Mark Anderson, Author at Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom

Online Safety and Security in a post

Mark Anderson — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 09:05:17 +0000

Never before have citizens in the UK had more rights. The introduction of the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in May this year brought about a number of changes that have had significant impact in schools. The best bit for me with it all has been the conversations around protecting children and their data that have had to happen because of it. The requirement for everyone to take more responsibility for the safeguarding of the sensitive data they hold in schools has been a positive one.

I will always remember the difficulty of ensuring all colleagues in one school I worked in moving away from USB sticks and ensuring complex passcodes for devices rather than just simple 4-digit codes; some even refused to have those because of the “inconvenience” having a secure password entailed. Just like it is our professional obligation as teachers to safeguard our learners in real life so it is our responsibility to ensure that we take care with their data in their digital lives too, when it relates to our professional work with them in loco parentis.

The deadline for GDPR may have passed but schools are still coming to terms with the changes. Just last night I read on Facebook about a school facing a Subject Access Request (SAR) from a parent. The ensuring conversation talked about the difficulty and time such a thing will take. There are lots of changes and it’s difficult to know exactly what to do and how to do it.

It is recognised that when organising trips into the world outside of school risk assessments are important and so how do you ensure you mitigate against risk for your learners around online safety, security, and data protection? Fortunately, there is lots of great advice and software around to help you as an educator not only find out about your obligations and what you can do but also how you can safeguard your learners too.

Microsoft have a great blog titled GDPR: The five things teachers should do first which is a great read with some fantastic advice. Added to that their brilliant free eBook packed with great advice, the GDPR for Education book is worthy of a good read. Another great resource to check out for all schools is the DfE’s Data Protection Toolkit: For Schools.

One of the key ways that schools can help to safeguard learners is through the careful management of the devices that they use. Microsoft’s Intune is a device management solution that is competitively priced and gives some great features to help manage the devices in your school. Through their admin console it is possible for everyone to get groups of devices up and running very quickly. The admin portal you have access to gives options to help anyone, from a teacher in the classroom to network administrators to accomplish everyday things that you need to do with devices in classrooms.

As I know from personal experience, students can often forget their login passwords for devices and lots of time can be wasted with learners having to travel to a technician’s office to get their password reset. One of my favourite features in the console is SSPR (Self-Service Password Reset) which is something that can be done by a teacher in the classroom. This one little efficiency can help keep students from getting off-track while using their devices and lets you as a teacher concentrate on the important part of the job; your teaching and their learning.

Other features such as SSO (Single Sign On) for apps also means that learners will be more efficient in their logins to the crucial software you will want them to use. It has the additional benefit of ensuring that once authentication has taken place through logging in, through the SSO you can rest assured that their use of the software will be safe and secure.

About the author

Mark Anderson is a former teacher and school leader and now award-winning author, blogger, speaker, thought-leader and trainer around all things to do with teaching, learning and effective use of technology in the classroom.

Mark firmly believes that education is a force for good and under his moniker of the ICT Evangelist he strives to demonstrate how technology is something that can help to make the big difference to the lives of learners and teachers alike.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, or check out his blog.

The post Online Safety and Security in a post appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

How to access free resources and encourage collaboration

Mark Anderson — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 10:21:33 +0000

One of the most difficult parts of an educator’s job is staying on top of all of the preparation required in each and every lesson taught. The pressures on educators to not only help learners achieve fantastic results but to make those lessons relevant, purposeful and to stay on top of curriculum developments and other statutory changes is huge. With all of this pressure and wanting to always do right by the learners in your classroom, teaching is most definitely not the easiest of jobs! It is not so much about keeping plates spinning but more like trying to work with 363234234 tabs open in your browser at the same time.

Luckily there are lots of easy ways in which technology can help, and if you’re a teacher you’ll know that one of the best productivity tools going is Microsoft’s Office 365. Free for teachers and students with all of the features you know and love from Microsoft, you can access resources, ideas, tools and more to help you communicate, collaborate, share, and be more efficient in the classroom, all whilst supporting sound teaching and learning in your classroom.

Social media

One of the key ways I use to help me in getting help with my work is through my professional learning network of educators on social media. My main ‘go to’ sources are found on Twitter although there are some fantastic resources available on websites such as Pinterest, too. When it comes to Twitter there are some great accounts you can follow to get new ideas and examples from real classrooms to inspire your use of technology.

A selection of great people to follow on Twitter in this area are:

Added to this on Twitter, there are regular chats held where educators including those with MIEE and MIEExpert status discuss and share ideas around teaching and learning with technology. These chats are held using the hashtag #MSFTEduChat and its associated Twitter account @TweetMeet.

