Anith Gopal

In December, my local BBC News station showed an interview with a head teacher, who’d had to crawl across a sloping playground, covered in black ice, to send out a text to let parents know the school was closed. Which surprised me because he was using one of the systems that allows you to send out the message from a website

If you’re running the ICT systems in your school, and NOT running the curriculum ICT, then you may want to forward this onto the ICT Co-ordinator, or to the Deputy Head in charge of Curriculum Development. Although it’s got ‘IT’ in the title, the IT Academy is actually all about curriculum development and helping your students/staff to gain commercially valuable qualifications. Don’t tell the curriculum side, but it’s also a great way to get your school an inclusive MSDNAA and TechNet Plus subscription if you’re having difficulty getting it paid for otherwise! I’ve spent a few hours in the company of the team who promote the Microsoft IT Academy scheme in the UK.

I had the chance to visit Warwickshire last week, and to meet up with Chris Page and the rest of the local authority education IT team.

After last night’s post , about the first to deploy the full release version of Windows 7 amongst schools, the race has changed.

I was in a training session on Friday, when we were joined by the Microsoft IT team – the clever chaps that keep our IT network running right across the business, seemingly in the face of all of the odds. I believe that the odds really are stacked heavily against keeping the IT system stable, because each user has complete control over their own computer – for example, I can hit F12 and rebuild any machine at any point, self-install software and am encouraged to use everything from Instant Messenger to development tools. Asif Jinnah who manages the UK IT systems, talked about what they have been doing to reduce our internal IT running costs, and although our challenge is different to yours, I thought you might enjoy hearing some of our story of balancing the need to grow our business whilst managing our IT costs.

From what I’ve seen visiting schools in this country, I’d say on the whole…not much. (Don’t feel bad; teachers and schools in the US trust students a lot less.) The level trust we have for students and pupils is always made obvious when I visit other countries. Here are two examples.

Last week, as Twitter followers will already know, I spent the week in Atlanta, at our internal conference called MGX (Microsoft Global Exchange).

This is just a quick one for Monday morning. Last week, when I talked about Information Security, and Becta’s guidance, at the Learning Gateway Conference, there was quite a bit of interest in the two-factor authentication that would be required for all teacher access to sensitive data from outside the school (eg if they are accessing your MIS and Learning Platform from home).

At today’s Learning Gateway Conference, I talked about the Becta Information Security guidelines. My perspective was “here’s the Becta official advice, and here’s my take on an action plan for you”. Even though the subject was Information Security, and it was after lunch, the hour seemed to whizz by ( and nobody fell asleep! )

Every now and again I come across a bit of information that I’m not sure about. Like this from a written answer in Parliament : The Next Generation Learning campaign sponsored by Becta is designed to raise the awareness of parents or carers, employers and learners of the benefits of the use of technology in education and to drive greater demand for it.

Yesterday we were out and about on a West Midlands road trip with a gaggle of colleagues from the global education team. The aim of the trip was to see some of the things that are happening in UK schools, to inform our future directions and policies. It was a little bit like a school trip, as I checked at each stage we hadn’t lost anybody on our way.