Education education education at BETT 2010

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DEEP3874

I have spent the last four days on the Microsoft stand at a huge education show (BETT 2010) to field technical questions on Windows 7 and Office 2010. I take my hat off to the IT Pro’s working in schools as they have to cope with all kinds of applications and hardware and usually there are only one or two per school.

But don’t take my word for it here are some of the more unusual conversations I had:

  • Will Pagemaker 5 run on windows 7 as I want to upgrade form windows 3.11? (no idea !)
  • Can I save my document in DAISY format? Daisy is an open accessibility format allowing documents to be zoomed in and narrated as audio (like talking books) , and the add-on for this can be found here
  • What happened to Producer so I could make a video of my PowerPoint presentation?.  This is now built into PowerPoint 2010 (go to backstage i.e. file-> share)..

image

  • Where did Moviemaker go in Windows 7 – it’s now a live program and you can download live maker here

In future these guys will be opening up their networks to pupils’ laptops and of course there is the 20% turnover in every school every year as pupils form the senior year leave and new ones arrive in the junior year.

Fortunately there are quite a few things to make life a little easier for them , probably the most important being live@edu, which is free Microsoft hosted e-mail and collaboration for pupils and students, so that the IT staff in a school only have to worry about e-mail for the staff.

Other resources for schools in the UK are on the Microsoft education portal, and the education team’s blog including part 1 and part 2 of ICT Money Saving tips, which was a standing room only talk on the Microsoft stand at BETT.

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