Microsoft UK Schools

Today is Safer Internet Day

If you switched on the radio this morning, you’ll have heard Jim Gamble from CEOP, and know that it’s European Safer Internet Day today. As I mentioned in my post a couple of weeks ago, we have been supporting schools, parents and young people in a variety of different ways. Today, we have lots of our staff, who are CEOP-trained volunteers, working in schools talking about Internet safety and helping parents and young people to protect stay safe online. In fact, I learnt earlier that it’s 100 people out and about today.

* CEOP is the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is part of the UK police force. You can read about their work and background here

In the UK, the place to look for resources is the ThinkuKnow website, which is run by CEOP. There is a special minisite for the Safer Internet Day, and it links to specific resources for lessons, assemblies and parents meetings. On their site, they’ve got a range of ideas of what your school could do.

They’ve also announced a CEOP specific version of Internet Explorer 8 that has a ‘Click CEOP’ button on the toolbar for instant access to Internet safety information for children and parents. (If you’re already using Internet Explorer 8, then you can add it to your existing toolbar).

The Click CEOP button brings up a specific menu, that helps young people to learn about staying safer online, provides links to activities, and also where appropriate links them straight through to the CEOP team. (This menu can also be installed by default on school browsers, using the download on their site).

But this isn’t just a flash-in-the-pan. Last year the UK Microsoft team directly educated 12,000 young people and 2,000 parents in online safety.  Our commitment to safeguarding young people online saw us join the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) as an executive board member.  And this year as part of the “Click Clever Click Safe” campaign UKCCIS will be launching a new digital safety code for children– “Zip It, Block It, Flag It”. 

If you want to find out about our advice to parents, or would like to contact us regarding having a volunteer from Microsoft speaking at your school, then here’s the link for more information.

Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips – 12 – Save money on upgrades

Part eleven 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 more to come after this one

If you don’t spend all of your time obsessing about licensing, then it is pretty easy to decide that it is too complicated (and I’m definitely not just referring to Microsoft licensing!). And amongst all of the licensing detail, it is sometimes a little difficult to see the wood from the trees – or to stop and take a few minutes to work out if a big change to the way you license software would be a good thing or not.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post called “How to get the best on Microsoft Software in Education”, and it has been in the Top 10 posts ever since. It just steps you through the decisions you need to take one by one.

So here’s one key element of it, which is absolutely critical, and especially worth reviewing in the months coming up to a major product release.

Subscribe or buy?

There are two basic ways of buying Microsoft software. One is to buy a perpetual licence, and the other is to buy a subscription licence.

• 'Perpetual' licences are exactly what they say - you buy them, and keep the licence forever. You are only licensed for the version you have bought. So if you buy a licence for Office 2007, you can't run Office 2010 without buying another licence.

• 'Subscription' licences are where you pay to use the software for an agreed amount of time, usually a year. Of course, this costs less up-front, but may cost more over a number of years; however it does come with the automatic right to upgrade to newer versions.

For schools, the subscription licence is called a School Agreement, and basically it involves counting up all of your computers, and then you license all of them for the software you need (often that means Windows upgrades and Office).

So how does a School Agreement save money?

There’s a number of tricks to thinking about your subscription:

• If you like to upgrade to the latest versions of software as they are released, your subscription means you can do that without having to buy new licences. And these days, with technology moving so fast, the upgrade cycle is pretty much every 3 years for both Windows and Office

• If a new release is due shortly (as in the case of Office 2010) a subscription automatically covers you for it. If you buy a perpetual licence for Office 2007 now, you aren’t entitled to upgrade to Office 2010 without buying a new perpetual licence.

• The School Agreement is based on you counting your computers once a year. If you count them all in March, and then add 100 new computers in April, they are automatically covered without you having to pay more in that year’s subscription. You only have to start paying for them from the next year’s count.

• The annual cost of a subscription is lower than the up-front cost of a perpetual licence. Which means that if you’re budget is being squeezed, you can help reduce this year’s cost, at the same time making next year’s cost predictable.

Let’s say you’re just about to open a new BSF school in March, and you’re going to use this year’s budget to buy 200 Office 2007 Professional Plus licences. You’ll pay about £37 each for the licences under the perpetual Select scheme (Source: Pugh). And if you want to upgrade to Office 2010 in September, you’ll need to buy new licences – which may be another £37 each.

Alternatively, if you’re covering all your computers with a School Agreement, then you’ll pay about £14 each for the licences on subscription (Source: Pugh). And the subscription includes the upgrade to Office 2010. Now, because it’s a subscription, next year, you’ll pay again to continue it. But you can perhaps see that if you’re a frequent upgrader, or there are new versions due, it saves you money if you buy using a subscription agreement.

