Microsoft UK Schools News Blog

Licensing parents for SharePoint – what’s free and what isn’t

I got a question from Mike Herrity yesterday, asking me about the ways that parents can be given access to SharePoint/Learning Gateway, and explicitly whether they needed their own SharePoint licences.

As an aside: Mike Herrity is a deputy head at Twynham School down in Dorset, and is a great SharePoint user. And what I like about Mike is that he’s a prolific sharer – both his SharePoint in Education blog, and his new Netbooks in Education blog are required reading if you’d like to get ideas about what you can do in the future to support your school to build a connected learning community. Mike’s also one of the people I follow from my Twitter account

So back to the question:

“Do I need extra licences for parents to login to SharePoint for online reporting?”

“No”

Obviously, because it’s a licensing question, there’s a bit more to it, but hopefully easy to understand:

If your students are licensed for your Learning Gateway/SharePoint - eg you have bought Client Access Licences (CALs) - then we automatically extend the rights to their parents too (and the parents will normally have their own logon).

You won’t be surprised to learn that we have a document called “Licensing – Parental Access” that lays all of this out (but perhaps not quite as clearly as above!), and an additional document which you can download to keep with your licensing records:

• Parent/Guardian CAL Grant Letter
  For customers who buy CALs on Select, Open or School Agreement
  

Additionally, if you have a School Agreement and have licensed all your students and all of your staff with CALs, then you can also automatically be granted rights for prospective students, alumni & students/staff at collaborating academic or government institutions.

• External Connector Grant Letter
  All you need to do is to download this and put it in your licensing file.

Engaging Parents – Does your school have a good story to tell?

Last year, we worked with four schools across England to create a series of videos and case studies that described how these schools tackled nine different areas of school reform, such as change management, student experience, learning outcomes, use of ICT, and so forth. And we then made these materials available on our Innovative Schools website.

In addition to being seen by thousands of teachers and leaders in schools across the world, Jim Knight (who was Minister for Schools at that point) used three of the videos to open the BETT Show in January, and the schools also received a letter from him thanking them for their participation in the project. They are featured on Microsoft’s worldwide Innovative Schools Web site, and are shown to education audiences all over the world. The schools have since received visits from Microsoft executives from the US, government officials, teachers and school leaders from many other countries.

Now we’re in the process of launching a new project with the DCSF to showcase schools who are using technology in innovative ways to engage parents in their children’s learning. As a part of this project, we will be creating a new set of video case studies and supporting materials with a new set of example schools. We are in the process of selecting these schools right now, and rather than go to the same schools we work with all the time, we thought we’d ask you – What is YOUR school doing?

If you think your school is doing creative things using ICT to better involve parents, let us know. Email Kristen Weatherby (who leads our Partners in Learning programme) to let her know what you’re doing. At this stage she won’t need tons of details, just an overview of how you’re engaging parents to support their children’s learning. I know some of the gaps that the research shows up include:

• How do you ensure that parents understand what you’re saying to them?
• How do you get them engaged with their own children’s learning at home?
• Can you be sure learning continues outside the school gates?
• What’s the role of technology in supporting that?

Microsoft licensing for schools – a new option appears from the crowd

A year ago we started conversations with OGC and Becta to refresh our licensing schemes, with a goal of adding in some more flexibility for individual customers, and responding to changes in the way that all public sector organisations use ICT. With OGC (now known as Buying Solutions) we looked at the whole of public sector excluding education. And with Becta we looked solely at education.

Across the rest of the public sector that resulted in the new Public Sector Agreement (or PSA09) which introduces more flexibility over the choice of product packages and subscription arrangements – matching up with the Chancellor’s statements in the budget that public sector organisations should review carefully the need to own assets. And Angela Eagles, the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury ‘praised’ the new agreement as it could save £75m over the next five years.

This new agreement will contribute to the Government’s efficiency targets in support of its Operational Efficiency Programme, and clearly demonstrates the huge benefits that can be achieved through collaborative procurement.

Now it’s the turn of education

Today, we’ve announced the outcome of our discussions with Becta, and are launching a pilot programme for a new licensing option, specifically for UK schools.

