Microsoft UK Schools News Blog

Windows 7 multi-touch at BETT

One of the nice features in Windows 7 that’s not had much coverage is multi-touch. I think this is mainly because few of us have multi-touch laptops or screens. However, when you see it in action, it’s the kind of thing that makes you think “I want one of those”. Last year we had a Surface on the stand, which created lots of interest, but I always knew it would be quite specialist – after all, the idea of spending £10,000 on a single device was only ever going to be sensible for a small number of situations (no matter how transformative it might be).

You can get an idea of what multi-touch allows on the video below (one of my colleagues, Andrew Fryer, recorded this at home with his nephew).

View this video on the YouTube site directly

So the idea of adding the same kind of multi-touch capabilities to a standard classroom PC, for a small amount of extra cost, is interesting. And that’s what we’re going to set out to demonstrate at BETT, using a Dell multi-touch monitor on a standard PC. But there are quite a few ways of adding multi-touch capability in the classroom:

Add a multi-touch monitor to a standard PC

We’re going to have some Dell SX2210T multi-touch monitors on the stand, running on standard PCs. I’ve not played with one myself yet, but getting multi-touch on a sub-£300 monitor (£277 ex-VAT currently) seems like an affordable solution. Can’t wait for them to arrive in the office.

Buy a specific multi-touch PC

HP have jumped enthusiastically into touch computers, with a line of TouchSmart devices, including all-in-one PCs and TouchSmart laptops. We’ve got a couple of HP TX2’s on the way to try out, so I’ll let you know what they’re like. (Harry Fryer was using a TouchSmart All-in-on PC in the video above)

Use a multi-touch interactive whiteboard

When I was chatting with Promethean last week I discovered that their current whiteboards allow for multitouch (your existing boards might need a firmware update), which means that you can use the same capabilities on a teacher’s classroom whiteboard. Which seems to me like an ideal opportunity to re-energise some teachers to use discover new ways of using their whiteboards (I’m guessing we all still know too many times when we see them simply being used as a big projector, with no interactivity).

Or make your own multi-touch interactive whiteboard/wall/anything using Johnny Chung Lee’s ideas

I’m guessing you’ll need a geek-factor to be interested in doing this, but how about playing around with some of Johnny’s ideas (he’s the man who created the Wiimote multi-touch interactive whiteboard/wall for £50)

How to make a beautiful school SharePoint site

On Monday I shared some UK Education SharePoint websites that I described as beautiful, and which had been created by UK education establishments. And the opinion around the office was that the Twynham School Sixth Form website was the most astonishing one (in fact, half a dozen times I was asked by Microsoft colleagues “Are you sure that was done in SharePoint?”).

My colleague, Ben Nunney, who’s an ex-teacher, paid it a massive compliment when he said on Twitter “I know I'm too old to go back to school, but if I could I'd go here - PURELY based on their amazing website”

Mike Herrity from Twynham School talks a lot on his SharePoint in Education blog about all of the things that they’re doing with ICT in his school, and it makes a useful resource if you’re thinking of doing some SharePoint work yourself.

But he hadn’t mentioned to me that he was also writing a series of articles about how they have created the Sixth Form site, which are being published on EndUserSharepoint.com. The series (not all there at this point) actually walks through the whole process, and describes the challenges (including the need to convince the Leadership Team in the school that you can make a good looking site in SharePoint).

If you are in any way involved in using SharePoint in a school, I think it is a must read series, either for you, or for whoever is providing/developing your SharePoint.

How we did it: Twynham 6th form Internet facing website using SharePoint 2007 - Part 1

How we did it: Twynham 6th form Internet facing website using SharePoint 2007 - Part 2

Putting an interactive map onto your school website

A little while ago, Microsoft acquired Multimap (which I liked, because Multimap was my favourite way of getting directions and decent maps). And you may have noticed over the last few months that Multimap and Bing maps have been getting closer together, and now they’ve become the same thing, and the ways to display a map have improved dramatically.

