http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/default.aspx
Thanks to Ray Fleming for notifying me
Short throw projector rumour
I’m not usually one for spreading rumours but I heard today that you can get a Hitachi ultra short throw projector with wall mount fully fit for £949 with a full 3 year bulb + unit warranty.
I’m waiting on hearing confirmation but if this is true then it is an amazing deal! I guess we’re waiting on an official press release from the installs team..
Microsoft Security Essentials is now available in the UK (29th of Sep)
Quick link to download – http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ OR http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/?mkt=en-us
Overview
Security Essentials will replace your paid anti virus software. This is GREAT news for the computer industry. Why? Because by having antivirus companies charge to solve a problem put the relationship of cash and virus’ in bed with each other.
This meant that people were paying for virus’ to be written and then people were getting paid to reverse engineer these virus’. Now the virus writers are up against a whole OS and a company that has more profit than many companies have GDP.
Quick review
Download is painless and easy, once verification is completed the software downloads its own updates and begins scanning your computer. Very few clicks are required. The whole process takes about 1 minute of your time then your scan will take as much time as it needs to complete the job.
The proof will be in the pudding, by Microsoft releasing this they have really taken on a big challenge. It shows that microsoft are as willing as ever to provide what the huddled masses need.
And for education?
The impact on education is questionable. This AV client is not an enterprise product and not centrally monitored or managed so it is unlikely it will replace other AV client/server solutions.
How cool would it be if you could assign a workstation to an organization using SAML or a federated log on and get update/virus status and/or push out software?
If centralized management or some sort of auditing/reporting became available then it would replace the enterprise products at a saving of £500 on average per school (deployment costs taken into account), that’s about £8,000,000 (£8 million) across the whole of England! Nice!
And to Microsoft..
Microsoft, if you are listening… Think about some sort of central monitoring,reporting, updating system that works with a federated login such as shibboleth or something, please!
UPDATE – I just came to give a link to this and it appears that microsoft has removed the product.. No idea what’s going on there.. I get a 404 – We are sorry, the page you……
Here is the link for when they put it back online! http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
It appears that the UK site may be down.. You can always use the US link..
My pointless PLN
I joined twitter several months ago with the aim to meet educators that shared my interest. Turns out most of the people I’m following or are following me don’t share my interests. Even though most of my followers are educators it appears that their recommended sites are not what I would recommend. This doesn’t mean that I think their input is worthless its just not appropriate for me.
The main for this is that Primary Schools don’t need access to further education sites, most twitters are HE/FE and most consultants have split roles but seem to focus less on earlier years. I guess this should of been expected.
My solution is to be a bit more brutal about who I follow so that my twitter feed doesn’t get spammed with a load of irrelevant sites and comments.
It’s not all pointless though, some people on my PLN are great and have given me some great feedback and comments helping me create some great websites and publish them in real time to the people who requested the service…
So if you’re like me, which you probably aren’t then make sure you are picky about who you follow else you will feel swamped.
Syncplicity & its place in education (Software review)
Syncplicity is a small client application that periodicly uploads files to the internet so you can access them from another location. Accounts are free, limited to GB. Accounts are per email address.
Installation and configuration is unbelievably easy so there are no technical barriers.
I’m backing up my “my documents” as if I was a pupil at home on a netbook.
I think if syncplicity allowed shibboleth based logon to this service then they could be onto a winner. A school which had no servers could use this to backup and save pupils work.
There are of course a few advantages of having servers and those should not be ignored. I’m also not so sure on Becta’s stance on something like this, inevitably private information will be uploaded and the question has to be asked. Can simplicity be trusted any more or less than any other provider ie the remote backup services from Primary Technology? Primary Technology offer the same service but an annual charge of £200.
Visit syncplicity to download and check it out, I’m going to leave it running on my computer over the next few months just to see how it goes.