It’s a bit of a mouthful, as it is called the ‘Subscription Enrolment for Schools – UK Pilot’, so let’s call it SESP for now! It gives you a mid-way option between the Select Agreement and the School Agreement. Here’s the simple bullet points for SESP:

• It’s a subscription agreement - you pay an annual subscription, based on what you choose to license
• You can choose to either license some/all of your students, or some/all of your computers
• If you choose to license by students, you also get the rights for those students to use the same software at home free (eg if you license Office 2007, then every student can also install it on their home computer too)
• When we release new software versions, you’re automatically covered to use them (think Windows 7 & Office 2010!)
• Because it is a subscription, you’re only renting the software. So if you cancel your subscription, you have to stop using the software (or convert the licences to perpetual licences by doing something called a ‘buy-out’)

When is it likely to be helpful?

There are some clear scenarios when this could be helpful to you in a school, for example:

• If you have previously bought Select licences, and you want to upgrade some of your software (to either move towards subscription, or reduce your up-front cost). For example, you decide that to meet the Information Security guidelines from Becta, you want to install Windows 7 to get BitLocker and BitLocker To Go – to encrypt all of your laptop disks and USB memory keys.
  You can use SESP to get upgrade just your teachers’ licences
  
• You have a current School Agreement covering all of your computers, but 20% of them don’t use Office.
  You can ‘downgrade’ to SESP to only license those that do use Office. But don’t forget you’ll need to make sure the other computers have the right perpetual Windows upgrade (eg Windows Business) to run on your school network.
  
• You want to allow students to bring in their own laptops, but want to have the same software on them that are on your school computers, eg Windows Business to connect to the network, and Office 2007
  With the student option, you are licensed for the computer the student uses, whether you own it or they do, and whether it is at home or school.
  
• Your IT technician is bored, and wants more paperwork to deal with.
  Only joking…a bit. If you have a current School Agreement, all you have to do today is count all your computers, once a year. With SESP there will be more work to record which groups are covered under which licences, so will mean more record keeping. But that’s worth it if you want to have lots of different configurations of software packages across different machines/users.

My summary table of options

Here’s my quick summary of the three main options you now have

	Select	SESP	School Agreement
Licence Type	Perpetual	Subscription	Subscription
Payment	All-up front	Annual fee	Annual fee
How you license	One option: Buy each licence that you need, when you need it	Four options: Student – count all your students OR a ‘clearly defined’ group that you want to license Computer – count all computers OR a ‘clearly defined’ group that you want to license	One option: Simply count how all your school computers, and choose what you want to license
Flexibility	Highest	Medium	Lowest
Simplicity	Medium	Lowest	Highest
Initial Cost per licence	Highest	Lower	Lowest
Ongoing cost per licence*	Nil	Same as year 1	Same as year 1
Automatic upgrade rights	No unless you also buy Software Assurance	Yes	Yes

Where to find out more

You can read more about SESP (including a comprehensive 11 page FAQ document) on the UK Education website. But the real place to find out more is the education licensing expert at your current Microsoft Education Large Account Reseller. Not only will they understand the nuances, but they can also help you with the pricing.

Licensing can be notoriously complicated, so can I also recommend a quick read of How to get the best deal on Microsoft software, which pre-dates today’s news, but is a step-by-step guide on how to select the best licence arrangement for schools. (My most important tip is ‘Don’t buy an Open licence unless without reading it first!’)

UK Pilot of new Microsoft licensing scheme for schools

We’ve introduced a new licensing scheme pilot for UK schools this morning, which introduces more flexibility, and potentially some cost savings for some of you. Here’s the summary of it:

Subscription Enrolment for Schools

The agreement option sits between our existing Select and School Agreement schemes:

• The School Agreement (which is an annual subscription) has been chosen by a minority of state schools, when it has suited their need to have a simple, comprehensive licensing programme across all of their computers, where they need to have up-to-date software across all of their computers, and provides a way to license software with a low up-front cost.
• The Select Agreement (which is a one-off perpetual licence) is chosen by the majority of state schools, as it provides complete flexibility about what can be licensed, and with no ongoing costs. With this, schools pay the entire software licence cost up front.