Over 3 years, you’d pay £42 for Office 2007/2010 Enterprise on a subscription licence (eg School Agreement), or £74 for Office 2007/2010 Professional Plus on a perpetual licence (eg Select Licence)

The other thing about the subscription schemes is that you automatically receive the Enterprise versions of the software – in the case of Office, that means you get OneNote and Groove (See table). Or in the case of Windows 7, you get the Enterprise version that includes BitLocker Drive Encryption, AppLocker, Windows XP mode and a pile of other things (See table)

To find out if it will save you money, then you should either give your Microsoft Education partner a call (just like I did for the pricing quoted above!), or read more about our licensing on our UK Education website

Ready-made IT user documentation

When I started working at Microsoft, I hadn’t been in such an open, technology rich culture before. And with so many IT systems around, and so many different software resources, my head was buzzing. In fact, I remember that at the end of the first week, the number of links in my Favourites was massive – just to internal websites.

I’d never used internet telephony, encryption, instant messaging, live meeting, SharePoint or Groove before, so I was all at sea until I could play around and work out how they were supposed to operate. Meanwhile, people who’d been at Microsoft for a while were metaphorically whizzing past me, as they collaborated, shared, published and distributed information. Whilst I was trying to work out how to answer my desk phone.

One of the godsends for me was a set of documents called Work Smart Guides, which walked me through the basics of some of the new technology I was encountering.

As our IT team describe it, Work Smart Guides bridge the gap between technology and users. Work Smart guides provide employees with scenario-based, best-use productivity aids on Microsoft products and technologies.

We produce them because we expect to see more consistent, productive, and cost-effective use of products and technologies across the company – which helps the business ROI on IT investments, as well as helping people to understand the benefit the IT team deliver to users.

Ready-made IT guides

I found out today that we have also published them for customers to modify and use. This seems a great step – because I’m guessing that lots of schools are either producing user documentation for staff, or want to. And I bet that 80-90% of the content of some of them is identical. So these guides would make a good starter for 10, either for the format, or the instructions, or simply the screenshots. As an example, here’s the Email Basics one.

The subjects covered in the step-by-step guides for users include:

• Environmental sustainability (hints like using Balanced power settings on your laptop)
• Protecting data with BitLocker
• Getting started with email
• Transfer files and settings to a new computer
• Collaborating with SharePoint
• An overview of collaboration tools
• Customising SharePoint sites
• Integrating Outlook with SharePoint
• Basics of managing email (Are you a stacker or a filer?)
• Office tips
• Outlook email signatures
• New features for users in Windows 7

Download the Work Smart Guides

You can download the customisable versions of Work Smart materials from TechNet. There are 23 of them, and they come in one big Zip file for you to play with.

Bonus: You should also be looking at the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder, described by Long Zheng as a miracle tool. It does what it says on the tin, and the best bit is that the document it creates is brilliant for creating user guides, with screen shots and step-by-step instructions. Just stick “problem steps” into the search box of your Windows 7 Start menu. It would be fantastic when you’ve got to start from scratch, and especially for curriculum materials and lesson plans.

Get off Facebook, Dad, I need to finish my homework

At BETT we issued a press release on parental views towards ICT, at home and at school. This was suppored by research done during December 2009 and surveyed 500 parents of secondary-school age children, so it is recent, and it will be representative.

I’ve held back on publishing it on the blog, until the BBC covered it - you can read their story “More studying on home computers” here

There seems to be a common misconception that children only use their computers at home to play games or connect to social networks. However, the research seems to suggest that instead the connection gap between the home PC and schoolwork comes not from students but from the parents who are using home PCs for social networking and uploading photos and videos. The culture of learning is changing and parents need to keep up and I can imagine across the country children are saying, ‘‘Get off Facebook, Dad, I need to finish my homework!”.

I think that due to the way that children are using PCs, there is an increasing blurring between learning-time and leisure-time and so computers in the home are becoming as important as those in the classroom.

The way that students are consuming information and engaging with each other and their teachers is constantly changing, as is the way that they learn and are motivated. There is a need for parents as well as teachers to adapt to this changing behaviour through the use of technology and programmes like Home Access. Getting parents on board, with the right skill-set to support and engage with their children effectively at home, is essential. It was good to see that two-thirds of parents felt they needed to improve their ICT skills to keep up with their children.

Here’s the start of the news release, and below I’ve put a copy of a summary of the key findings, some of which may be useful for you in conversations in school – as well as with parents!

	Parental attitudes towards home PCs as a learning tool will enhance the success of the Home Access Programme LONDON – 13 January 2010 – Microsoft has today released the findings of a recently-commissioned survey that highlights the importance of parental engagement alongside getting PCs into the hands of children that currently do not have computers at home. The study explored the attitudes of parents of secondary school age children (11-18 year olds) across the UK and revealed that making IT in education a success is more than just about access to the right technology. In order for children to truly benefit, there must be parental understanding of PCs as a learning resource as well as effective parental engagement. 512 parents participated in the research, conducted in December 2009 and released today. The study shows that 9 of 10 children use their home computers at least once a week for educational reasons – the same percentage as those who use a school computer for study during the same period of time. The survey also found that 4 out of 10 children use their home computers for study every day, which is more than the 3 out of 10 who use computers daily at school.

