June Conferences Are Looming!

May is winding down here... and it will soon be June. And it will be an exciting month! I'm going to two big conferences in the span of a couple weeks, InfoComm/EduComm in Las Vegas and then ISTE (the conference formerly known as NECC) in Denver. I already have a whole lot of briefings lined up with a wide variety of ed. tech companies, and this will no doubt be a month where a whole lot of new products are released.

Look for continuing coverage here on my blog, in the magazine, and in the DA Daily.

Microsoft Office 2010 Adds Handy Education Features

I had an interesting meeting with Cameron Evans in NYC yesterday, he's the national and chief technology officer of education at Microsoft (and has a pretty active and interesting blog). It was a long conversation about Office 2010, (available free in Beta download or for business users now, for the rest of us in June), which if you haven't heard, is a pretty significant release. Among the many new features are several designed with school users in mind...

Word 2010 has an innovation that Microsoft says conquers a "27-year-old problem," of how best to edit and collaborate on documents without all the confusion of emailing around multiple versions: live coauthoring. They devoted a whole page interview to the feature on the Office site, saying:

"Using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, the tool allows multiple people to work on a single copy of a document at the same time or at different times, seamlessly, whether they are online or offline."

Students and teachers can collaborate on multiple devices and in multiple locations, all simultaneously on the same paper. Pretty cool. Makes sending versions back and forth look...silly. I also liked the new "navigation pane," which detects subheadings in the document and creates buttons for each in the margin. Grab and drag a button up or down, and that section of the document moves, so to move the conclusion to the second paragraph, just grab and move it, without highlighting and dragging across pages, copying, pasting and cutting, etc.

Also, PowerPoint has some better presentation tools useful to classroom teachers, including audio and video inserting, new video editing tools right in PowerPoint, or the ability to embed streaming videos from sites like YouTube directly into a slide. No need to switch between programs, exit the slide show, open Windows Media Player, etc. to incorporate multimedia in a presentation. Also very cool.

And for the first time ever, all of the many programs in Office 2010 also have the same interface Microsoft calls The Ribbon, at the top of the page, making it much easier to learn and navigate multiple programs quickly. Great for students to be able to learn and use Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, etc. and not spend hours and hours learning each one.

And, Microsoft has built in support for mobile devices in Office 2010 as well, so students (with the right smartphone and application) can access files like papers in Word from anywhere with their phone.

Collaboration and mobile learning... these are topics DA has pointed to as technology trends in K12, and Office 2010 is certainly illustrating what a lot of experts have envisioned for the future.

HP's New "Mobile Thin Client"

You may have seen or heard about virtualization/thin clients/zero clients before, as I've written about all of the above in DA. This type of computing makes a ton of sense for schools, which have large fleets of computers, each one with multiple users, low technology budgets and limited IT staff. So having virtual desktops running on thin clients is a great solution, as it allows for much less frequent replacement schedules, far less maintenance, easier for multiple users, and enables individual users to keep all of their information in the cloud, either local or on the big ol' Internet.

So, there are a number of big players in the K12 space for thin clients or zero clients. But I think the company most out in front is HP. Their new virtualization solutions combine everything a school would need into one package: hardware like monitors, thin client appliances, servers and the like, as well as packaged software such as Microsoft's Windows MultiPoint Server 2010.

Well HP's latest is something you might not have seen before. The new 4320t is a mobile thin client. So just like a desktop thin client, this is a machine designed to be used with a server or the cloud, but is a laptop instead, obviously adding mobility. It has very little hard drive space and not as much processing power as a full-fledged laptop... because you don't need much when you're using it as a thin client and not storing much, if anything, on it. It's slated to be released later this month, so check back for pricing then, which I'm guessing will be much lower than a laptop. Might it be a worthy consideration for a one-to-one program?

NEC Unleashes New Digital Signage

If you needed any proof that televisions and digital signage are getting larger, nicer and yet less expensive, well then, you obviously don't read the circulars in the Sunday paper. Or leave the house. And if so, I present to you Exhibit A, the new NEC S521, a 52" addition to their S Series of affordable LCD digital signage, which are beefier, more durable versions of televisions built to stand up to many hours of continuous use in environments like schools.

This is a full HD 1080p resolution unit with features including an ambient light sensor to adjust the picture automatically based on the environment, Energy Star compliance, connections like DisplayPort, VGA, DVI-D, 5 BNC (RGB/HV), composite, component, S-Video and HDMI, remote monitoring and control through Ethernet, RS-232 in/out, IR and DDC/CI connections and more. MSRP of just $2699, which is pretty great all things considered. No more handwritten paper signs for announcements in the school lobby!

IntelliGuard Systems Pilots New Type of Emergency Notification

I've written before in DA about emergency notification systems, their increasing popularity, many new capabilities that extend beyond emergencies to more regular communication, and transition to fully hosted, cloud-based systems.

Unfortunately, for all those developments, the question can certainly still be raised: what if in an emergency, your notification system works perfectly, but the wireless network that alerts your community's cellular phones is overloaded? Messages that need to be heard immediately could be delayed or lost.

This is the scenario that American Messaging has responded to with their RAVENAlert devices, made by their subsidiary IntelliGuard Systems. These are dedicated wall units that immediately display text messages from an administrator in every room with the units installed, and have a loud alarm and flashing light They use a dedicated network that has been in use primarily in hospitals and by first responders, but also on college campuses for decades, so it can't get overloaded because emergency messages are its only purpose.

Their latest product focuses on alerting individuals, not just rooms or buildings, via a small keychain messenger. The company just tested the devices last week with 50 students, faculty and staff members at Texas Southern University in Houston, and all users were instantly notified simultaneously while spread across the 150-acre campus. Pretty interesting...and definitely a possibility in the K12 arena. And another reason to not lose your keys!