Tools to inspire

If you’re looking for new tools to inspire and engage teaching and learning in your classroom, a great starting point is to explore the Microsoft Store for Education. If you’re not really a social media person or like to have more control over the resources you get to view, there are a significant number of resources shared by Microsoft to inspire and encourage collaboration beyond that on social media.

Learn more about how you as a teacher can collaborate on all devices either in your teams or with your classes by visiting the main Office 365 site. Here you’ll also learn that both you as an educator and your students can access Office 365 Education completely free. This great offer includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and the great teaching and learning workflow and collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams.

When I find a great resource to use in my classroom one of the first things I’ll want to do is talk about it with other people. I’ll want to find out if anyone else has used it and what sort of impact it will have. The Microsoft Educator Community is a great place to ask questions such as these.

If you want to share you discoveries with your colleagues, Microsoft Teams has you covered there too. Microsoft Teams is the hub that brings everything together for teaching and learning in your classroom and as the name suggests, across your teams too. As a teacher you want a nice centralised, easy to use, collaborative and robust tool to support your activities as a teacher. This is where Teams delivers. You can set work. You can collect in work. You can give feedback. You can collaborate. You can give every learner a voice, such an important aspect to ensuring equity and inclusivity in education. You can link in your OneNote Class Notebooks. You can send quick messages to your colleagues. You can quickly share files with colleagues. It all ties in with One Drive. The list of superb, workload reducing, efficient productivity activities you can undertake in Teams is phenomenal. As you would expect there is a whole load of support available to you to get started to. A great starting point will be to visit the dedicated Teams site here.

When you’re ready to really get a rocket load of support across all of the Office 365 suite, I can highly recommend a visit to the Office 365 Training Centre where you’ll be able to get access to free training in Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and of course Teams. Here you’ll learn time-saving tips, how to share, co-author, communicate and collaborate as a team, see what’s possible with amazing education focussed templates in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I hope you’ve found these resources helpful, I can’t wait to hear what you come up with!

About the author

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, or check out his blog.

The post How to access free resources and encourage collaboration appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Get your creative curriculum on

Mark Anderson — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 12:40:34 +0000

We often hear about how we as educators are preparing our learners for an uncertain future and for jobs that haven’t been created yet. Whilst we might be asked to ensure we have a broad and balanced curriculum, schools are being squeezed tighter and tighter, often in ways which results in a narrowing of the curriculum. It doesn’t have to be that way though.

With digital skills high on the agenda in many schools across the whole of the UK it is great to see the company-wide commitment of Microsoft to support the growth of these skills in the UK. To that end, they have developed a whole programme to support this initiative. Their aim, to have delivered by 2020, 30,000 new digital apprenticeships, 30,000 Public Sector officials trained and 500,000 new cloud experts. Wow indeed!

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How can you do it?

In recent years we’ve seen some debunking of Bloom’s Taxonomy and its importance, however we all know that in order to be problem solvers and finders and demonstrate the skills that employers want alongside qualifications, something needs to change. Creativity is an important skill to be able to use to help learners unpick and solve the problems of tomorrow. Sure, technology and AI will help with this but what about right now?

To help with this, Microsoft have been continuing their efforts to develop software which can support teaching and learning in creative ways. Take the Paint 3D for example. Completely redefining the Paint program of yesteryear, they’ve updated it to include some simply phenomenal features to help learners create amazing things. For example, you can create professional 3D models which can be explored in lots of different ways such as through Mixed Reality. The 3D objects that you create can then be placed directly into other tools such as PowerPoint to enable you to explore the creations whilst presenting about them in 3D too, you can even animate them!

Microsoft Learning Consultant, Jose Kingsley Davies, has created a series of videos to help teachers learn how they can embed this fantastic free tool into the curriculum. Focusing upon the STEAM subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics, the series of videos will prove to be super-helpful in embedding this innovative tool into your curriculum.

Other tools such as Sway allow you to create modern, innovative and beautiful creative presentations, newsletters or documents which allow learners to be creative in the presentation of their work. Sway is such an intuitive tool it enables you to easily create beautiful, striking pieces of work allowing learners to focus on the most important element of their creations – the content. Hosted online, the Sways created are viewed in a web browser but effortlessly, these are completely reshaped and resized to fit whatever browser you might be using. Therefore, whether you are viewing it on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or even a big screen, the presentation will always look awesome. Find out more about Sway and what you can do with it by visiting the Sway site here.

A recent addition to the Microsoft family of tools for education has had educators from around the world going slightly crazy (in a good way) because in its addition, it has made the awesome tool completely free. For those educators on Twitter and social media, the hashtag #FlipgridFever has been difficult to miss in recent times. Flipgrid is the awesome social learning tool that enables you to easily engage and give feedback on work that learners have created. One stumbling block for many schools previously was that this awesome platform involved a cost; well not anymore! Microsoft have purchased this fantastic piece of educational technology and made it completely free to all in education! To learn more about this fantastic tool and how it can help learning in creative ways in your school visit this page here.

