Gates unveils school technology initiatives
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates outlined on Wednesday a vision of education in which students worldwide use high-speed Internet connections and curriculums that draw on online resources such as Wikipedia to become more globally competitive. "We are now on the verge of something where technology will make a difference," Gates said in an address before the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, Scotland. Advances in hardware, software, and connectivity and are enabling a "user-centric" focus for technology, letting people access information over vast distances inexpensively, Gates said. The address by Gates concluded the two-day Government Leaders Forum, an annual Microsoft-sponsored conference attended by government leaders throughout Europe. The delegates addressed education issues and how Europe can become more competitive through the use of IT. Gordon Brown, the U.K.'s chancellor of the exchequer who oversees financial matters, warned in a speech before Gates' address that the number of jobs that require no skills in the country will drop from 3.4 million today to only 600,000 by 2020. Those who donât have access to education programs and acquire IT skills are "at risk of being unemployed over the next decade." "We cannot afford to ignore the potential of any child," Brown said. Microsoft is backing several educational programs aimed at integrating technologies into classrooms that some young people may already be encountering outside of school. Teachers may have trouble keeping up with students who are already using devices such as the Xbox Live gaming system at their homes, Gates said. "When they [students] come back into the classroom and there's a chalkboard there, that teacher has a hard time living up to the level of drama and richness," he said. Gates announced that Microsoft will expand the company's Innovative Schools initiative, which looks at ways to better integrate technology and learning, to an additional 12 countries: Ireland, the U.K., France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Qatar, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Hong Kong. Microsoft has undertaken a variety of projects as part of the program. In Philadelphia, the company joined the city's school district and built a 750-student high school -- called a School of the Future -- that focuses on how technology can improve student performance. It opened in September 2006. The company provided technical guidance, which included the building of a secure Web portal for parents and students for access to assignments, class schedules and grades. In the U.K., Microsoft backs the Building Schools for the Future program, a Â£40 billion ($78 billion) government program to revamp secondary education. The company assists local authorities on ways to integrate technology into education. In Taipei, students at Zhong Lun High School have improved their acceptance rate from 36 percent to 50 percent since it became a School of the Future two years ago, Microsoft said. The company also helped with a distance education facility for teachers, where they can design and publish e-learning material. At the start of his address, Gates spoke of Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American steel magnate who later used his wealth to fund libraries and educational institutions. Next year, Gates will step down as Microsoft's chairman to focus on the philanthropy through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on global health and development issues. Gates recalled one of Carnegie's statements: "He who dies rich, dies disgraced." "Iâm working on avoiding that, but it's a high responsibility," Gates said to laughs.
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TODAY'S LESSON: Nearly all U.S. schools are connected to the Internet, according to a new study, but they still lag behind most of society in using computer technology.
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"TechKnow" program doles out PCs to children who complete special class, meet standards regarding grades and attendance.
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Microsoft has trained 200,000 teachers in India on the use of computers, ahead of its original target to train 80,000 teachers in the country during the five-year period ending December this year, it said.The company introduced the program, called project Shiksha, in 2003 with the objective of&#160;raising the computer literacy of Indian teachers and students&#160;in government-run schools. The 200,000 teachers trained so far have in turn trained about 10 million students, a spokeswoman for Microsoft India said on Monday.The moves by Microsoft to offer free or subsidized software in India have however come in for criticism from the Free Software Foundation, which compared Microsoft&#39;s philanthropy to that of a cigarette manufacturer handing out free samples of cigarettes to students.The communist-run state of Kerala in south India is actively&#160;promoting open-source software&#160;in schools, but most other states and the federal government are beneficiaries of Microsoft&#39;s programs.Microsoft works with state governments to help teachers use its technology in school administrations and also to include it in their curriculum and teaching methods, she said. While the state governments provide the classrooms, Microsoft provides the hardware and software, and a team of trainers for the teachers.Although the company has reached its training target, it&#39;s not stopping the program yet. It did not say how many more teachers and students it plans to cover under the program, though.The company has introduced low-cost, starter editions of its Vista operating system, as well as local language versions of its Office suite to target both the academic and e-governance markets.&#160;
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T.C. Williams High School is handing out laptops to make sure students of all backgrounds have the latest equipment in an increasingly computerized world.
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Technological skills, like maneuvering a mouse, are becoming part of a childâs developmental milestones.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's research arm is celebrating its 15-year anniversary this week by patting itself on the back for creating innovating technology and showing off some new work being done in the group. Microsoft Research held an event at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus Tuesday where Chairman and co-founder Bill Gates appeared via video to applaud the organization, Microsoft said. "During the past 15 years, Microsoft researchers have contributed amazing breakthroughs and insights that have advanced the state of the art in dozens of technology fields," Gates said in his talk, according to a press statement. "Their work is a clear reflection of Microsoft's commitment to innovation." Microsoft Research was founded in 1991, and works independent of the product groups to invent new technology. It also works with academic programs and provides grants to help promote IT research and innovation in universities. At Tuesday's event, the research team demonstrated some new technologies currently in development, Microsoft said. They included visualization technologies that combine maps from Windows Live Local with other maps -- such as those of bike trails or bus routes -- to create hybrid maps that can be helpful to users. Other technologies demonstrated included one that allowed images and data to be displayed projector-like on tabletops, walls and other surfaces and manipulated with hand gestures -- thus doing away with the need for a mouse or monitor -- and graphics technology for transforming two-dimensional images into 3D graphics, Microsoft said. While not all of the technologies developed within Microsoft Research make it into actual products, some recent ones that have will be included in the forthcoming Windows Vista OS, Microsoft said. They include new desktop search technologies that allow users to locate anything stored on their computer quickly, as well as technology for providing a unified user experience for searching on both the Web and locally on the desktop, Microsoft said. Microsoft Research has more than 700 researchers at five laboratories around the world. Aside from Redmond, the research group has labs in Beijing; Bangalore, India; Cambridge, England; and Mountain View, California.
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Technological skills, like maneuvering a mouse, are becoming part of childâs developmental milestones.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Thursday announced a new $328 million plan to provide computer and Internet services through public libraries in developing nations.
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PARIS  - Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates signed a co-operation agreement with UNESCO on Wednesday to improve access to computers, the Internet and information technology training in developing countries.
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Attendees at this year&#146;s PowerSchool University ramped up their student information system skills with the new PowerSchool 4.0 and augmented their development activities through peer networking. [Aug 3]
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InfoWorld - Forty students from around the world got to pitch their software projects to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday as part of a worldwide software development challenge.
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By Tiffany Erickson Deseret Morning News  Davis School District leaders want students to get the most out of the district's computers and taxpayers' money by refurbishing older computers and giving them to students.
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By Mark Guydish, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Times Leader  Sep. 22--UNION TWP. -- Northwest Area High School students will have access to more computers, and teachers will have more high-tech "smart boards," thanks to a $67,000 state grant.
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The One Laptop Per Child project to lessen the digital divide is in full swing.
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Microsoft Corp  unveiled a new  initiative on Monday that will give college and high school  students around the world free access to technology tools used  to develop and design software.
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Even as he moves to part time, Microsoft chairman will continue pursuit of such technologies as tablet computing, speech recognition. Everything will be a computer, Gates says