The new pilot, the “Subscription Enrolment for Schools – UK Pilot” (SESP), is designed to allow schools to choose a mix of subscription and perpetual licences, by allowing them to choose which computers they want to buy subscriptions for (which means they always have the latest version of Microsoft software). They can then license other computers with Select licences. It also offers options such as ‘per-user’ licensing, which provides extra benefits such as staff and/or students being licensed to use the same software at school and on their own privately-owned home computers. This offers a combination of low up-front cost and increased flexibility

There are plenty of anecdotes flying around about school budget cuts, so keep this one ready up your sleeve if you need it! You may be able to use the scheme to save money on software purchases. Although bear in mind that software represent just 5-7% of the overall cost of school ICT spend, according to Becta’s “Managing ICT costs in schools” report. If you’re a network manager, it’s worth taking a look at the report before one of the other senior managers does – you don’t want them jumping to conclusions! For example, if they infer things from seeing this chart from page 6, you’ll want to show them the first bullet in page 7 which says “The annual TCO of ICT (including hidden costs) averaged around £50,000 for project primary schools and around £270,000 for project secondary schools”. And then ask them for some more budget!

You can read a lot more about SESP on our website, and I’m nearly finished on a longer blog post which summarises all of the detail succinctly – more shortly.

Newcastle event next week - Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 networking

Jonathan Noble has also let me know that there are still plenty of spare spaces at the free event at Newcastle University next Wednesday (the 8th), which will be looking at Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 for education. And the agenda includes DirectAccess, BranchCache and XP Mode – all mentioned earlier in the week.

Find out more on Jonathan’s blog, or just sign up directly at the VBUG site

Typing in Arabic on a Qwerty keyboard – a simple free download

In my local library I often pass by the computer section, where people are sitting typing away into Hotmail in languages I don’t understand (I live in rural Oxfordshire, so much of the time I think it’s eastern European languages). And I guess they’ve become fluent in finding the key combinations to create the accents, umlauts etc. But I’d never considered that it would be possible to send an email in Arabic from a qwerty keyboard.

Microsoft Maren looks ideal for any computer where there may be a requirement for Arabic as well as Roman languages. For example, in a community access suite, or open access areas such as libraries.

Lack of access to an Arabic keyboard or lack of familiarity with one are two of the most common problems preventing Arabic users from communicating in their own language.

But the team at the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab have, and they’ve created a simple Windows extension that allows users to easily chat, search, blog, email and create documents in Arabic, by converting it on the fly from Roman characters.

It’s available as a free download from the Maren website, and there’s also a funky animation that shows how it works.

Microsoft Maren allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters (Romanized Arabic, Arabizi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic) and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script.

This download isn’t just for education institutions – you can also point students to the site if they want to download it for their home PCs.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 networking enhancements for education

I’ve just finished reading the whitepaper about networking enhancements that are included within Windows 7, which are especially powerful when combined with Windows Server 2008 R2. Although I’m not the most technical person in the team, it made sense to me, and a couple of key features jumped out at me as being particularly useful in schools:

DirectAccess for academic staff to replace VPN connections

The scenario of VPN which the whitepaper describes matches my own use of VPN.

When I’m working from home, I avoid using a VPN connection when I can, because all of my internet traffic is re-routed through it, and slows down downloads and other web access (VOIP is sometimes lower quality too). And if my machine goes into sleep mode temporarily, I have to go through all of the quarantine and security checks again when it wakes up. So I tend to ‘batch up’ the things I need to VPN for, logon, do them, and then logoff VPN again.

But as a user, it means that if I get internal SharePoint links in email, I can’t click straight through. And I can’t quickly update my own SharePoint wiki etc. (And, similarly, the IT support team can’t automatically deploy critical updates or Group Policy changes until I next VPN in). I’m guessing that you have the same situation on campus.

With Windows 7, the inclusion of DirectAccess means that teachers can have the same experience (and access) when they work at home (or from another remote location, like a wireless hotspot) as they would when they’re in school. So they can access your internal SharePoint, other intranet sites and any internal applications and data remotely. But it doesn’t re-route their general Internet traffic, so they still have full-speed web access. Unless you decide to change that too – which might be the case if you use the same methodology for laptops that you let students take home. For example, you could use this same technology to insist that all school-owned devices go through the school firewall and filters for all Internet access, even when used at home.