Headline findings

• The view among parents is that computers provide a key learning resource, although the lack of availability and quality of computers in the school setting poses some questions.
• Parents are heavy computer users, with a majority describing using a computer as one of their favourite activities.
• It is clear, however, that parents have certain concerns about IT and feel that it is their responsibility of the parent to learn about technology.
• Fathers appear more concerned about IT and how it impacts on their children and consequent parental relationship

IT as learning tool

• While we are all aware that to younger generations computers are hugely important, the survey illustrates the extent of computer use not simply as recreational tool for gaming or networking but as a genuine educational resource.
  • 11-18 year-olds are clearly hugely enthusiastic about their computers: for 71% it is among their favourite activities and almost all (94%) enjoy using them.
  • The big surprise is the number of children using their home computers for study. 90% use their home computer for study at least once a week: the same percentage as those who use a school computer for study. 37% use their home computer daily for study (against 30% at school).
  • 97% of parents believe computers have at least some value for their child’s learning, with 39% describing them as ‘crucial’.
  • The home computer is highly valued: 82% of parents think that their child’s computer at home is better than the one at school.
  • Almost a third of parents worry that their does not get enough access to computers at school. 27% think their child’s learning is being ‘hindered’ by their school’s poor IT resources.

Parents and their computers

• Some of the enthusiasm for IT demonstrated among kids is likely to rub off on their parents. We found that a majority for parents are as keen, if not more, than their children on computers, and use them for a wide range of activities:
  • 99% of parents enjoy using computers, and for 65% it is among their favourite activities. A fifth say it is their favourite activity.
  • They are using their computers for a range of multimedia and social networking activities: 73% of parents have a Facebook account, 53% have uploaded photos to a website, and 28% have uploaded YouTube videos.

Parents as IT guardians

• Despite their enthusiasm for computers, many parents are worried about their own IT skills. This derives from a need to ‘keep up’ with their kids’ often quite advanced knowledge and also the more traditionally parental instincts of nurturing and guardianship. They want to protect their children and ensure that they are getting what they need from IT.
  • Although parents already seem to be fairly technologically advanced, they still want to broaden their skills: 63% would like to know more about technology than they already do.
  • This is, at least in part, driven by their desire to help their kids: 86% look for ways to help their children in their education and, as we’ve seen already, 97% believe that technology is a benefit to their child’s learning.
  • As such, it should come as little surprise that 80% agree that it’s a parent’s responsibility to be conversant on computers.
  • 58% worry about what their child is doing on the internet, and an even higher proportion, 91%, believe that it is their responsibility to monitor what their child sees and does on the internet. Concerns about the dangers of the internet are still clearly top of mind for parents, and a key driver of their involvement with their kids’ IT activities.
  • Above and beyond concerns about skills and security, there is a not insignificant group of parents who are worried about the impact a gap in IT skills could have on the parent/child relationship. 40% agree that “The IT gap between parents and their children is harmful to the relationships of those parents and their children.”

Variance by Age and Sex

• We see some significant differences between the populations when we look at variance by age/gender etc.
  • Men are more likely to worry about what their children are doing on-line, 63% compared to 52% of women.
  • They also are more concerned about the impact that an IT gap between parents and children can have. 47% of men feel such a gap can be harmful to relationships, compared to only 32% of women.
  • Younger parents, despite typically having greater levels of expertise and knowledge of IT and the internet also worry more about their children on-line. 64% of under 34s with children compared to only 43% of over 55s are concerned about what their children are doing on-line

You can read the full press release as a PDF here

Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips – 11 – Part Two of Saving Students Money

Part eleven 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 contains 14 Top ICT Money Saving Tips. So there’s more to come after this one

Thanks to those of you who’ve asked me to ‘get a move on’ writing up these. With so many other things which need doing, it’s important to get the occasional chivvy along, as it proves that somebody wants these tips!

Today’s tip is the second one for your students – it’s not going to save you money, but it could save some of your students a packet.

Free technical software for students

Under the DreamSpark scheme, schools can register with us, and then have the ability to give students free access to a range of technical software – programming tools, design tools and games development tools – for their own use at home. The idea is simple – if you’ve got Computer Studies or Design students, then they may want to use the same software at home as you use in school, but it tends to be quite specialist, and can be expensive.

The steps to get DreamSpark for your students are easy:

• Register your school on our website
• Verify your school (eg we ask you to fax us something that shows you do represent your school!)
• We then send you your student access keys – and they use these to download the software from the DreamSpark site for home use.
• Err, that’s it.

Of course, if you want the complicated version, then feel free to read our whole FAQ for the school scheme

So, if somebody in your school is a budding programmer, designer or robot builder, you can now make their day.

Find it all at: http://www.dreamspark.com/

I’m sure you don’t need reminding to forward this onto your ICT Co-ordinator in school!

