Microsoft vs. Apple – Either, And, or Both?

I spent an interesting afternoon this week with an experienced teacher and department head of a small private school. I was amazed at how effectively he wielded his Apple iPad. And as we began to discuss the way in which he used the iPad in the classroom, I was even more impressed.

I have often opined that the iPad is a great way of consuming content, but you need a PC with a real keyboard to create content. As is often the case, I was only partly correct in my thinking. True, if you are writing a lengthy article and mostly typing words into a computer, any desktop or laptop computer is far more effective that an iPad or tablet (without an attached keyboard).

But how much classroom content consists of pure text?

Today’s students are best engaged with words, images, and video – and all in an interactive fashion that allows an instructor to  emphasize, dissect, highlight, and notate. And once content is created, to quickly post it to a website where students can gain access.

For many teachers, this is an improbable task. And for many organizations this can be a difficult due to institutional policies and infrastructure limitation, but it should not be so.

While there are a number of solutions to this dilemma, it is important to realize a couple of important principles. And this is the answer to either, and, or both. You can easily create and share content with Windows based devices and Apple or iOS devices or Android devices. But any argument about which DEVICE is better is pointless and mostly a waste of time. The best device to create content on is the device YOU are comfortable creating content on.

Here are three things you should consider as you discover the best way to manage content creation and publication in your public or private web space:

1.       Does the platform, solution, or program you are proposing support all types of devices?

2.       Do you have editorial and access control and ownership of the process and the content?

3.       Does the storage facility or website provide access to all browser types?

One of the technologies we recommend is SharePoint. SharePoint is many things: a shared document repository, a public website, and a development platform. And while the core features of SharePoint are impressive, the real potential of SharePoint is its ability accommodate a very wide variety of devices.

“Accommodating a wide variety of devices” is a little vague.  By this I mean that apps built for the various devices have a specific SharePoint publishing feature built into them.

To check this out, open up one of the many apps you have on your device and see if there is not a SharePoint or WebDAV Server option for file storage. Many of the popular applications I use on my iPad and iPhone come with that functionality.

Remember that getting a document into the cloud or online is only half (or less) of the solution. You also  need to provide a link to the content you just published, provide access control, automate the placement of that content into your student’s workspace, and then provide a venue for feedback or grading in the case of a worksheet or assignment.   Oh and then there is the question of document retention, archiving, and lifespan.

Forgive me if I am overcomplicating a simple solution, but from an institutional point of vew there is a little more going on here than a simple Dropbox sharing. At least it seems to me that there should be a little more going on.

It is apparent that Microsoft has embraced quite thoroughly the consumerization of IT. This is the process by which computing becomes less and less device specific. Our infrastructure must embrace and accommodate solutions that are available to anyone at any time on pretty much any device that is internet capable, to be truly effective.

So when someone asks me whether I like Microsoft or Apple, my response is generally YES – Either, And, or Both! And that is a good place to start in having a conversation about content creation, sharing, and management.                          

 

Office 365 & Google Docs Smackdown - And the winner is...

I was recently asked why we recommended Office 365 instead of Google and the collaboration tools called Google Docs, when most Google services are free.  My first thought was to wonder if having the constant interruption of unsolicited advertising is actually a significant hidden cost, but that’s a subject for another day. Thankfully, when you sign up as an organization using Google Docs the advertising stops.

Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365 are a set of web based productivity tools used by many individuals and organizations. From a product origination standpoint, Google Docs evolved out of features developed for individual Gmail users and Microsoft Office 365 was developed as an extension of the popular Microsoft Office suite of programs. The origin of these two systems is an important distinction and should not be overlooked.

