You may remember a while ago I mentioned that almost 1 in 5 readers of this blog are running Windows 7.

To be honest, that’s nagged at me for a while. Because I’ve worried that it means that I’m only “preaching to the choir” – ie the readers of the blog are only the super-keen Microsoft lovers. Although some of the emails I get would prove that wrong :-)

So I thought I’d check elsewhere, and asked Chris at EduGeek what their statistics were showing. EduGeek is a big community of network managers and technicians from schools in the UK (and latterly in other countries too). His answer (after duly consulting the web logs) was 14%. Not quite matching my 19%, but considering that it is a much more diverse community, its still a surprisingly good number.

The whole table was:

You can read the EduGeek statistics on their website – and if you don’t know EduGeek already, then it’s worth considering popping onto their website more regularly.

There’s something that I don’t get in this table (and it was the same in my earlier version) – 2% are browsing the web using Windows Server 2003. Must be a statistical oddity – or there’s more going on the in the school Server Room than we all think!

Kristen and Stuart, who run our Partners in Learning programme, spend their time helping teachers to get most effective use from ICT in their classroom. They have found that one of the most effective ways to help teachers is to give them time to share experiences with other teachers, learn from innovators, and reflect on their own teaching practice. And sometimes that means getting out of school!

There are still free places available for exactly that at the Innovative Teachers Forum in Birmingham on 1st December. With a theme of “Connecting Learners, Connecting Teachers”, it promises to be a good day because some of the best there are some inspiring speakers.

In fact, I’ve just ditched three meetings from my diary and decided I’m going to go too, as I haven’t heard John Davitt speak for a year, and it’s time for top up from his inspirational jumble of ideas.

If you’ve got a favourite teacher that you’d like to move up the ICT learning curve, then let them know about it, and send them this link with the details of the day and registration. Surely somebody deserves a day out of the classroom?

Yesterday, I learnt that the Innovative Teachers Network has been nominated and reached the shortlist for the BETT Awards 2010*. Of course, this is great news, and especially for Kristen Weatherby and Stuart Ball who have spent the last two years getting the website going, and building the community of teachers on it. It has now got to a new level of maturity because of all of the classroom lesson plans that are available to download, with some excellent resources, not just from UK teachers but from others around the world.

We had no idea it had been nominated for an award so it was a surprise. Perhaps if we’d known we wouldn’t have changed its name last week to the Partners in Learning Network. Maybe we’ll be the first winner to have been nominated as one thing, and win as another!

You can find out more about it, and what it does on our Teachers blog

• Find out about registration
• Read a bit more about some of the international teachers that contribute resources to it
• Find out how to get free education licences for Kar2ouche Creative Writing, Songsmith and AutoCollage

And here’s three thoughts if you don’t actually teach yourself, and are surrounded by colleagues that do:

1. Help your closest teaching colleagues by giving them a link to the “Teaching Ideas and Resources blog” (Blog link)
2. Help all of your teaching colleagues by adding the RSS feed to your school’s learning platform or website (RSS link)
3. And for those who won’t be affected by either of the above? Persuade them to sign up for email alerts from the blog – so that every other day they’ll get a helpful email with a teaching idea (How to subscribe by email)

Dean Close School, in Cheltenham, are in the process of rolling out Windows 7 and the latest Windows Server across their school – to 500 computers owned by the school, as well as using it to more effectively manage the 500 laptops that are brought to school by pupils.

Part of the pressure for this has come from pupils themselves. As Nyall Monkton, the IT Manager at the school said:

When students started bringing their own laptops to school with pre-release versions of Windows 7 installed, we didn’t have the capacity to support them.

I often think that pressure for change in IT seems to come from two directions – from the users and from the suppliers – with IT managers in the middle between the two. And in schools, it also feels like teachers are the middle too – being pressured for faster paced change, with students pushing upwards, and the IT world pushing downwards.

The school had an existing School Agreement, and were lucky enough that their Microsoft partner, Bechtle, were on our early adopter programme for Windows 7. So they were able to jump onboard earlier than most – with their first part of their deployment in July.

You can read their story on our global case studies website

But now, the “saving money” bit.

