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Last week I spoke to a group of schools about money saving strategies ( based on this info ), and I do plan to shortly record the whole presentation, so that I can share it. But when I got to the bit about making sure that you do something about desktop power savings, there were a few in the audience...

We have a team, called Microsoft Global Foundation Services , who have the job of building clouds. Or at least, building ‘the Cloud’ – they design, build, run and support our global data centres which are at the hub of all of our cloud services. In Europe, we have one in Ireland and...

It’s not often that the TES reports on ICT – apart from a couple of pages tucked away towards the back of the magazine. But today they’ve splashed articles about ICT on the front page of the main newspaper and on the front page of the magazine. Unfortunately, in keeping with ‘good news is no news’, you...

One of the hidden costs of ICT in schools is the power usage of the equipment you’ve got around your school. I call it hidden because it is often not visible to the IT team, and the full energy costs of all of your servers and computers are simply part of the school’s overall electric bill. I’ve written...

1. Schools create 2% of UK greenhouse gases, and have a target of a 53% cut in energy emissions by 2020 According to the government’s carbon management strategy for schools, "Climate change and schools" on Teachernet, the government target for schools is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by...

In the Top Money Saving Tips post series, I wrote about various education IT cost savings – things that could be done to reduce your school IT budget, or to use IT to save money in other areas of the school budget. In all I described 14 tips, and calculated a potential cost saving over three years...

We’re supporting the team running “ Project Genie ”, which is all about making climate change meaningful to pupils in primary schools. In the pilot programme, the schools that took part saw energy use savings of up to 40% – which is pretty significant when you consider that most schools spend more on...

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...

Virtualisation again. Just to remind you if you’re still not up with it, virtualisation is shorthand for replacing your bank of network servers with just a few, more powerful ones, each housing a number of virtual servers. And why has it suddenly become a talking point? Because although the principle...

The Microsoft worldwide case studies site always throws up some interesting things to read. But a couple of weeks ago I noticed that a new case study of a UK school had been published by our services team, in partnership with Dell. It’s from Lodge Park Technology College, in Northants, and tells the...

Part thirteen of the series of Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips for schools , based on my BETT 2010 presentation. Good news, my counting was hopeless, and my Top 10 tips actually contain 14 Top ICT Money Saving Tips. So there’s one more to come after this one Last summer, I wrote a blog post called “ What...

Part seven of the series of Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips for schools , based on my BETT 2010 presentation. Late last year, I was chatting with a group of senior leaders in schools about the amount of paper that is used in a typical school (it had been partially prompted by me, when I realised that...

Part three of the series of Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips for schools , based on my BETT 2010 presentation. My next tip is to think about the energy usage of your computers in school. According to the latest research from BESA , primary schools have an average of 50 computers per school, and secondary...

Part two of the money saving tips, based on my BETT 2010 presentation Yesterday, I covered saving money by server virtualisation. Today, let’s go outside of the server room and consider all of the computers right around you school. With the rapid growth in the number of computers (an average...

I like “ They Work for You ”, a website which tracks things which go on in Parliament. I use the RSS feeds of education ministers to keep an eye on news I’ve missed (such as new statistics published like these , or progress on big programmes like BSF ), and I’ve also used it personally to contact my...

I was talking to colleagues in the Local Government team the other day, and they were telling me how the focus within local authorities has moved to "cost-saving" as a priority within their decision making. This is partly caused by the need to fill the budget gaps created by the downfall of Icelandic...

Just one of the things on head teachers’ minds these days is the budget gap created by rising electricity and gas costs. Some schools talk about 150% increases, and the knock on to other school budgets could be immense. And ICT is surely playing its part in the increase. Since 2002, the number of computers...

A colleague published a new story on the worldwide Microsoft case studies website earlier this month, on Norwich School, who had expanded and replaced their email system. They wanted to encourage their staff, students and parents to their email system more, to help information to flow around the school...

Climate change and sustainability - these issues are at the forefront of most people's minds nowadays as it becomes more and more obvious that we need to change the way we live. In the long-term, changing the way young people relate to the planet we live on and ensuring they understand the effect we...

One for Network Managers: We've announced that Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista will be released in the Spring Term 2008, which is good news for those who are waiting for this before doing widescale deployments of the new operating system across your school. In advance of that the Beta is available now...

This isn't for everybody - it's a technical guide, written primarily for IT staff - but I've posted information because I know that it will be of interest to people involved with BSF, and some schools and local authorities have implemented some of the technologies described, and the case studies could...

I have been lucky enough to visit lots of schools in my time working in education ICT. And I have often found that within a few minutes of walking in the door, you can quickly decide whether it is a "good" school or not. The benchmark for me has always been "Would I like my children to go here?" Yesterday...

PC Pro have been doing some research on the ways that Windows Vista can save power.....come again...save power? Yup It appears that computers are left on all the time with nobody using them (hmm, let me think about the IT Suite, or some of those odd computers in the back of classrooms). So, if...