Hundreds of teachers across Abu Dhabi to receive Office 365 training

Equipping teachers with the latest Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skills is vital to improving teaching and learning outcomes in the 21st century.

Once teachers have the skills they need to effectively teach subjects in STEM they can stimulate and enhance learning skills for their students.

The Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC), recognising the importance of improving teacher learning outcomes, recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft at the BETT Middle East Leadership Forum and Expo.

Quite an appropriate setting, given that the forum aims to promote the discovery of technology and knowledge to enhance lifelong learning.

Training teachers to transform the way they teach

At the core of this partnership is our goal to deploy Office 365 across all ADEC schools. We will also be training over 360 teachers from across all public schools in Abu Dhabi, as part of ADEC’s Professional Development Program. Our aim is for them to transfer their knowledge to their colleagues, and use this knowledge to transform the way they teach.

Providing the tools to prepare learners for future challenges

This partnership really makes sense for us, because we share similar values to ADEC. We share a vision to produce world class learners who are prepared to meet future global challenges. ADEC is committed to improving leadership, teaching methods and learning skills to achieve this and our Office 365 offering lends itself to exactly this.

We are continuously providing teachers and students with new technologies that support the integration and development of ICT skills at school level.

The features of Office 365 allow teachers and students to access and share educational materials anywhere, anytime. 1 terabyte of OneDrive space allows them to collaborate, share and co-author documents; and by integrating the cloud tool into the curriculum, there’s real potential to develop new, innovative teaching methods that simultaneously prepare students for the workplace.

Abu Dhabi is considered a hub of educational excellence, so we are anticipating great results coming out of our partnership with ADEC, and hopefully these learnings will be applied elsewhere in the future.