Small Print: I knew you’d look for this! Some things worth knowing are:

• This is available to your students for home use, whether or not you buy this software for your school too
• You are responsible for distributing the access keys to your students – you don’t share any student information with us
• If you want to buy this software for your school, look at MSDN AA in Money Saving Tip #8 for the best way

Windows Azure in four minutes

This blog post is definitely for the techies amongst you!

Things are changing very rapidly in the way that ICT services can be delivered and used in schools. Although most of these developments aren’t specific to education, they are addressing needs of schools.

One of the developments is the Windows Azure system, which is designed to allow you to run services and develop applications for a cloud-based system, instead of having a big pile of servers within your school.

Unless you’ve got a pile of developers in your school (and some of you do!) then I guess you aren’t going to be buried in the detail of how these services work – because it will mainly be used by your suppliers, as they think about moving some of their applications to the cloud.

The official summary blurb for Azure describes it thus:

	The Windows Azure platform offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows. Windows Azure offers a platform that is easily implemented alongside your current environment. - Windows Azure: operating system as an online service - Microsoft SQL Azure: fully relational cloud database solution - Windows Azure platform AppFabric: makes it simpler to connect cloud services and on-premises applications

But I’ve found a short video that provides an overview of Windows Azure in a much more digestible form. Having watched it, I can now describe it to other people much better (and now fully appreciate why it’s a good thing!). It’s a good video if you’re a school network manager, or perhaps for IT Co-ordinators as a teaching resource.

The best simple introduction I’ve seen for Windows Azure

If you can’t see the video above, then here’s a direct link. However, as it’s a YouTube video, it may be blocked by your school filter – unfortunately I couldn’t find a copy anywhere else.

Fascinating fact: Steve Marx has blogged about how he made this video - using just PowerPoint & Community Clips. I’m envious of his talent.

If this is a bit lightweight for you, then you may prefer to read the Introducing Windows Azure whitepaper (PDF) – just one of many whitepapers on Windows Azure

Looking for school customers to share opinions on licensing

Each year we have about 80-90 interns that join Microsoft for a year, normally after their second year at university. They work all over the business, and each year we have two that work in the education team. One of last year’s interns, Mitch, worked on support for education licensing (Oh, I can hear the jealous cries now!) and now that he’s returned to university for his final year, he’s doing a business project as a replacement for a dissertation. And he’s chosen to work on a customer satisfaction project with education licensing. We benefit too, as he’ll present back the results of his work to Microsoft as well as his university lecturers (although individual responses stay anonymous).

And he’s asked me if I can ask for your help:

	Microsoft Education Customer Satisfaction (Research) My name is Mitch Phypers; Between June 2008 and July 2009, I worked as an intern at Microsoft specifically within the UK Education Licensing team providing licensing and operational support to Microsoft Partners.  I am now in my final year of university studying Business with Operations and Project Management. Instead of a dissertation, I have had the opportunity to work with a university colleague on a consultancy project for a company.  We have decided to focus the consultancy project on Microsoft’s education customer satisfaction, looking directly at licensing satisfaction specifically in Schools. Would you be willing to take part in a telephone call with myself at some point during February? I would be really interested to hear about your personal experiences with Microsoft and your honest opinions/views of the current licensing processes in place (including licence management, product licensing, licence documents etc). If you would be willing to participate in a telephone interview (15-30 minutes max), that would be fantastic.  If you could please let me know by emailing a confirmation to gmconsulting@live.co.uk (This email has been created for our project purpose only). We hope to hear from you soon.

Mitch has already done a batch of research with some of our education licensing partners, and he’s now keen to get some impressions from the ‘other side of the fence’! If you’re willing to give him a bit of your time, then drop him an email and let him know. I’m guessing that some of you who read the blog would have an opinion to share?

Blog giveaway – Being Human - Human-Computer interaction in the year 2020

When Microsoft Research sponsored a conference on Human-Computer interaction they produced a fantastic book called “Being Human” (view PDF) that looked into the future, and gives an idea of what human-computer interaction might look like in a decade. It doesn’t just look at it from a Microsoft perspective, but considers a wide range of products today and research across the world that is building that future.

It’s a fascinating read and very well written. And having seen some of the work at their labs in Cambridge, it’s one of the less-scary visions of the future! Of course, it’s got the style of interface we see in the Minority Report, but also some simple ideas which take advantage of the ubiquitous connectivity (my favourite simple idea is the Whereabouts Clock – left and on page 71, which gave me an immediate “I want one of those” feeling that I haven’t had since playing with the Surface in 2008.)

Anyway, I have 6 copies to give away as a classroom resource. Just drop me an email, with your name and address, and I will stick a copy in the post.

Sorry, all the spare copies I had have been snapped up. However, I'd recommend the download of the Being Human PDF version, as there are some good sections which would make good curriculum resources.

Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips – 10 – Save Students Money

Part ten 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 contains 14 Top ICT Money Saving Tips. So there’s more to come after this one

So far I’ve talked about saving your school budget directly, but for the next couple of tips, I’m going to look at saving your students money (or perhaps their parents!).