Lastly but by no means least, Microsoft’s Minecraft for Education offer is phenomenal. All around the world young people are creating the most amazing things in Minecraft to demonstrate, model, enhance and support their learning. If you haven’t looked at it yet as a tool for your learners, you should do. A world in which learners take control of what they are creating, it is a fantastic tool to support all types of STEAM activities. With lots of free class resources, plugins such as the recent Chemistry update or the even more recent aquatic update enabling learners to build underwater worlds that comes with 17 standards-aligned lessons – there has never been so much support to help educators make the most of their educational technology in purposeful and meaningful ways. Learn more about Minecraft in Education here and if you’re looking for training in any of these areas, not only are there great resources and support in the Microsoft Educator Community but there is also a great educator Minecraft community you can tap in to as well by visiting here.

Never before have the opportunities for creativity been so readily available from Microsoft. Start your journey today and see what unleashing these tools in your classroom can do for learning, progress and creativity in your learners.

About the author

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, or check out his blog.

The post Get your creative curriculum on appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Ease of Deployment and set-up of classroom laptops

Mark Anderson — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:43:44 +0000

Faith can be a really powerful thing. I have faith in lots of things such as the brakes in my car working. That faith doesn’t happen automatically though. Faith in these things is built up over time which leads to us having the confidence to use them without having to think too much about them. When it comes to using technology, particularly in education, given the time constraints and tight budgets, it is important that we do not have to make leaps of faith and leave our success to chance. Just like the brakes on my car, we cannot just have blind faith that these things will work. To support this when it comes to cars we have things such as our Government imposed MOT tests to make sure that our cars are roadworthy. Safety is too important to be left to chance. In the same way, in order to ensure that the technology you purchase for your school meets the right standards and are used well, we have to make sure that the deployment of these devices has been done in ways so as to not impact on your teaching or your pupil’s learning. Additionally, we need to make sure that the devices we choose to use are set up in ways that ensure the safety of our young digital citizens too.

I class myself as a modern educator. A modern educator is someone who uses technology in the classroom to support and enhance their teaching and the learning of their students. I know how important it is to be confident that the technology we are going to use is going to work. Robust deployment processes to ensure safety and efficacy are key to the successful use of technology in education.

As a teacher, we have all had those experiences where the Wi-Fi has caused us problems, or the login times have meant that a lot of a lesson is lost whilst waiting for technology to come on and be available. Thankfully, technology is at a stage now where these issues don’t have to impact on teaching or learning any more.

So, what?

The forthcoming summer months can often be a stressful time for IT Admins as this is often the time when schools choose to refresh their technology for the start of the next academic year in readiness for when students return to school following the break. Key things to consider include setting up student and staff user accounts, device management, app deployment, shared learning spaces, linking these things to your MIS (Management Information System) – there is a lot to consider. Thankfully, Microsoft provide lots of resources to help IT Admins set up their Windows devices with ease.

By simply visiting the Microsoft Education documentation and resources pages you can find support for all types of set up activities. From looking at it from a deployment overview perspective to actually getting into the nitty gritty of cloud deployment, device management and setting up all of the tools required for teachers and students, Microsoft have you covered.

Cloud Deployment

Here you can learn about setting up your Office 365 tenant which is your first step to getting your school onto Office 365. You can also learn about how to secure your network, sync your Active Directory, sync your MIS and sort out the important licenses for all of your users.

Device Management

Here you can learn about how to successfully deploy Windows 10, manage your devices using Intune for Education, install any Office apps or other apps you wish to include from the Microsoft Store for Education and even set up Minecraft Education Edition for your colleagues.

Tools for Teachers

The final piece of the Microsoft jigsaw is to sort out all of those important tools that all of your teachers will be crying out for. In this section you will be supported in ensuring that Microsoft’s Learning Tools, OneNote Class Notebooks, Teams for Education, Microsoft Forms and access to other things such as Skype in the Classroom and other education resources are only a click away for your colleagues. It’s all here for you.

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About the author

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, or check out his blog.

The post Ease of Deployment and set-up of classroom laptops appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Affordability of devices

Mark Anderson — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 13:48:13 +0000

One of the most difficult things a school has to focus on is achieving value for money for its learners. In these times of shrinking budgets, the largest slice of your budget will always be the salaries of your staff. Additionally, whether you are an independent or state school regardless of whether you are a Primary or Secondary school or a College, it is incumbent upon us to get a return for our investments. To help with this and quite rightly so, when it comes to human resources, we use quality assurance strategies such as performance management to ensure that there is a high level of efficacy in the work that all school stakeholders undertake. The best schools work closely with their teachers to support and develop their professional standards to ensure they are the best they can be for the learners in the classroom.

