This might only make sense, if you read yesterday's post, because I'm going to continue the theme.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Here's another conversational ice-breaking-list, of free Microsoft software to help with teaching and learning. Just in case you weren't sure what we do to help learning. Yesterday I gave you a baker's dozen. Today, one extra - fourteen free things:
If you’re looking for nostalgia, take a look at the Life of Brian script – which doesn’t start with the question you think.
I was talking to a teacher at the weekend, and when he heard that I worked for Microsoft in the Education team, he asked “What has Microsoft got to do with education?”. Well, that set us up for a long conversation.
It also left me wondering – how many other people in education don’t know how involved we are with the education system? Do they just see Microsoft as ‘the Windows and Office people’.
So, in no particular order, here’s a quick baker's dozen things that we have been doing, all related to learning
A couple of weeks ago, Becta were reported as saying that pupils’ learning would be harmed if Office didn’t support Open Document Format (ODF). So hopefully they’ll be smiling this morning, now that we’ve announced that Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will provide native support for ODF.
Now, don’t get me started on whether I agree with Becta’s statement about pupils’ learning , because I don’t really think that students have as much difficulty with software as we adults do! But back onto the subject…
You can already save files from Office 2007 in 20 different formats – of which, my favourite three are:
There’s already a convertor to convert files between Open XML and ODF – we’ve worked with the SourceForge.net community to make this available. And a free plug-in for Office 2007 which adds the “Save as PDF” option to the menu.
What’s been announced today is that the Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will have native support for Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, PDF & XML Paper Specifications (XPS), when it is released in the first half of 2009.
This is all part of working more closely with the interoperability groups who are working on interoperability between document file formats – like the DAISY format for accessible publishing (DAISY blog post)– and with organisations like the Interop Vendor Alliance (website).
I guess you’re asking yourself what this means for you and your school? Well, if you’re keen to use ODF, you’ll get a menu item next year that will add “Save as ODF” (and until then you can use the other ways above). So if your students don’t have MS Office at home, they can read the files with another application - but as Open Office & Google Apps already support .doc format, you’ll probably not need it in many circumstances.
Of course, if your students don’t have Office at home, then perhaps you might want to let them know about our education partners (Software4Students, RM and Pugh), that offer discounted prices specifically for students, which brings the cost of Office 2007 down to under £36.
There’s more detail of this announcement on our PressPass site
Today was ‘SharePoint Partner day’ at our offices – we invited 21 different SharePoint partners to present to about 100 schools – which meant a whirlwind of presentations. In all, there are now 95 educational software applications which have been integrated into SharePoint and the Microsoft Learning Gateway, so we had a lot to cover!
21 partners x 12 minutes each= a lot of PowerPoint
I don’t know what I’d done to deserve it, but Mark asked me to kick off the day with my “New World of Learning” presentation, which talks about some of the changes in the workplace, the world of technology, and students’ lives. And he gave me bonus time – I got a massive 20 minutes to do the whole story!
Here’s the slides I used, and just below the link to the video. (
I’ll see how many of the 21 partner presentations I can get, to share here too)
Finally, you can download the excellent video of the US students below. The version I used is an edited version of the original, which I'd twinned up with KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I see". The download below is sound-track-less, so it's time to hone your Movie Maker skills!
The video is from the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University, and the full video is on their web site. If you liked it, the other video they produced which I'd recommend is their (more technical) Web 2.0 video "The Machine is Us/ing us".
As part of the Partners in Learning programme, we develop training and curriculum materials for teachers, which are then made available free of charge. It includes a range of professional development resources, curriculum and learning materials designed to support teachers in developing further skills, from ICT and using ICT in the delivery of their lessons to investigating new approaches to teaching and learning.
Some of the materials available include:
Materials for ICT teachers , such as materials to create a student-run IT Hep Desk, a network course for KS4 and ‘Code Rules’ to support computer programming.
Materials for teachers using ICT in other curriculum areas, including the “101 Ideas for Teachers”, Know IT All for e-safety, and the resources from the Hampshire/TDA Cross Curricular ICT project.
Michael Fullan’s “Leading Change" for managers and school leaders
You can find it all on our Curriculum section on the UK Education website
A while ago Mark wrote on this blog about the work that Microsoft were doing to develop a DAISY XML translator. The DAISY Consortium was set up to help those with visual impairment (or ‘print disabilities’) to access digital content easily, and enhance their use of the materials. We’ve been working with DAISY to develop a Word plug-in which allows Open XML documents to be translated into DAISY XML, which has become a globally accepted standard for digital talking books – for example, it’s used by the RNIB’s Talking Book Service.