Here is a summary of features in both:

Domain based email (you@yourdomain.org):  Google Mail vs.  Exchange Email
Word Processing:     Document vs. Word
Spreadsheets and Calculations:    Spreadsheet  vs. Excel
Presentation:       Presentation  vs. PowerPoint
Note taking/ Other     Form & Drawing vs. One Note
Document Storage, Sharing, and Collaboration:  Google Docs  vs. SharePoint
Instant Messaging & Voice over Internet Protocol: Google Voice  vs. Lync 2010

Microsoft Office has always been about providing advanced document creation and management, while Google and subsequently Google Docs have evolved from the monetization of your eyeballs looking at advertisements. How we got here might be an interesting academic exercise, but you are probably more interested in knowing which is best for your organization. For our purposes today, we will compare Google Docs with the Office 365 E-2 plan, which are roughly equivalent in features and both are free for education.

My purpose is not to do a feature by feature comparison and evaluate relative merits and/or weaknesses. That has been done many times by a number of objective authors. Rather, my purpose is to consider the two systems in their entirety and evaluate the way in which you might work in a more seamless and integrated fashion.

A comparison of features suggests a great deal of similarity in the two products, but there are important differences. The most important differentiator is the integration with your Microsoft technologies.

But wait you say, we are an Apple based organization. Well if that is the case, then you are really not asking the right question at all with respect to this article. But it does make a point.

Before you can decide upon which of the productivity suites, Google Docs or Office 365, is right for you; there needs to be a candid evaluation of your school computing environment. If you are primarily an Apple organization or an Open Source organization, then my opinion is that there is little difference between the two (unless you are using the Mac version of Office).  However, if you are operating primarily in a Microsoft environment, Office 365 is a clear winner. And the reason is the deep and feature rich integration between the Microsoft Desktop and the cloud (Office 365).

What do I mean about integration, well let’s consider the definition:

Integration (from the Latin integer, meaning whole or entire) generally means combining parts so that they work together or form a whole.

Integration in Office 365 takes many forms, perhaps the most important is the ability to move on and off your desktop, laptop, or other device and have your documents with you – even when you are offline (no internet). This takes the form of automatic synchronization of documents and emails once you reconnect. With Google Docs and email if you have no internet connection you are out of business.

Another deep integration feature is the management of complex documents on your desktop.
For most teachers, and certainly all but your most advanced students, the web based tools of either Google Docs or Office 365 web based services will be adequate. But your key administrators, school secretaries, and finance staff will be severely handicapped using only the web based version of Word (Document) or Excel (Spreadsheet). Accordingly, having the capacity to move seamlessly between the simple and the complex within the same interface is crucial. In other words, you can’t create documents with advanced formatting in either web based version, but you can create them on your desktop version of Office and save it to Office 365 without difficulty. Not the case with Google Docs.

I’ll mention one more deep integration feature, with respect to document management specifically. In Office 365, you can save your documents to a folder that appears to be on your computer, but actually resides in the cloud (Office 365). And you can use familiar drag and drop functions to move documents to the various folders in either environment. Furthermore, you can set up the automatic synchronization of those documents.

If you do a simple search on Office 365 vs. Google Docs and you find a wide variety of experts extolling the virtues of Office 365 or Google Docs, depending upon which they favor. And for the record, the reviews I saw tended to favor Office 365 overall, but only slightly.  Now that Google Docs no longer enjoys any kind of cost advantage, perhaps even more so.

However, almost all reviews pointed to the superior functionality of Office 365 when combined with the desktop version of Office Professional (desktop software).

In the world of commercial organizations this is a huge barrier to overcome, but in the world of academic licensing you get Office Professional plus as part of your Microsoft licensing agreement for schools. See my previous article about Open Value Subscription for Education Services (OVS-ES). This weighs the comparison heavily in favor of Office 365.

Let’s add one other significant factor to this system level comparison. The Live@EDU services, which provide cloud based email, document sharing, and social functions for students is now part of Office 365 and designed specifically for education, not business in general. Integrating Live@EDU into your school provides email, cloud based storage, collaboration tools for lesson material between students and teachers, and a controlled social platform for student creativity. These are enormously helpful tools, particularly for upper grade levels. In fact some have used the Live@EDU services as the foundation for a robust Learning Management System.

Finally, management and support is far, far superior in Office 365. For starters, you get unlimited technical support with a live human being – not a search engine. And the increased level of detail for administering the services is substantial. In fact, you’ll probably need to have some level of expertise on staff to help you manage this because you are actually controlling to a large extent the actual server environment hosting your services.

