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.

Comments

[Todd]

Thanks for the great write up about the new Office 2010! I just wanted to drop by and let everyone know that you are now able to pre-order the new version of Office at http://store.microsoft.com/Category.aspx?CatId=210.

Also, we recently added a new 'Add Your Name' feature on our Facebook page, and I highly recommend you go and check it out! Thanks for the support, and feel free to send me any questions you may have about Office.

Thanks,

Todd
Microsoft Office Outreach Team
Todd_Oteam@hotmail.com
http://www.facebook.com/Office
http://twitter.com/Office

[Isabella_OTeam]

Thank you for providing information about some of the great new features of Office 2010. As you mentioned, Office 2010 will be released in mid-June. However, it can be pre-ordered now: http://store.microsoft.com/Category.aspx?CatId=210.

Cheers,
Isabella
MSFT Office Outreach Team