The second most expensive thing covered by a school budget often comes down to the technology that is used in the school. It has always seemed strange to me however that when it comes to things such as technology in a school budget, such care and attention aren’t always given such focused inquiry. Just as you will seek a return from your investment in your human resources, equally you should seek to get a good return from your investment in the technology you choose to purchase to support teaching and learning in the classroom.

What should you look for?

Ease of use and maintenance are high on the check list for schools. The cost of maintaining technology, particularly around that of support staff, can be large. Ensuring that what you choose to purchase is well supported by the companies you buy from is also important. You will want quick and easy set up times and you’ll want to make log on times quick and simple too to avoid any loss of learning time in the classroom. You’ll also want the tools available on your devices to be proven to have an impact on learning and standards. You will probably too look for technology where colleagues can be well supported with their professional learning in using that technology to ensure that they are both confident and competent in their use of it in the classroom. Far too many schools I visit have expensive technology hidden away in cupboards never being used. Sometimes it’s not even inside cupboards, it’s the interactive displays in classrooms that are only ever used to display things where the interactivity is never used. Making sure that you think carefully about the money you spend with your school budget has never been so important.

Luckily, Microsoft have been working hard with educators and school leaders from around the world to create packages to ensure that both the hardware and software that comes into schools provide efficacy in all of areas mentioned above. Their Affordable devices for education guides showcase how you can make Microsoft work for you in your school.

With options for Windows 10 or Windows 10 S and software for learning, collaboration, creativity, computing such as Minecraft: Education Edition, PowerPoint, OneNote, Paint 3D, LEGO® Education WeDo® 2.0 and Microsoft Teams, you’ll be well placed to make impacts straight away. Most devices come with multiple input options too so not only can you use these devices as a laptop with a keyboard but you can also use them in tablet mode. This means the devices are truly mobile and can use the touch screen features such as inking to support lots of different teaching and learning activities in lots of learning spaces. Many of them also come with a stylus to help cut down the overall cost of purchase.

Workload, wellbeing, efficiency and the core business of all teachers, teaching and learning, are all supported by the superb offers available to schools; all you have to do is check out the guide which relates to your phase and you’re away.

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About the author

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, or check out his blog.

The post Affordability of devices appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Lift off this coming academic year with superb training free from Microsoft

Mark Anderson — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 14:24:30 +0000

Imagine if you went to the doctor with an ailment and they told you that they hadn’t had their knowledge about medicine and their skills updated since they left university. You’d be horrified, right?

Continuing professional development is key to ensuring that all professionals are able to make the most of cutting-edge research, knowledge and skills in their various disciplines. As education professionals, the same is true for us as teachers. Given the nature of our work, we have a moral imperative to ensure that we do the best we can by our learners and part of that is updating our skills in aspects of our professional work.

When it comes to professional learning opportunities for teachers, the courses we undertake to update our skills aren’t always accredited; not with Microsoft though! The Microsoft Educator Community (MEC) is a fantastic place where you can explore lots of different types of learning activity to support your innovative practice as a teacher where you can gain accreditation for it too!

How do you get started?

The first thing you’ll need to do is to sign up for the Microsoft Educator Community. Many choose to use their school email address to help identify you within the community (should you wish to do that). There are more than a quarter of a million educators on there, not just learning with you but also sharing their ideas and resources, asking and answering questions and much more.

Once you’re signed up to the community all you then have to do is choose which courses you’d like to complete and follow the simple instructions. The community gives you access to rich content to help embed Microsoft solutions into your curriculum and now is a great time to start thinking about doing that as we roll towards the start of the new academic year.

What can I learn?

Access to all of the courses available can be found in the MEC. You can choose from many different types of learning and different types of classroom activities. There are opportunities exploring project based learning, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, pedagogy, and more. Embedding Microsoft tools in the classroom has never been easier with courses on teaching with technology, teaching with Minecraft in the classroom, and many more.

Each course is rated by its difficulty ranging from Beginner to Advanced, with various Intermediate levels in-between. Each course is also worth a number of points which you are awarded upon your successful completion of the courses.

Once you have achieved a score of 1,000 points or more you will be awarded your Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) badge. A proud achievement and a great way of benchmarking your skills too. Alongside the MIE badge there are lots of other great badges you can earn for undertaking different activities through the MEC.

For those of you who are really keen to develop your skills further, beyond those shown above, there are lots of other badges you can earn linked to things such as pedagogy, Minecraft, use of OneNote, sharing lesson plans and more. For the full low down on the badges you can earn, check out the badges page on the MEC here.

About the author

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, or check out his blog.

The post Lift off this coming academic year with superb training free from Microsoft appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.