The first student money saving tip is to ensure that when they’re buying Microsoft Office or other Microsoft software, they are getting the best price. As you know, we have specific education licensing schemes for schools, which means that you pay a lot less for our software than a consumer or a business. But did you know that your students can also buy software under an education licence too?

What price is Microsoft’s student software?

Let’s use Office as an example. Not only are there lots of different versions of the Office suite, but lots of different prices:

• Our retail package, Office 2007 Home and Student, can be bought from a high-street retailer or online store, and typically costs £60 or over.
  Today, it’s £59.99 at Amazon, £69.95 at Dixons, and £70.49 at Misco, and £69.95 at PC World

• The business packages, like Office 2007 Standard, are sold through most Microsoft partners, and typically start at over £200. (Some parents buy these licences for their children, because they specifically want Access or Publisher, and haven’t realised there are Academic versions)

• The Academic licence version of the business packages, which is limited to use by education institutions, staff or students. You won’t see them in the high street or at most normal computer shops, as they are only available through our authorised Education partners. Although each of our education partners set their own price, I grabbed a copy of the Pugh catalogue, and their price for Office Standard is £94 under our “Academic Fully Packaged Product”. (For schools to buy these licences for their own use, Pugh quote £52 under our “Open” licence scheme, and £29 under “Select”)
   
  
• For students, we have a small number of partners who run online shops, where students can order Academic versions directly. Normally, after the students order, the partner will ship out a DVD along with their licence key. A quick scan across the sites gives a slim range of prices for Office 2007 Standard Academic Edition:
  • £36.10 at RM’s Basement
  • £38.99 at Software4Students
  • £45.59 at Pugh’s student shop
    

• Most students actually buy the Professional or Professional Plus version, so that they get Access and Publisher, and the prices vary on these between the suppliers (but always at a significant saving). It’s worth shopping between the stores depending on what version your students want (Today, the cheapest price on Professional Plus is £44.99 at two of the stores above)

Should students be buying software for their schoolwork?

I know there are people that think students shouldn’t have to buy software for their schoolwork. However, the reality is that many of them do buy copies of Office (if you want to know if that’s true in your school, go and ask a typical class how many have Word and PowerPoint at home). And if they’re going to do it, you can help them save money by buying from the right place.

And I also know that there are people who argue that it shouldn’t be as expensive. Often this is said by people that think that Office costs £100 or more (in a research panel recently, we found that 60% of students believed Office cost over £100 in the shops, when the reality is it’s often under £70 everywhere).

And there’s another argument that’s relevant for parents:

A copy of Office will typically last for 3 years before it’s replaced, costs under £40, and will support their children’s learning in lots of ways.

A copy of Call of Duty will typically last a lot less time, costs more money, and I think it’s difficult to argue that it supports learning of the National Curriculum

I’m not arguing that parents shouldn’t buy games for their children, but am arguing that there’s a balance to the argument that Office is expensive!

Where students should buy software

In a nutshell, to save money when buying Office, your students should go to one of our student partner shops, because they are going to get between 40% and 95% off:

RM’s Basement

Software4Students

Pugh’s Student Shop

Microsoft at BETT 2010 – the world’s largest Education IT exhibition

As you’ll know, the BETT Show in January is a major event for schools in the UK, and also a major event from Microsoft too. After months of planning, it’s all over in four days, and we then get a chance to recuperate from the week. After the show, it’s my job to write an internal review of the BETT Show for the Microsoft UK staff. Given that so many of you will have been to BETT, I thought I'd take the risk of sharing a big chunk of the review with you, so that you can see what BETT means to us.

To be honest, I’ve hesitated to share this for a week now, because I don’t want to be seen as showing off about what BETT means to us. But I think that there’s information in here that will interest most of the readers on the blog, so hey, publish and be damned!

As well as being Microsoft UK’s largest event of the year, the BETT Show is the largest education ICT trade show in the world, with 30,000 visitors in 4 days. So our appearance at the show is the result of months of planning, and massive amount of team work right across the UK business. For example, with a core education team of 15 people, it takes a huge effort from an extended education team, and volunteers from right across the company, to get up to 50 staff for each day at the show – including the ever-popular Saturday. I noticed somebody on another blog calling it an ‘army of staff’ and being critical of the fact we had so many. But with 6,000 visitors a day heading to our stand, it is amazing how busy everybody gets in the peak times of the day!

This year, with plenty of new products to launch, every one of the 200 square metres was busy all day, and with a mix of demonstration pods and a theatre holding up to 200, we were able to get through the usual volume of show visitors. Our research has shown that of the 30,000 visitors, 80% visit the Microsoft stand, and either see an individual demonstration or sit in one of our theatre presentations – from both Microsoft presenters as well some of our customers. Alongside the BETT show main stand, we also carried out 25 press briefings, for education, technical and mainstream media. This year we had a broad spectrum of individual briefings, for journalists from the Times Education Supplement and Education Executive, to the BBC and The Register.