There’s a lot of technical details (and acronyms like IPv6, IPsec and 56-bit key encryption) on page 5-6 of the whitepaper

Better synchronisation for offline files and slow connections

Windows 7 adds enhanced support for synchronising files between your own PC and a network share – with more sensitivity to bandwidth for broadband and WAN connections, and invisible background synchronisation of offline files. This will be particularly useful where staff keep master files on their local machine (like their curriculum delivery plan) but you want to protect them from losing it all by ensuring it is synchronised to a network connection.

Well, the alternative is to implant the I-must-make-a-backup-every-day chip in your colleagues!

Better support for saving money on electricity

With the wider use of wireless and laptop trolleys around schools, you’ll be pleased to hear that Wake On Lan has been extended to wireless too – allowing you to use a more aggressive power-saving profile on your laptops and desktops, without compromising your ability to manage them.

Don’t underestimate how much money this could save you. PC Pro put the potential power savings at nearly £50 a computer if you switch from Windows default power settings to the most energy efficient. With an estimated 1/2 million university-owned computers across campuses, that’s a big bundle of money. (I know that you don’t pay the power bills from the IT budget, but perhaps there’s an opportunity to get some contribution from the facilities teams to support the changes!)

Have a read of the whitepaper – there’s a lot of straightforward and clear advice

And bonus materials…

As a bonus, there are more detailed technical documents on DirectAccess which are also useful:

• DirectAccess Technical Overview
  Covers the functional and architectural aspects of DirectAccess, a technology introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to enable mobile workers to seamlessly connect to enterprise network resources when connected to the Internet.
  
• Next Generation Remote Access with DirectAccess and VPNs
  Compares DirectAccess with VPNs and describes the scenarios that are most appropriate for each.
  
• Using DirectAccess to provide secure access to corporate resources from anywhere
  Case Study: Although broadband services and Wi-Fi have dramatically improved, the connectivity experience for remote corporate users remains largely unchanged. Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) is adopting the DirectAccess feature in Windows® 7 and in Windows Server® 2008 R2 to enable employees to gain seamless remote access to corporate applications and data. The solution, which only requires Internet connectivity and credentials, significantly improves productivity and can be an important cost-saving mechanism.
  
• DirectAccess Early Adopter’s Guide
  This guide introduces DirectAccess concepts, defines new terms, explains requirements for installation, discusses how to design DirectAccess architecture, and then steps you through installation and deployment.
  
• Direct Access Step-by-Step Guide
  Step By Step Guide: Demonstrate DirectAccess in a Test Lab

Free Windows 7 Release Candidate download will end shortly

This isn’t specific to schools, but as it hasn’t got much coverage worldwide, I thought it worth a mention. If you’re thinking of experimenting with Windows 7 in the summer holidays – eg testing some of your old educational software using the XP compatibility mode – then you may want to know that the free download of the Windows 7 Release Candidate will end on 15th August.

The Release Candidate (RC) is our last public release before Windows 7 is finalised and actually released as a full product. The RC version is free to use until Spring next year, and although the download won’t be available after 15th August, you can run it right up until March 2010 without interruptions.

Visit the download site to get a copy and a licence key

It’s handy if you want to install a copy for:

• Testing software compatibility
• Seeing whether it runs on old cronky hardware (see this if you want an idea)
• Running on one of your non-mission-critical computers whilst waiting for the final release

Free classroom posters for Office 2007 to brighten up the IT suite

It’s now less than 3 weeks until the end of term for most schools, and I know that your thoughts will be turning to summer projects (unless you’re a teacher, in which case you are probably thinking about the blessed relief after 3 o’clock on the last day of term)

In case you’ve got any IT suite work going on, or even if you just want to get on the right side of a teacher, you may be interested to know we have just one hundred of our big Office 2007 free classroom poster sets left. If you’d like a set just email James directly, and he will get them in the post straight away.

He has a pile of poster tubes, read to go, containing 8 of these posters (2 of each for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook).

If you’d like to get a set, just email James with your name, school name and address.

(If you just can’t wait, and you want to download the PDFs, then click here to get them from my SkyDrive)

Schools wasting money on ICT – phew, not true

The Guardian today wrote an article about school funding, which was prompted by a new Audit Commission report ‘Valuable lessons’. The message was that “hundreds of millions of pounds are being wasted”.