Oh, and one last thing.  A core element of your data management plan, which should have oversight policies with respect to your schools intellectual property, should address how you control data.  Google docs accounts normally evolve out of individual Gmail accounts and therefore (by definition) violate the most basic tenants of your data management plan.

If you have ever experienced a legal discovery, you will understand how difficult it can be to gain access to communication by staff members who are using primarily their personal email accounts or personally owned Google Docs accounts.  True, an enterprise wide version Google Doc’s can be setup, but trying to do that after a user has years of mostly personal stuff in the system may not be an easy task.

Summary

When you consider these two cloud based productivity suites as a complex communication tool, you have to consider more than just the list of features and the cost. You must consider your data management plan, the makeup of your users (and their computing preferences), the organizations computing environment, and how well the service will integrate into your infrastructure.

Most comparisons look at a list of features and do a side by side comparison, and while that is helpful, it seems that it ignores the one obvious question.  Here’s the question:  In which format do you create the significant documents used in your organization? Statistics still suggest a large majority of you use Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Power Point. And to a lesser extent you may use other products in the Office Professional Plus 2010 suite.

Do you honestly think that using Google docs to manage Microsoft originated documents would be a superior solution?
 
Admittedly, the individual Gmail account and related Google doc features for individuals are impressive and useful. But extending that organization wide is a fundamentally different matter.  Personal Gmail accounts are entirely inadequate for use in a public school setting (same goes for Hotmail or yahoo mail). Privacy issues alone should give you pause. But ultimately the administration of the school has no control over individual owned email accounts or Google Docs accounts.

If you ultimately decide to use Google Docs, please be sure to set it up properly with appropriate groups, permissions, and access control. Do it as an organization, not as a collection of individuals, and incorporate your schools domain name into the service.

And let’s end on a positive note – a shout out for Google docs. It is a far superior solution to using nothing, and it is a great solution for those using email accounts included with their website hosting service, drop box, ever note, or the other variety of sharing solutions.

It is however, a distance second class competitor to Microsoft Office 365 in my humble opinion. In all probability, the popularity of Google Docs is due to the features that users loved about Microsoft Office, but were unwilling to pay for. And frankly that used to be a good reason…. but no longer.

Learning Management Systems - Are you missing the obvious?

OK, its POP Quiz time: What percentage of Charter Schools has a LMS in place?
Hint: This is not a FaceBook (Like My Status) related question!
Answer: I have not a clue, but my guess is not many.

I don’t know entirely what seems to be driving the LMS conversation lately, but over the past few months we’ve heard a great deal of discussion regarding it. This past week I spent significant time trying to understand the concepts, the key players, and the benefits.

If you are a Charter School administrator, you really ought to know about Learning Management Systems. It is something that will improve the quality of instruction and make life better for our front line teaching staff. It will also provide benefits to administrators as well.

A Learning Management Systems (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, and reporting of training programs, classroom and online events, e-learning programs, and training content. I suppose you could (and maybe have) used a collection of three ring binders for this purpose, but as we continue to digitize things, a computer based version of this process will probably be in your future.

A slight variation of this definition would include content, as in a system that helps create the content upon which all of the management described above depends. A content concentric system would be labeled a Learning Content Management System (LCMS). For purposes of this article, I refer to both.
Are you considering a Learning Management System? It’s a great idea and here are some suggestions that might help.

But before we get started, there is the obvious. Is your learning environment driving the requirement for an LMS or is it the other way around? If you are considering an LMS for the sake of the LMS technology, you have it all backwards.

The overriding consideration in your LMS evaluation should be the curriculim. If your curriculim is elearning oriented, your staff technically inclined, and your coursework primarily digital, then this could be a very good idea.

If not this could be interesting, to say the least.

Start with a candid evaluation of your ecosystem

Why are you evaluating a LMS?  Where do you start? Are your teachers clamoring for it, or is the conversation being driven by an ambitious sales rep? Do you see the vision of a successful implementation or is this just the latest “Hot” idea brought to you by your IT providers?