The options now (see below) are the standard Multimap-style map or an Ordnance Survey map. And in London you can also have the A-Z streetmaps style, and even lay the tube lines over the top.

OS Map

Adding a Bing map to your website

I’ve never tried to embed a map like these onto a website, and I was surprised to find out how easy it is. (I had mistakenly assumed that it was difficult, or somehow copyright-limited, to embed a map like these onto another website). So now I’ve discovered, here’s my simple guide to embed a Bing map:

1. Get the map you want up on screen in Bing maps
2. Click the share (envelope) icon in the bottom left of the screen
3. Copy the code below the text that says “Embed in a web page”) and paste that into your web page
4. Or, you may want to click the ‘Customise & Preview’ link first – for example, change it into a static map, or change the size, or change the style

Embedding a map on your website is much better than simply putting an image in, because your website visitors can then zoom in and out (especially if you have school visitors that don’t know the area), and move around. (To show this, the top two maps are the same place, but two different styles. The second one allows you to pan and zoom, whilst the first one doesn’t. Handy if you want to see more of the area. The third one is just an image – so you can’t do anything to it)

Making a beautiful SharePoint site for a school

I know that lots of people are using SharePoint in their school – or have it provided to them by their local authority. When you install SharePoint “out of the box”, it is fair to say that it isn’t something that whacks you between the eyes shouting out “I’m beautiful. Look At Me!”. But that’s perhaps not surprising where people have many different uses for it, and almost everybody that sees it comes up with yet another use for it schools.

But there are some common uses, such as providing a document storage and collaboration system, or supporting the workflow for a learning platform (you may not realise it, but many of the Becta certified Learning Platforms run on top of SharePoint, as it invisibly handles all of the workflow underneath). And now schools are turning to it to run their public-facing websites too – because you can use exactly the same skills to control the content on a public website as you do for your internal SharePoint. Which means that a well-designed website can be updated by non-technical users (making it easy for the staff in the school office to update the announcements, or publish newsletters and notices).

And so the inevitable question that gets asked is “Can I make it look better?”. And to help, I’ve put together a “Good Looking Education SharePoint Websites” album from UK sites.

The latest one that I’ve seen is the Twynham School VI Form in Dorset, where they’ve had professional designers creating a look and feel that is just stunning – and then the programmers in school have turned it into a reality.

If you’re looking for inspiration, take a look at the album, and then go and explore your favourites – the URLs are shown at the bottom of each picture.

If you don't have access to SkyDrive in your school, then you can download a PDF version of the album

Do you know of another one to add? Just drop me an email with a URL

 

Scaling up Innovation

The Microsoft UK Education team has a dozen people in it (surprised?) who are focused full-time on education – across schools, colleges and universities. Which means that we’re awfully busy and spread across many, many things all the time. But fortunately we have the help of other similar teams around the world, and a much bigger team in our offices in America. Sometimes we produce work for the rest of the world (like the Innovative Schools case studies, focusing on journeys of innovation and the lessons that innovative schools have learnt on their way), and sometimes the work flows the other way – towards us.

One of the things that has been done as part of the worldwide Partners in Learning programme is The Scaling Framework – an interactive tool that helps analyse how you move an innovation from being something done by 1 or 2 people, to making it widespread.

It made me think of two specific cases where today there is a challenge of scaling innovation. The first is Learning Platforms, where it is proving to be difficult to take good practice from one teacher/department/school to the whole system. And the other is taking an innovative ICT initiative and spreading it to other schools.

The Scaling Framework is a simple interactive tool that explains the five dimensions of scale, and then digs down into areas such as “Traps to Avoid” and “Next Steps to Explore”.

You can either us this as an individual, or pop it up on your whiteboard next time you’re holding a leadership team meeting, and explore interactively.

Take a look at the interactive Scaling Framework, and see if it can help you

I was interested in the “Spread” dimension – and the trap to avoid: “Developers should realise a somewhat less powerful innovation that reaches much greater numbers of use is a step forward”.  We were talking about this at lunchtime today, discussing a new piece of software for teachers which may only appeal to innovators, meaning that the majority of users won’t be affected by it. So is it better to try and promote something a little less innovative, but likely to be used by more people?

