Developing ICT in education and cost saving were a couple of the hot topics presented at the recent BETT show at the Olympia, London which are now featuring in schools across the UK and are fast becoming part of the education future.
One of Microsoft’s success stories comes from West Hatch High School, Chigwell, who demonstrated that using ICT and cost saving solutions in their school has saved them money in a time where budgets have been cut.
Both Microsoft and West Hatch High School would like to invite you to attend an Education ICT event to highlight ICT solutions that have worked in their school which can easily be adapted to help cut cost and save money around your school.
If you would like to attend this event and take this opportunity and share with you the recently announced Office 365 showcasing many of Microsoft’s technologies and SharePoint 2010 as a teaching and learning platform, please e-mail Alan Richards, Information Systems Manager to book your place.
Agenda
09:30 – 09:50 -Arrival 09:50 – 10:00 -Welcome 10:00 – 10:30 -Mark Reynolds, Microsoft UK – Costs Savings In Education 10:30 – 11:00 -Dave Coleman, Twynham School – Virtualising using Microsoft Hyper-V 11:00 – 11:10 -Coffee Break 11:10 – 11:40 -James Marshall, Microsoft UK – Office 365 11:40 – 12:10 -Alex Pearce, SharePoint MVP – Using SharePoint 2010 as a Learning Platform 12:10 – 13:00 -Buffet Lunch 13:00 – 13:30 -Alan Richards, West Hatch High School – The Paperless School 13:30 - Onwards -Q & A, networking and close
At Microsoft in general, but especially in the UK we have a fantastically rich partner ecosystem, and within the education space alone there is a huge number of partner companies out there who can help with all sorts of projects. Oxford Computer Group, experts in identity and access management, are one such partner and they are running a webinar on February 3rd 2011 to talk about how to prepare for the move to cloud services and some of the processes around provisioning and de-provisioning accounts and managing access.
The brief for the event is:
“For several years, Microsoft Live@edu has provided hosted email and collaboration tools for education providers. It has been deployed by thousands of organizations and is used by millions of students. For 2011 Live@edu will become part of Microsoft Office 365 which brings together cloud versions of Microsoft's most trusted communications and collaboration products, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync for IM, voice and video conferencing. This 45 minute webinar is intended for education providers who have been considering Cloud solutions, such as Live@edu, and who need to understand not only what Office 365 brings, but perhaps more importantly, how to prepare for the move to Cloud services and how to provision and de-provision accounts and manage user access. We start by providing a simple overview of what Live@edu provides and what Office 365 will provide. We then examine real-world case studies to understand how organisations have prepared for their move to Cloud services, bringing out some of the specific challenges and how to address them. In education, perhaps more than any other sector, managing the entire lifecycle of a digital identity can be challenging! Therefore we will show you how Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 is being used to automate the administrative tasks associated with identity management, highlighting the many benefits this brings. The webinar will conclude with a short Q&A session.”
“For several years, Microsoft Live@edu has provided hosted email and collaboration tools for education providers. It has been deployed by thousands of organizations and is used by millions of students. For 2011 Live@edu will become part of Microsoft Office 365 which brings together cloud versions of Microsoft's most trusted communications and collaboration products, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync for IM, voice and video conferencing.
This 45 minute webinar is intended for education providers who have been considering Cloud solutions, such as Live@edu, and who need to understand not only what Office 365 brings, but perhaps more importantly, how to prepare for the move to Cloud services and how to provision and de-provision accounts and manage user access.
We start by providing a simple overview of what Live@edu provides and what Office 365 will provide. We then examine real-world case studies to understand how organisations have prepared for their move to Cloud services, bringing out some of the specific challenges and how to address them.
In education, perhaps more than any other sector, managing the entire lifecycle of a digital identity can be challenging! Therefore we will show you how Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010 is being used to automate the administrative tasks associated with identity management, highlighting the many benefits this brings. The webinar will conclude with a short Q&A session.”
If you’d like to find out more about the event, including registering for it, you can find out more on their website.
EduGeek and Microsoft will be hosting a live webinar presenting on how to cut your schools spend using ICT solutions.
If you have time and would like to understand more, you can register your attendance here
Wow! After months of planning the Microsoft stand, finding presenters and schools to share their success stories, hunting down staff to work on the demo pods and theatre stand and even down to the colour of the Microsoft Education polo shirts, my first BETT (and my first BETT experience) is now done and dusted. And what a successful year it was – if I may say so myself!
Microsoft gave 66 presentations in total broken down to 16 presentations per day from Wednesday through to Friday and 12 presentations on Saturday. On average 1200 customers each day stopped at our theatre stand to watch our presenters from schools and Microsoft and giving insight on how we are positioning our technology for the education market. According to BESA a total of 27000 customers passed through both the theatre stand and the demo pod stand over four days.
We also had a number of key announcements made at BETT this year which caused quite a buzz among our partners and customers:
It was also with great sadness (well for the majority) that this was also Ray Fleming’s final BETT as on Saturday afternoon, Ray jetted off to join Microsoft Australia to work in the Education team, taking his family with him.