In the case study they talk about reducing the time taking managing the network, and reducing the time that staff have to spend on administrative tasks – and improving their access to the school network from home. But they also identified a really clear cost saving, through the new DirectAccess feature in Windows:

In the future, we won’t need to maintain Citrix. This will save us £15,000 to £25,000

I’ve started to hear similar stories of cost savings – either saving money in the IT budget through using the in-built capabilities of Windows to save money on third-party applications, or saving the school significant amounts of money on the electric bill by a combination of using power saving settings in Windows 7 and through virtualising physical servers. I’m going to ask Gerald (who wrote the Windows Early Adopters paper) to interview people from some of the stories I hear – if you’ve got a story about how one of our products has saved you money, then drop me an email, and perhaps I can send Gerald in your direction.

If you’ve got a Sixth Form, you’ll want to know…

XMA and Toshiba have launched a competition, called “The next Bill Gates”. In a world of competitions and campaigns all the time, it’s a bit of a “does what it says on the tin” competition. It’s for students who’ll be applying for university next year, and students enter by recording a 60-second video answering the question “Why are you the next Bill Gates?”

The prize is £3,500 of tuition fees, a Toshiba laptop and a summer 2010 placement with XMA.

As far as I know, it has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but darn, why weren’t we quicker thinking of this idea :-)  Every year we take in about 80 interns for a full year as well as offering work experience for pupils from local schools, but hadn’t thought of offering it as the chance to become the next Bill Gates…

In parallel with Gerald’s written case studies (see Saturday’s post) in September, I also managed to get out of the office, and visit North Leamington School in Warwickshire – with a film crew in tow.

Although they’d only just opened, and they were adjusting to the new school site, they were very accommodating, and willing interview candidates!

The goal was to capture their story – of opening a brand new school in September, with a big deployment of Windows 7. You can see the result for yourself below.

It was an astonishing project to complete on time, as the Warwickshire IT team had only finally got access to be able to install the IT equipment on the 20th August, and so they had to deploy a brand new, massive network in just a couple of weeks. And make sure it was running for the new arrivals.

From watching the video, you’d have no sense of how much pressure that will have placed on the school, the staff and the IT technicians, and it definitely seemed a swan-like performance (very smooth on the surface, but I imagine lots of paddling underneath!).

Normally, I wouldn’t be aiming to get a video produced so soon after a school had opened, but we had to rush this one through so that it could be shown when Steve Ballmer came to London. It’ll be interesting to hear the student’s opinions in a few months – especially once they’ve all realised that they had Windows 7 so early, and their school really was a leap ahead.

Windows 7 became available to schools in mid-August 2009, uncomfortably close to the start of the new school year. Although there was every encouragement from Microsoft for schools taking the plunge, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that those ICT teams that grasped the nettle were displaying a fair amount of courage. The start of a school term, after all, isn’t a moveable deadline.

Whether the new operating system was installed or not, whether or not it worked, or did what was printed on the tin, the students, teachers and administrators were still going to arrive and switch on their machines expecting to do pick up where they left off before their holidays. Failure, as they say, was not an option.

These are the first two paragraphs from Gerald Haigh’s article about the experiences of the early schools using Windows 7 in the UK. After just two weeks of term time, he went out to talk to half a dozen schools for us, and record their stories. Gerald normally spends his time split between writing books for school leaders, and leadership focused articles for educational publications. But given his ability to dive straight in and ask the right questions, it made sense to ask him to talk to these early adopters.

The resulting document, which you can download from my SkyDrive, gives you a clear idea of the thoughts of those schools, and why they chose to make such an early start on Windows 7.

Take a look for yourself, and perhaps share with others in your school, to find out what happened when the following schools started term with Windows 7:

• West Hatch High School in Essex
• Lodge Park Technology College in Northamptonshire
• The Long Eaton School in Nottingham
• The Samworth Enterprise Academy in Leicester
• Twynham School in Dorset
• Broadclyst Primary School in Devon

Thanks to Gerald and the schools for their openness in doing this – what had originally seemed like it might make an interesting blog post has turned into a cracking 15 page read!