I was a bit alarmed to see that amongst the savings, they were quoted as saying that there’s a potential £110M to be saved from ICT budgets:

That shocked me – because that implies that over 15% of the ICT budget is mis-spent.

Fortunately, when I went to the original Audit Commission report, I discovered that three small letters had been left out of the Guardian report. They were N, O and N. ie the Audit Commission said schools could save £110M from non-ICT budgets.

So, having got over that heart attack moment, I then started to look through the report to see what it did say about ICT spending in schools.

Firstly, I looked in the summary for head teachers, which mentions ICT just twice :

Regular reviews of high-cost goods and services, such as administration and ICT, will reveal whether they are meeting the school’s aims and objectives, and whether services are meeting the performance levels expected. The reviews will also help the school with decisions about future suppliers. Different options for service provision can be considered and your school’s governing body has an important role

…schools can improve economy and efficiency by ensuring that they have considered…the deployment on non-education staff. In one example, a school employed a full-time ICT technician and generated income from this by contracting with other schools.

With a third reference to the Becta Best Value guidance for procurement information

So then I looked at the main report…

There are a pair of charts, showing growth in expenditure over the last 4 years – which shows that in both primary and secondary schools, ‘ICT Learning Resources’ has been one of the areas of spend with lowest growth, and with a small group of overall spend.

And then a single sentence about the fact that only half of schools review their ICT investment in relation to improving learning and raising standards (Para 75) and finally a plug for using e-procurement to purchase (not just ICT, but lots of things. However, they noted that they have not analysed whether it is more cost-effective).

It appears that the Audit Commission don’t see ICT as a major opportunity to achieve more efficiency and effectiveness, compared to catering, cleaning and caretaking, and non-ICT learning resources. And they applaud the schools that are showing entrepreneurial spirit by things such as sharing ICT technicians across schools. Which is nice to know if you’re a network manager in a school, and you’ve got a BSF steamroller heading your way! Download the report and send it to your head (appropriately highlighted!)

Good Blogging Guide – Part Six – When things go wrong

Hopefully this is the chapter you’ll never need. So I’ll make it short!

Imagine the scenario.

You have been blogging for a while, and you have the support and encouragement of other people in your school/local authority. Things are looking good. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the common things is that somebody somewhere says something inappropriate online, and then somebody in your school comes along and says “Well, you’re an expert in the Internet, can you fix it?”. It could be something like a comment on a YouTube video, or Facebook, or even a comment on your blog. Or somebody else writes a blog post referring to yours, and saying what a half-wit you are.

What do you do?

Fortunately, official help is at hand. Instead of having to spend hours/days/weeks explaining to your head teacher why you can’t block YouTube/Facebook across the whole country – or having to defend your blogging - then how about using this flow chart from the US Air Force?

It deals with the steps in responding (or not) to a negative blog posting about them. I have found also that it is incredibly useful to use when talking to people who don’t yet fully understand the implications of social media, and the community habits. After all, if an organisation as big and hierarchical as USAF can deal with online communities with a simple flow chart, then it makes an effective point.

It starts with “Has someone discovered a blog post about your organisation?” and walks through scenarios of people, which it refers to as:

• Trolls
• Rager
• Misguided
• Unhappy Customer

It then provides common sense advice for dealing with each situation. As a set of rules of engagement, it’s simple to understand and clear to work through.

The diagram is self explanatory – and ideal to share with colleagues. You can download a PDF of the Air Force Blog Assessment.

If you’re interested in reading more about the USAF’s social media interactions, then read WebInkNow’s article about it, or take a look at the US Air Force Live blog

Good Blogging Guide – Part Five – No lawyers please

This isn’t a reference to litigation, or any of the legalities of blogging (for things of that flavour, read Friday’s post on a blogging code of practice). Nope, this is about writing style. It’s about being clear and simple.

The title ‘No Lawyers Please’ comes from people I’ve worked with in the past, who seem to be completely normal people until they put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. Suddenly, their whole character changes. Whereas they speak like anybody else, they write as though they are Charles Dickens or a High Court judge. They have perhaps been taught by somebody who believed that unless a word had 15 syllables, it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

I would have been fairer if I’d called this ‘No educational policymakers please’, because I’ve noticed that there’s definitely a pattern to announce new policies in a way that befuddles with language. And looking in the mirror, perhaps ‘No technologists please’, because we’re also guilty of using language which is hard to work out and full of acronyms.

