Schools warned off Microsoft deal
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UK technology agency Becta lodges an official complaint over Microsoft's school licensing agreements.
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Education Secretary Charles Clarke rules against admissions policies followed by some Catholic schools.
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The BBC is threatened with a complaint to the EC over use of Microsoft software in its iPlayer.
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The European Commission warns that Microsoft could face further fines for failing to comply with anti-trust rulings.
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Razzle dazzle 'em Interactive whiteboards that are used in schools and colleges across the UK could potentially cause eyesight damage due to a lack of basic government guidelines.â¦
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Parents are urged to ensure their children keep their Christmas gadgets out of class.
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Troubled engineering firm Jarvis is thrown off a Â£92m schools contract  by Norfolk Council and warns its losses will continue into 2005.
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European tech group complains new OS breaks the deal, ignores standards.
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Facing sharp criticism from academic computing experts, Blackboard Inc. announced Thursday what it calls a legally binding promise that it won't pursue patent lawsuits against users of open-source online classroom technology.
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Microsoft Corp.'s decision to release a major upgrade for its flagship operating system in the same month that hundreds of thousands of students are reporting to college campuses across the nation is causing a major headache for the higher education community.
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Schools are given new guidance aimed at stopping pupils using mobile phones and the internet to bully others.
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Some colleges are fretting the release of Microsoft&#39;s upgrade to its XP operating system -- whose release coincides with the opening of campuses around the country -- saying that multiple downloads of the patch could significantly
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The European Union threatened Microsoft Corp. with new fines on Thursday, claiming the software giant had failed to live up to legal promises to provide competitors with updated, complete and reasonably priced information on work group servers.
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By Sam Burson  TEACHING experts have called for measures to be taken against companies running youth websites following the arrest of two teenagers for 'cyber-bullying'.
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Microsoft will spend $235.5 million in schools worldwide over the next five years, part of a plan to triple the number of students and teachers trained in its software programs to up to 270 million by 2013.The money, part of the Partners in Learning program, will go toward training and skills programs in areas with limited IT training and equipment, said Orlando Ayala, vice president of the Unlimited Potential Group, part of Microsoft&#39;s education division, on Tuesday.The announcement is one of several expected to come from the Government Leaders Forum (GLF), an annual conference where Microsoft courts educators and government officials. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates will keynote at the GLF on Wednesday in Berlin.Microsoft&#39;s investment shows how important it views developing markets to its future business. Last year, Microsoft introduced the Student Innovation Suite, which includes the XP Starter Edition plus educational applications, for $3 for qualifying countries.Microsoft faces heated competition from companies supporting the open-source OS Linux and associated software in developing countries. &quot;I think as a company we welcome choice,&quot; Ayala said. &quot;Frankly, we welcome the competition.&quot;The company&#39;s educational funding comes with a hitch: &quot;Of course, that includes the fact they [the schools] use Windows,&quot; Ayala said.That approach contradicts one recommendation contained in a study of software usage in Europe completed in November 2006.Presented to the European Commission, the study concluded that it&#39;s better for students to learn general IT skills rather than just proprietary software.Otherwise, it&#39;s less likely that software from other vendors will be used if people are only trained in programs from one vendor, said Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, of the United Nations University-Merit in Maastricht in the Netherlands. Ghosh is one of the authors of the study.Microsoft&#39;s educational donations look less generous when the company spends &quot;it in order to create a market that&#39;s forced into buying its products,&quot; he said. But Ghosh added it&#39;s hard to argue that struggling schools &quot;should refuse the computers altogether if there&#39;s no money.&quot;Microsoft has recently made significant deals in developing areas. A nongovernmental organization in Russia is buying 1 million units of the Student Innovation Suite over the next five years, Ayala said. The company is also supplying 50,000 units of the same software to Mexico and 150,000 to Libya, he said.While Microsoft is nudging consumers and businesses in developed markets to use its latest Windows Vista operating system, XP will remain the OS the company supports for low-cost laptops such as the Asus Eee and Intel&#39;s Classmate PC, Ayala said.The reason is XP has a smaller footprint than Vista, Ayala said, referring to factors such as how much memory the OS uses and the size of the OS on a PC&#39;s hard drive.Microsoft is still working through some of the &quot;technical limitations&quot; that remain in&#160;putting XP on the XO, the green PC from the One Laptop Per Child project, Ayala said.
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More interoperability woes for Redmond The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has referred Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for alleged anti-competitive practices in the schools software market.â¦
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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.