I’m sure this list is out on the web somewhere, but just in case you’ve not seen it in this easy-to-read format before, below is my list of the features of each version of Windows 7. I think this will help you to work out which one is right for your school:

• Windows 7 Home Premium is the retail version. It doesn’t allow network login (called Domain Join), so it’s unsuitable for school-based computers, and unlikely to be useful for student laptops owned by the school, unless you don’t plan to manage them or connect them up to your school network except via the web. It is also unable to run XP Mode, which might be useful for some of your older software.
  
• Windows 7 Professional is the minimum version you’ll need in-school as it has network domain join and XP Mode.
  
• Windows 7 Enterprise is the right version if you believe that you should be encrypting any laptops used by staff (this is something I believe strongly!), because it comes with BitLocker and BitLocker To Go. And in addition it also adds AppLocker – which you may want on all of your devices too.
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate is in the table below for completeness, but you are only likely to get this version if you buy it in a retail store with it pre-installed (which is an expensive way to get the functionality in Enterprise or Professional edition)

See below the table for my “How to Buy Windows 7” guide

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

How to buy Windows 7 for your school

So now you’ve worked out which version you want, you may want to know the best way to buy the right version!

Existing computers

• For any existing computers running any version of Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can buy a Windows 7 upgrade on your Select, SESP or School Agreement. If it’s basic Select, the upgrade is to Windows 7 Professional. If you have SESP or School Agreement, or buy a Select licence with the Software Assurance option, you’ll get Windows 7 Enterprise.

New computers

• For Professional edition, you can either buy a new PC with it pre-installed, or buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then add an upgrade.
  It’s worth checking the price of both options, because the second often can often be cheaper.
• For Enterprise edition, the best way is to buy a new PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then add an upgrade licence via a School Agreement, or with the Select licence plus Software Assurance (which gives you the right to keep upgrading, and adds the Enterprise features)

Here’s some links to find out more about School Agreement, SESP, Select Licences and Software Assurance. And the evergreen “How to get the best deal on Microsoft software” post

Your existing Microsoft partner will be able to give you a quote. I’ve just checked on the Pugh site*, and they quote £34 for a Select Windows 7 Professional upgrade.

* Pugh is one of our partners, but there are plenty of others. You can find them all on our website

Mike Herrity, at Twynham School, is hosting a meeting for schools who have adopted Windows 7, to allow early adopters to share their experiences, and the lessons that have been learnt over the last 5 weeks since it was released for Volume Licence customers.

Instead of having to head down to the south coast, I’ve offered to provide a meeting room here in Reading, at the Microsoft Campus, on Wednesday 7th October.

There’s space for 20 people available, so if you’d like to attend, zip over to Mike’s excellent blog, or just drop Mike an email. He’s managing the attendee list, I’m just providing the room and the free lunch!

If you have started deploying Windows 7, this is going to be a valuable day, and I am pretty sure it will save you more than a day of your time in learning from other people’s experiences.

However, if you haven’t started deploying Windows 7 yet, then Mike will be aiming to write up lessons from the day to share with others, so keep an eye on this blog later for when it’s published.

For those of you who didn’t hang around to upgrade your networks, grapple with new furniture, install audio visual equipment, or enjoy the blissful student-free corridors, welcome back.

What did you miss? Well, whilst your back was turned I managed keep on blogging at an increasing rate – and whilst not every post is worth going back to, here’s a list of the most read posts from the summer holidays:

1. What does Windows 7 run on
   A runaway winner, thanks to links from all kinds of Windows forums
2. Shift Happens UK download
   Will this ever make it’s way out of the blog hit parade?
3. Slides from the Windows 7 in Education event
   Actually, the event invite got more readers, but it’s history, so better to look at the slides
4. Do you work during your holidays?
   A look at the “Out of Office” phenomenon
5. We’re going on a Quango Hunt
   Making light of the CPS report, and giving you a poll to quash a quango
6. Where are all the freebies now the budget’s cut
   An update on where to find Microsoft’s free stuff
7. How fast can Windows 7 go?
   Only posted yesterday, but already in the top posts list

If you want to read the rest, you’ll have to look for them yourself – just click on the “+” sign next to “Archives” in the left hand bar, and you can see them all. I’ve just noticed a wrote 32 this summer.

But my favourite (to write) wasn’t in the Top 10. It was actually “A week in Atlanta – Technology, Cheese and Soda” – about a visit to the World of Coke. I suspect that it’s not in the Top 10 because most people have more sense!