In addition to the BETT exhibition, the UK team were also deeply involved in Becta’s Learning and Teaching World Forum (LATWF) and the Education Leaders Briefing (ELB), events which were events for senior education ministers and policymakers around the world. LATWF is hosted by the UK government, and we are a sponsor, whilst the ELB is Microsoft hosted, and involves delegates from 48 different countries, and also brings in UK customers to present good practice examples. And finally, over 50 international visitors headed off to the New Line Learning Academies in Kent, to see an example of how education could be transformed by effective ICT.

It was also the first time that we’d used the new brand at an exhibition, and the design of the stand was very different from the conventional Microsoft branding used before.

So with a bright orange stand, and 50 Microsoft staff, how did it go?

• In our on-stand theatre we had seating for 60 people, but regularly packed in 180-200 people who were standing around the edge and in the exhibition aisles. With 18 presentations a day, all 20 minutes long, we presented some of our new products and solutions to more than 7,000 people.
• The 20 individual demo pods gave us the chance to show off many of our existing and new products, including many of the things that schools can get for free. In addition to Windows 7, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, we also promoted DreamSpark (free technical software for students), AutoCollage (free to teachers), Bing Maps, Live@edu, Education Labs and a few specialised partners (Prodigy Learning for IT Academy, Comet for Home Access and HP for MultiPoint Server)
• We were joined on the stand by 13 school customers, who we were giving an insight into how they use our products on the demonstration pods as well as in the theatre.
• Launches included two new products - MultiPoint Mouse and Kodu – as well as a new Partners in Learning competition for teachers.
• We completed 25 press briefings in 3 days – with all kinds of journalists, from the mainstream press (like the BBC, T3, and the Financial Times) to IT trade press (like the Guardian, PC Advisor, ZD Net, Microscope and The Register) to specialist education titles (like the Education Executive, ICT in Education, and the TES). Some of the stories have already appeared, whilst some will be appearing over the next few weeks.
• As well as UK customers, we hosted visitors on the BETT stand from 43 other countries (Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guernsey, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Libya, Lithuania, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA)

Of course, all of that work will be most valuable when it helps customers to understand what it is that we offer to the UK Education market, and helps them to consider using of our products and services in their teaching and learning. So in addition to the 1,000 customers who have asked for a follow up from us, we’ll also be surveying a random sample of UK education customers through an independent school research panel. By using an independent panel, we can check the difference in views of Microsoft and our products between those who came to BETT and those who didn’t, and also those that came to the Microsoft stand and those who didn’t.

BETT Press Coverage

Some of the press briefings won’t appear in print for quite some time, but you can get an idea of the kind of coverage from what has appeared already:

The Register

Microsoft tells UK schools: buy our software, save money

ZD Net

Building Windows 7 into free home PCs

Integrating Microsoft with Moodle

The Times Education Supplement

Off-the-wall ideas for a brave new world of global connections

The Guardian

School online services - for free

The Guardian Technology Blog (Jack Schofield)

BETT 2010: Trend spotting products

MJO Online

BETT 'knackeration' and 'Top 10 Money Saving Tips'

Softpedia

The Microsoft “Innovid” video competition is opened to teachers in the UK

PublicTechnology.net

Minister: Private/public partnerships vital to educational success

Microscope

BETT attracts major IT players targeting education

Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips – 9 – Stop your email servers

Part nine of the series of Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips for schools, based on my BETT 2010 presentation

When the DCSF issued their "Securing our Future" Discussion Guide (download the PDF version), it was accompanied by dire headlines in the papers warning of the need to save £750 million pounds in school budgets. Although the headlines were strong, the advice in the document was focused on practical things that schools could do to save money.   And there were a number of examples of ICT driven savings, including the example of the London Grid for Learning:

	London schools have reduced their ICT costs by adopting shared ICT services through London Grid for Learning (LGfL). In addition to broadband and learning platforms, shared services now include remotely hosted email accounts and personal server space for all staff and students, thus removing the need for schools to host their own exchange servers. Compared to school-hosted email services, schools save upwards of £10 per user per year – more than £11 million for London in total.

Which leads me directly my Money Saving Tip Number 9 - endorsed by the civil servants of Whitehall (okay, that’s a bit cheeky, but hey, this is a blog!)

Switch off your email servers!

Did you know that instead of running your own email servers, or paying somebody to run an email service for you, you could simply just switch to our free cloud-based Live@edu service? In the past we've offered this to local authorities and to your Regional Broadband Consortium-which is exactly why it's been featured as a London-wide solution - the LGfL switched last year.