DAISY stands for Digital Accessible Information System, which lets you work with digital content in many ways, synchronising audio with display output, generating braille versions, or allowing text to speech conversion.
The free Word Add-In has now been released, and adds a “Save as DAISY XML” option to the Word menu. The convertor is released as an open source project, and can be downloaded from the Open XML Community site. The beauty of this software is that it makes a specialist facility available within the core of Office – offering a broader reach for solutions that help visually impaired learners. It makes it easier for all staff in a school to be able to prepare materials in a way that could be used by all learners.
The Save as Daisy XML function works with Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP
A few years ago, you couldn’t go to an education conference without hearing all about learning styles (Auditory, Visual, Tactual, Kinesthetic & Verbal). Now it’s as though it never happened – conferences are talking about personalisation, policy and Every Child Matters. Even though it’s no longer trendy, there are plenty of people still working on improving learner engagement in education through developing a better understanding of the influence of learning styles, and how they can be exploited.
If you’re interested in learning styles, it is definitely worth a read – with some excellent background on learning styles (based on the Dunn and Dunn model) , along with an analysis of how tools in Office can help a student. It also refers to www.learningstyles.net, where you can take a personal Learning Style assessment
I learnt something about my own learning style (and why I learn in that way) from the booklet. For example
Some people learn best when they have new and difficult information presented to them step by step in a logical sequence; they are called analytics. Others (most people) learn best when they have new and difficult information presented in large chunks on the basis of which they can then investigate the details themselves; they are called globals. Finally, there is a group of people, called the integrated, who do not prefer one way rather than the other; they can approach new and difficult information both analytically and globally.
I’m clearly a ‘global’ – I really like investigating and coming to my own conclusion, because then I feel more of an investment in the result. As I continued through the guide, it made even more sense.
You can download the booklet from here
We seem to be busy at the moment, getting our customer case studies published on Microsoft’s worldwide case study website. This is partly a reflection of the fact that UK schools seem to be leading the world in their adoption of ICT to support learning (Of course, each country thinks they’re doing better than the rest, but we really are! Shh, don’t tell the rest of the world, we might offend their sensibilities. From what I hear, Australia’s running us a close second)
Anyway, back to a small village primary school in Devon… I wrote about them earlier in the year, but now their case study has been published on the worldwide site, they merit another mention. This case study is all about their use of ICT to enhance learning, and focuses on how they have used some of our products to encourage pupils to work collaboratively. By sharing work and ideas through a portal site, pupils are involved in many kinds of innovative initiatives, including using videoconferencing to work on projects with pupils from a school in Holland.
Jonathan Bishop, the Deputy Head at the school, knows that technology is an end to a means. When talking about their choice of Windows Vista, he said:
It is important to place an operating system within the context of what we want to achieve. The extra features and media-focused environment give us a better experience and more learning opportunities.
You can read more about it on the main worldwide case studies website
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, and to and from parents.
They gave all parents their own email account too, to be able to email staff, and put in place a simple set of rules to define who could email whom. And by mixing users with Outlook, and Outlook Web Access, they could provide anytime, anywhere access. As Steve Banyard, who’s the school’s Network Manager put it:
We wanted a system we could manage ourselves and that everyone could use with confidence. Above all, we wanted to manage user access to ensure that e-mail was there to support teachers and students, and that there was no risk of the system being abused.
There’s a green bonus too – the school is now using less paper because documents are accessed online. Their previous printed newsletter that used to go to 800 parents each term is now e-mailed to everybody.
You can read their whole story on the Microsoft case studies website
If you're an ICT teacher, you'll be familiar with the following scenario.
Watching a video this week, which we'd made with Cambridge University on their use of SQL Server, made me realise these resources could be useful for schools in a completely different context.
If you're teaching about relational databases, this video would help to illustrate how the 'relational' bit is going further - in this case, to relate century's old data to modern mapping data.
Find out some more about the project in this earlier blog post. Video: Microsoft Cambridge University SQL Server 2008 A higher quality version of this video is on the right hand side of this web page
Find out some more about the project in this earlier blog post.
Video: Microsoft Cambridge University SQL Server 2008
A higher quality version of this video is on the right hand side of this web page
Which got me thinking...is there a way for you to find some of our other videos? I’ve tried looking, but can’t find one. I’ll keep looking though. Perhaps you can suggest some?