 

 

Planning for BETT 2010

BETT is the big event in the education ICT calendar, not just for you but for us as well. Knowing that 30,000 people will flood through the doors of Olympia in about 7 working weeks tends to focus our minds on making sure that we put on a good show for them/you.

Our challenge, every year, is to get a balance between whizzy new technology and being realistic about ICT in the classroom – because the pace of change means that technology appears to be moving faster than the pace of change in the classroom. Some people are always looking for things to change rapidly (you only have to look at your students’ attitude to the release of the latest game) whilst others see change as something that disturbs the natural rhythm of things. And in your own school you will probably have staff on both ends of the spectrum.

This year, we have got lots of new products to launch (or which have been launched in the last few months), which will create a bit of a buzz. Windows 7 is out there, and in use by the innovators, but for many schools it may be the first chance for them to see it in detail. For some teachers, Office 2007 will be ‘new’, while some others will want to look at the next version – Office 2010. SharePoint is in a similar position – with some schools pushing the limits of the current version, and some who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Beta version of SharePoint 2010.

So the plan this year is to dramatically increase the number of demonstration PCs, so that we can show all of our new things, and still explain how we can help schools get more out of what they’ve already got.

Our draft list of “demonstration Pods” looks like this at the moment (bound to be some changes between now and BETT)

• Windows 7 (and also the multi-touch facilities, which are exciting to demo)
• Office 2007 (and a new add-in product to be launched, which I can’t yet tell you about yet)
• Office 2010 Beta – more here
• SharePoint 2010 – more here
• Home Learning Package – more here
• Semblio – more here
• …and a nice little bundle of 3 other new products to be announced on the first day of the show

Oh, and we’re just finalising this year’s freebies!

See you in January!

Office 2010 Beta Available

Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 have all reached the Beta milestone and are now available for download.

Remember how sometimes you felt smug when you were running Windows 7 Beta at least 6 months before everybody else in school? Well, you can feel it once again!

What’s new in the Office system?

On Monday 9 November, Microsoft Exchange 2010 became the first product launch in wave of innovation across the Office system. The first half of 2010 will see this wave continue with the release of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 .

• Microsoft Office 2010 provides rich and powerful new ways to deliver work. New features include enhanced tools, customisable templates, photo editing and the ability to work with multiple people from different locations at the exact same time using new co-authoring capabilities. By offering more ways to access files from virtually anywhere, Office 2010 gives users greater control. Learn More
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 enables organisations to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features. SharePoint 2010 facilitates business collaboration in its broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners and customers to work together in new and effective ways. Learn More
• Microsoft Project 2010 provides teams and organisations of all sizes with the right project collaboration tools, and a pathway to step up to more advanced Project and Portfolio Management capabilities as their needs evolve. Learn More
• The advanced diagramming tools of Microsoft Visio 2010 help you simplify complexity with intuitive and professional-looking diagrams, dynamic and data-driven visuals and new ways to share these on the Web in real-time. Learn More

In addition, with this beta we are unveiling several new features and products:

• Office Web Apps for business customers, available through SharePoint Server, allows SharePoint sites to host browser-based Web Apps accessible from virtually anywhere.
  To me, this is one of the most significant developments of SharePoint 2010 – you can provide Office applications, from your SharePoint server, to your students whether they are in-school or at home. Which means they can start a piece of work using Office on their school computer, and then continue it at home using their web browser.
  
• Outlook Social Connector, a new feature that brings communications history and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.

Happy downloading

Windows 7 building up steam in schools

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!

Free staff training – the UK Innovative Teachers Forum

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?

The Innovative Teachers Network is nominated in the BETT Awards

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)

Saving money with your IT – Dean Close School

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.

Who will be the next Bill Gates

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…

Windows 7 in North Leamington School in Warwickshire

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.

What is it like to be one of the first schools using Windows 7

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!

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

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 or School Agreement. If it’s basic Select, the upgrade is to Windows 7 Professional. If you have a 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, 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