Here's the bullet point version of what it is:

• Provides a co-branded hosted Exchange solution at no cost with Outlook Live (10GB mailbox per user)
• Equip your students for the real world with Microsoft tools
• Help to keep your students’ data private and promote online safety
• Excite students with 25GB of free file and document online storage on Windows Live SkyDrive
• Simplify online collaboration and document sharing with Office Live Workspace
• Give your school a reliable and easy-to-manage Microsoft solution with enhanced security
• Supported on all popular browsers on Windows or Mac, including Firefox and Safari

And now you can sign up your school individually, and not have to go through your local authority. So if you're spending money on email for your students (or not using email as much as you want with students because of the cost implications) then here's what you do:

• You register for a trial on our website
• We'll then setup the system for you, with an Exchange sever in Dublin doing all the work,  
• You can then access your email. from the web (using the 2010 version of Outlook Web Access), or from your existing email client (such as Outlook) or from other devices (like your mobile phone)
• You can keep your own email address and domain (like head@excellentschool.countyshire.sch.uk)
• And if you like it, you just keep using it. Free. Forever.

It really is that simple.

Now I reckon at this point you'll have some questions. So let's see how well l do at answering them!

• No, there is no advertising on the email
• Yes, really, it's free
• No, your data doesn't take a transatlantic trip we keep it in our EU-based data centre in Dublin.
• Yes, your students can each have a 10 GB mailbox, not 109B divided amongst them all
• No, we don't scan the email for targeting adverts (see above!) 
• Yes, you can set it up so that email is filtered for banned words (or even set it up with a third-party system to do email filtering etc - as LGfL have done)
• No, we don't charge anything. It's free.

So what should you do next?

• If you're in London, talk to LGfL to find out when your school is scheduled to be switched on.
• Otherwise, you can sign up for a trial (and I'd also recommend in parallel finding out if your local authority or RBC plans to roll this out).

Go to the website for more information and for a trial

How much will it save?

The DCSF Discussion Paper estimated a minimum of £10 per user per year-meaning £11m across London. But it might be different (or more) in your school, so here's the costs you might save:

• Server licences (Darn it, that's normally Exchange and Windows Server as a minimum!)
• CALs (if you don’t know the acronym, CAL=Client Access Licence, then I recommend staying blissfully unaware, and leaving it to your network manager!)
• Server hardware
• Power for the server (24 x 365 could easily be £1,500+)
• Cooling for the server
• Support contract for the server
• Filtering and spam-handling software
• Technician time to keep it running and management time too
• Backup devices
• Backup media
• …and I’m sure there’s a bunch of other things

Instead, we take of all of that stuff (including server maintenance, backup and disaster recovery). If we use DCSF’s £10 per user per year, then that could mean a typical secondary school saving nearly £10,000 a year. And savings of £2,500+ for a primary school.

What’s not to like? 

A little bonus - a little later this year will be announcing the addition of new SharePoint Online based collaboration and productivity services tailored for students as part of the Live@edu online service. Based on the next version of SharePoint Online, these new services will be available to customers starting in the second half of 2010. Click here to learn more.

New blog header today

My colleague Ben Nunney (who’s a Live@edu deployment specialist, a blogger, and a tweeter) sits behind me, and was mortally offended by my suggestion that you could do some nice graphic stuff in PowerPoint, and save yourself some Photoshop grief. I’d pointed out that the blog header was created in PowerPoint, because I could create overlays and gradients in PowerPoint (which I always had difficulty doing in Photoshop). Anyway, Ben’s a frustrated graphics designer, so last weekend he went home and started designing me a new blog header. In a few exchanges (with him sending me ideas mocked up in PhotoShop, and me sending back alterations done in PowerPoint ) we arrived at the new header you see above.

And now we’ve both right – the final JPG file was created in Photoshop, and the design stage was done in PowerPoint. A nice happy truce. (And according to Ben, a nicer header!).

A new way to add interactivity and quizzes to PowerPoint presentations

A few years ago I bought a keypad set so that I could create polls and quizzes in PowerPoint. But over time, I drifted away from using them, as it became increasingly difficult to set them up. But I’ve come across something that might well re-ignite my interest in doing talks and presentations with interactive questions. It’s a free product that plugs into PowerPoint 2007, called Mouse Mischief, that was launched at BETT.

Like all good ideas, the principle is both simple and clever. Basically, you plug lots of mice into your computer (or connect lots of wireless mice). And each one can be used independently to answer questions.

So, if you’re a teacher, and you’re delivering a lesson, you can pepper your PowerPoint with little questions and quizzes, to make it interesting for your class, and to give you instant formative assessment feedback.

Using the Mouse Mischief menu you can simply add Yes/No or Multiple Choice questions in your standard PowerPoint slides, tell it which is the correct answer, and then you’re ready. Because it is a standard PowerPoint slide, you can make the answers visual, not just limited to text. And pupils can either work as individuals, or join a team. Oh, and the teacher’s mouse is the one in control all the time (including a special “Freeze Student Mice” option when in quiz mode)!

And once the answers are in, you can display the results on screen, including a little feature which shows who gave the first correct answer.

It’s a great resource for whole-class or small-group teaching, but either way you’ll need to go looking for some more mice! But I’m willing to bet that you’ve got more spare mice around your school than you have spare polling keypads.