Ray has been part of the Public Sector team for the past 4 years however has been involved with 25 BETTS from his days at RM and Capita. Ray has played a huge part in the Education team, bringing about the cost saving and innovation for free stories with schools, as well as regularly blogging on both the education blog pages as well as his own. Ray will be missed however I’m pretty sure this won’t be the last we hear from him.
As budgets decrease schools are looking at innovative ways to cut costs and save money using ICT. Check out how from the two infographics presenting key industry statistics and Microsoft information on the Future Workforce research.
Cost of ICT in Education
Access to ICT in Education
Our resident Live@Edu and Office 365 expert, James Marshall, gives his take on the announcements made at BETT 2011.
As the dust settles after the annual BETT exhibition, and Olympia returns to normal I always make some time to look through the various forums and blogs that comment on the big announcements of the year. The big one for me was all the great news that came out about Microsoft Office 365 for education, and how it’s going to take our cloud services for education to the next level.
My favourite statistic was that over 15 million students are using Microsoft Live@edu worldwide – up on 11 million only three months ago.
Of course, sometimes it’s difficult to speak to every person individually at shows like BETT and so I would like to take this opportunity to reaffirm a few things…
The key thing to note is that nothing that we currently offer in Live@edu will be charged for in Office 365 for education. Live@edu email is hosted by Exchange Online and is the free Exchange Plan 1 in the world of Office 365 for education. All that changes is the inbox size grows from 10GB to 25GB, all still free.
The Windows Live SkyDrive service with Microsoft Office Web Apps that Live@edu customers currently use will still be available as a free service. If customers want the Office Web Apps in their SharePoint Online environment there are charges for staff but students get this feature for free. SharePoint Online is a feature we do not offer today in Live@edu so it is difficult to make comparisons but we are confident that the total cost of ownership of Office 365 for education will be much lower than providing the same level of service on-premise.
The prices we announced at BETT are $USD estimated retail prices for new customers. Our pricing for Office 365 for education for existing customers of our School and Campus Agreement programme (which will migrate to EES) has not been announced; however, we will take into account the schools/colleges existing investments. Finally, you’ll be able to mix and match between the different packages, for example: all students on plan A2, some staff on A2 and others on A4.
Remember, you can still register for Live@edu today by visiting the LIve@edu website and following the Enrol Your School link.
For three days now at BETT 2011 I've been presenting with a colleague, Mark Stewart, about some of the websites and products that students use in their social lives, and talking about how they could also be useful for teachers and schools. As it has been such a busy week, I've not had chance to get this list up before now, nor write long descriptions of each of the sites. But here's the list, and I'd encourage you to take a look at what they can do, and see if they might be useful for your teachers. My favourite of the lot is the Montage site.
Allows you to create your own 'daily' subject specific paper - ideal to put on the whiteboard as a lesson opener
http://montage.cloudapp.net/gallery
The montage examples I used was this one about floods
Microsoft Chronozoom needs Silverlight, and then gives you the history of the universe, all on one zoomable web page
http://chronozoom.cloudapp.net/firstgeneration.aspx
Uses Photosynth and DeepZoom to create an immersive learning experience
http://news.uk.msn.com/in-depth/world-war-two/battle-of-britain
Allows you to view, and create your own, 3D explorable models from a set of standard 2D photographs
http://www.photosynth.net/
Try out Office Web Apps for yourself, and see what your students can do with it without needing Office installed on their home computer
http://office.live.com
This year's BETT is generating plenty of new announcements from us, and here's yet another one.
On Tuesday we announced the availability details for Windows MultiPoint Server 2011, which will be available from March this year.
In a nutshell, Windows MultiPoint Server allows you to plug multiple screens into a single machine and gives each user their own virtual computer, with a full PC experience with multimedia, audio, USB ports etc - saving on hardware costs and power consumption. The technical phrase is 'Shared Resource Computing', but basically it means that as you come to replace computers in IT suites and your library, you may be able to save money.
There's a dedicated Windows MultiPoint Server website, and you can find out what customers think about it on the Windows SBS blog, as they have a bunch of short videos, with customers sharing their experiences (and savings!)
So the budget cuts have arrived – and the pressure is on to save money in schools. And ICT leaders in schools around the country are going to need to hone their skills to justify the investments they are bidding for.
Since late 2009 I’ve been working to look at how ICT can help save schools money – either saving in the ICT budget, or another area.
There are areas where ICT can help you make simple and effective cost savings in your school budget. Savings of up to a staggering £350,000 over 3 years.
I've collected many of the stories and examples into a new eBook - Saving Money with ICT - which contains many of the examples and stories that will help you to see how you can help your school save money.
You can download the Money Saving ebook via this link, or click on the front page on the right.
I hope that you find it useful - it's not meant to provide all of the answers, and I'm sure you'll have other ideas. But I believe it's a great starting point to your planning for this year and beyond.
I have 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.
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!
Download your own copy of the Saving Money with ICT eBook
After the announcement about Office 365 for education this morning, I thought you might appreciate this video from Jon Perera over in the States. It's a summary of the news on Office 365 for education, and describes how the new services will be available. At the moment the pricing information is in US Dollars, and we'll have UK pricing later this term.
Find out more about Office 365 for education