The key to remember when you blog is that most people look at it on their screen, and will scan it quite quickly before they move on to another thing. So you have to grab them quickly, and not put them off too soon.

My quick rules for this are:

• Be as personable as you possibly can (often a challenge for me!)
• Write the way you speak
• Don’t use language to make you look smart
• Drop the superlatives if they’re not deserved
• If it’s confidential don’t write it down

Be as personable as you possibly can

Well, I know that this can be tricky. How much of your life and self do you want to talk about? How many people are interested? I think we all make our own decisions on this, but I’d say that if you think about your reader, you shouldn’t go wrong. For example, if I write about my children, it is within the context of the story that I am telling.

• When my eldest daughter got told by her teacher that the video she had produced for the World War II timeline homework had to be redone as photos stuck to cardboard so it could be ‘assessed properly’, I thought that was relevant to my blog in context
• When my youngest came home from school having spent her Science lesson counting Tesco vouchers, I didn’t rush to my blog to wail about it.

Get the line right and you’ll hopefully write a good read and come across as a person not just a literary genius. Get it wrong, and you could be blogging into a vacuum.

Honesty here: I have no idea if I get it right or wrong, but sometimes when I’ve wandered too far either way, I’ve had comments, but often I get people talking to me about something I’ve written in a positive or constructive way, which I take as being good feedback.

Write the way you speak (and don’t use language to make you look smart)

Just use the same language. The web has a very short time span in which to grab your readers, and hold them. Shorter words and simpler sentences help. This rule doesn’t apply in every situation – but if you think your readers are coming through, on their way somewhere else, then the easier it is to understand what you’re saying, the more likely they’ll stick around or come back.

There are some tools you can use to help with this. The easiest one is the SMOG (simplified measure of gobbledygook) test, which gives you a rating for your readability. You simply paste in your text, and then it will calculate the SMOG level. And you can use that to work out if what you’ve written will be understood by your reader.

It isn’t foolproof, but it is a handy and simple test.

NIACE have a online SMOG calculator, which is straightforward. Basically, the lower your SMOG score, the more readable things are. They also publish a great readability booklet called “How to produce clear written materials for a range of readers” which covers much more than writing style.

For general guidance, here are some typical SMOG levels (generally, the lower the number, the easier it is to read):

• The Sun - 14
• The Daily Express - 16
• The Telegraph and The Guardian - 17+

I did a couple of quick tests on some materials. I thought I’d point the finger at myself first, by testing the other posts in this series:

• Good Blogging Guide Part One – 18
• Good Blogging Guide Part Two – 15
• Good Blogging Guide Part Three– 15
• Good Blogging Guide Part Four– 17
• Good Blogging Guide Part Five – 16 (that’s this one)

I’m not unhappy with 15-17, that’s about write for a writing to people in education (degree-level) but if I was writing for a very wide audience, I’d like to aim for 14-15. And considering the booklet on Readability scores 17, then I guess it’s okay)

And to make my point about educational policy language:

• Becta website on Information Management in schools – 24
• Becta website on Data Handling in schools – 22
• DCSF ‘Protection of Children’ - 21

And finally, the way to tell if you’re using language to make yourself look smart? Personally, if I have to ask somebody a spelling then I know I’m using a word I don’t normally use…

Drop the superlatives if they are not deserved

I remember when I first joined Microsoft, after 20+ years of working within British companies, I found it a little odd that colleagues would declare things awesome or super-exciting. Especially when coming from a workplace where good was counted as high praise. Over time, I’ve adjusted, and have even gone so far as to describe one thing as cool (but my daughter stopped that straight away).

Worldwide research has shown that the UK education audience don’t really like unjustified superlatives. So if something is good, then say it’s good, not amazing.

Of course, if something is brilliant, then say so. But if you call everything brilliant, you’re probably going to lose readers faster than gaining them.

And don’t get me started on people who use too many exclamation marks in emails! And people who use three!!! At the end of every sentence!!! Doesn’t it make you cry???