Read an overview of Mouse Mischief here, and once you’ve registered to download the beta from Microsoft Connect, there’s a detailed step-by-step Quick Start guide to using it.

In small groups, around a PC, then mice plugged into a USB hub will be the answer. Across a classroom, then wireless mice will be the answer (which will cost money, but still be a lot cheaper and easier to buy than wireless polling keypads)

Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips – 8 – Stop buying so much software

Part eight of the series of Top 10 ICT Money Saving Tips for schools, based on my BETT 2010 presentation

Yes, the one you thought you’d never see from me in this list of Top 10 ICT Money Saving tips! But here it is…

Did you know that you can buy a subscription called the MSDN AA (Trivia: MSDN AA stands for Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance). And the schools version is called High School AA. (Move along, no comedy to see here)

In a nutshell, what it allows you to do is use a range of software for teaching and learning purposes in IT, design, art, maths and science, without having to buy the licences individually. And the software includes Expression Studio 2 (including Expression Web, Web, Blend, Media and Design), Visual Studio Professional and SQL Server [Detailed list]. AND you can provide it to your students for their homework assignments.

All for £145 a year.

At this point, I should reinforce the five words above “for teaching and learning purposes”, so you can’t take use it for your SQL Server for MIS. It’s for teaching and learning only. And, Yes, we have understood that a school is all about teaching and learning, but I guess you’ll realise that we’ve written the rules in a very specific way to make sure that what we’re supporting is classroom use, not you running your whole school ICT system on MSDN AA software.

The scheme also provides a range of support and training resources for teachers on the MSDN AA Faculty Connection web site. (To save you using your Babel fish, I’ll point out that K-12 on this US site means ‘schools’)

So if you are licensing any of the software above, or you’re using an alternative product (pretty likely with the Expressions Design or Expressions Web suite), then there’s a potential (big) saving for you.

You can find out more about MSDN AA on the Microsoft website.

And a final bonus. If you already have a School Agreement subscription, then you’ve already got a free subscription to MSDN AA included! You may just need to activate it on the website

School Closures, Snow Days and Learning Platforms.

Over the last few weeks, the papers have been full of stories about school closures across the UK – naturally so, as half of all schools were shut down for at least a day by snow and ice. And it’s given impetus to the important issue of how a school that has to close can keep its children working, in contact with each other and with their teachers? Can they keep the learning going?

The answer, surely, lies in the use of a good learning platform (and some were quick to point out that it was the ideal time to switch to virtual learning using the learning platforms that the majority of schools have in place). Not all schools, though, are equally up to speed with their anytime/anywhere learning strategies. So I think what’s important is that there’s a pooling of experience by schools that have at least made steps towards keeping their students on task. It’s in that spirit that our friends at the 1,600 student Twynham School in Christchurch, Dorset, are sharing their experience of a one-day snow closure earlier this term.

Twynham has long used SharePoint as a support for learning, and since 2006 has been using, and constantly developing, its own learning platform – the Twynham Learning Gateway – using to the full the features of SharePoint 2007.

Assistant Head Mike Herrity and his team spoke about their SharePoint Learning Platform on our stand at BETT. He described particularly the snow day experience, and he’s written his own document for use within the school, and been kind enough to share it with me. These are his key points.

Mike starts by setting the scene:

	On Tuesday 5th January a notice was sent to all students during tutor time and the last lesson of the day when it became clear poor weather was likely…our commitment was to make a decision and post a notice by 7 am on the website

The website, says Mike, was to be the definitive place for information. Radio, he points out, isn’t always reliable and prompt because of the sheer number of schools involved. Text messaging is fine -- but only if the list of numbers is complete and up to date. Twynham’s research, though, shows that broadband availability in the school’s community is nearly at 100percent

Mike’s figures show that as the weather deteriorated, hits on the website climbed from its normal 3,000 daily hits eventually up to 21,000 on the day of closure itself, which was Thursday 7^th January.

The website notice reminded students and parents that the Twynham Learning Gateway would remain available for study support during closure, and the real story, for my money, is how remarkably well that worked. On average says Mike, the Gateway sees about 900 logins per day, in school time, on school computers. On the snow day, with school closed, and therefore no school computers in use, there were no fewer than 774 logins. As Mike says:

	This is an astonishing 86% of the average logins on a normal school day. What is clear is that students see the Learning Gateway as an integral part of their learning

That last sentence says it all. Once a school’s Learning Gateway is “an integral part of their learning”, they can surely claim to be using technology to transform the way that their students engage with their work.

You can see more about Twynham’s strategy in our ’Engaging with Parents’ case studies, which includes the stories of 5 schools, and looks beyond what they are doing to also at look at how they have done it.

Here’s the introduction video for Twynham:

Click here to follow the link if you can’t see the video above

One of the great things about Twynham School is that Mike Herrity doesn’t ever seem to stop sharing his experiences, and the what/how/why of their work, on his SharePoint in Education blog. I’m sure more details of the Snow Closure experience is just around the corner!