space, better spam protection, and mobile phone integration, Live@edu will help us transform the campus learning environment by connecting our students, educators and staffers through the cloud. This transformation of our infrastructure will also provide capabilities to our students that they will use in their educational pursuits as well as in their future careers.

Find out more about Live@edu