If it’s confidential don’t write it down

No more to say on this. People who’ve broken this rule and been found out never need reminding twice. If you need it, then see Good Blogging Guide Part Four for more context.

Building a school website in SharePoint

SharePoint has become an established standard across a large number of schools, local authorities and Regional Broadband Consortia. It is the platform underneath Glow in Scotland, and many of the learning platforms in use in schools. I think one of the key reasons it because it can provide a way to integrate all of the different IT systems across the schools – from your MIS to your learning platform, as well as everyday document management.

Less people are using it to run their external website, ending up with schools with two different web systems, which results in students and staff having two different places to refer for information.

Esher College have standardised onto one technology, and are using SharePoint for their external site too – with help from Parabola Software. Although they have three portals – one for the public site, one for student and one for staff, it is possible to link information between the portals and provided the user has access rights it’s seamless.

I’d be interested in hearing about schools using SharePoint for their external website – just add a comment to the blog, and give a link to yours.

(For more inspiration, take a look at this list of Top 10 SharePoint 2007 sites, with examples from outside of education, worldwide)

Good Blogging Guide - Did I get onto the first page of Google?

On Wednesday I wrote a blog post on how to improve your blog’s position in search engines, as part of my “Good Blogging Guide” series. It was all about search engine optimisation for blogs, and gave some simple to follow strategies. My goal was to demystify Search Engine Optimisation (SE) by writing an ‘SEO in plain English’ guide.

As a throwaway idea at the end of the post, I thought I’d better try and demonstrate that it works – although I wasn’t quite sure how it would turn out. This is what I said:

Can I really prove it works?

Let’s experiment shall we...

Currently my blog doesn’t show up at all when you search for ‘seo in plain english’ or ‘search engine optimisation for blogs’  – which isn’t a surprise, because I haven’t pressed publish yet. So let’s see if anything has happened by the end of the week

Check for yourself here:

SEO in plain english (currently 163,000 results)

Search engine optimisation for blogs (currently 26,500,000 results)

So what happened?

I can’t actually believe it! Hence my over-the-top, intended-to-be-humorous, created-2-minutes ago, graphic:

By Wednesday afternoon, about an hour after publishing, the second search was already showing up on the first page of Google.

By Thursday morning, the second search was on the first page still and the first search was on Page 3

And now it is the end of the week, I just checked to see what has happened:

The first search, “SEO in plain English” is now on the Google third page, at position 3 (amended to reflect Thom's comment)

 (I’m thinking that to get above a website called “seoinplainenglish.com”
would require a miracle – although the site appears to be dead, so there’s a chance)

And the second search, “Search Engine Optimisation for blogs”, is on the Google first page too, at position 1 and 2:

And other phrases? Well, the whole series has also turned up on the first page at position 2, 2, 5 and 7 if you search for phrases like Good Blogging Guide (for which there are 2 billion pages!). It also makes it to page on of Google when searching on the tenuous phrase blogging page one of Google

It has suprised me – I hadn’t really expected to see that kind of result. I’m going back over my blog to “SEO” some other bits! After all, it was only four simple steps. (Or maybe I should go and write the book…)

* Apologies to my colleagues in the Bing team, who will be smouldering about the fact I’m talking about Google. Take a look at my original post to see why.

Are you going to the Learning Gateway conference in July?

For those who are going: I’m now writing my presentation on Information Security (where, if I mention losing USB memory sticks, I’ll be very clear to make sure I say Leicester City instead of Leicestershire, unlike this week at the SIMS Conference), and so if you’re going to be there, add a comment, drop me an email or a tweet to let me know what questions you would want answers to.

For everybody else: If you’re into SharePoint and the Learning Gateway, it’s likely to go down as the most relevant CPD event of the year. I’m sure that your head will want to find the money once they’ve realised that it can help you to help your school with hitting DCSF targets for online parental reporting and learning platforms, make staff collaboration easier and even help you plan ahead for remote possibilities like a swine flu outbreak in your area!

Full details of the Learning Gateway Conference are on my earlier blog post. It’s not a Microsoft event (Alex Pearce from Great Barr School is making this all happen!) but there are a few Microsoft people speaking, and I have been bumping into various people who are all going to be there.