Your schools mission and curriculum emphasis will be one of the core considerations. While possible, it is a little more challenging to manage the performing arts in a digital world. But technology driven schools will benefit greatly.

One criterion would seem obvious, but may not be. You might first want to evaluate how much of your course content is eLearning capable, or at least presentable in a digital format, versus traditional learning. In other words, if you conduct most of your instructional hours with chalk boards, or whiteboards, paper, pencils, and other traditional education tools, the relative value of a LMS is diminished.

Start with a candid evaluation of your faculties approach to their teaching profession. Are they young and tech savvy teachers, or more mature and technology resistant teachers? Do they embrace the existing Information Systems with great enthusiasm, or do they reluctantly check their email because they are required to do so.

If you want a sure fired rebellion on your hands, try to implement a highly automated LMS system into an environment where technology is chaotic, unreliable, and underutilized.

Think clearly about the investment of time and resources you are about to make

In the world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, a close relative to LRM, there is a 70% failure rate for project implementations. The reasons are varied but boil down to steep learning challenges, lack of training, and failing to plan. And there is a universal tendency to underestimate the volume of keystrokes required to input all of the data points needed to make the system operational.

Here is a short list of data sets you will need to create:

·         Student Records

·         Faculty Records

·         Course Materials (the largest set)

·         Calendars and schedules

·         Grading Criteria

Additionally, you will need to create a secure connection to your states Student Information System to synchronize grades, attendance, and state mandated reporting. If your LMS is incapable of doing this, it will require a significant duplication of effort.

Course materials are by far the largest data set that needs to be created and it is an ongoing creation cycle, so think not only about what you already have (and in what format it exists), but also consider what authoring tools are available for content creation.  I would recommend biasing your LMS selection to one that utilizes common authoring tools used already by your staff, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Furthermore, most multimedia content is delivered by an internet browser and you will need to accommodate all types of users. For example, Apple devices (like iPads ) have great difficulty with media created using Adobe Flash and you may need to provide accommodations.

Choose the LMS that integrates best with your existing infrastructure

The most common network security model in a Charter School, especially those with older students is an Active Directory environment. Active Directory provides access control, user management, and group policy modeling. An LMS based upon Microsoft technologies (such as SharePoint) will use the active directory information to automatically propagate your student and faculty listings. This elimination of re-entering hundreds of records is significant and recurring.

There are other significant Microsoft solutions that will interact with your LMS. Three common programs are your Outlook based email, Lync 2010 messaging systems, and SharePoint.

A robust email system used both by the staff and students is extremely important and will serve as the transport medium for much of the learning outcomes. Please review previous posts about Microsoft Exchange email, it is very relevant to your LMS.

Because we communicate differently with  each other based upon our presence (or availability), if you are using Lync 2010 for internal messaging, you will also find it very helpful to have a LMS that incorporates the advanced messaging features found in Lync 2010, including Live Meeting services which can be used to actually record lectures for replay.

And SharePoint is the technology or framework which several of the most popular LMS systems use.

If your school operates with an Open Source architecture, an Apple environment, or other  non-Microsoft  technologies, there are fewer automated ways of connecting student and faculty records into your LMS. And this may influence your decision one way or another.

Consider using a pilot program to work out bugs and implementation issues

All of the LMS vendors I spoke with recommend identifying a core group of “early technology adopters” to serve as a catalyst for and trainers of other staff members. While this is a good idea, I recommend one addition step.

Don’t try to roll this solution out school wide, unless you have high confidence in your implementation team and a good track record in large technology projects. Instead create a pilot program led by your “early adopters” and go through an entire grading cycle with a small highly motivated and well trained group.

This pilot program will assist in identifying software design shortcomings, configuration challenges, and other deficiencies that will otherwise be multiplied many times over. Worst case scenario, the program gets scrapped with only minor expense and inconvenience.

By leveraging your pilot program experience you will improve the odds of success in a school wide rollout.

Evaluate the total costs associated when comparing LMS vendors

There are generally two models used to buy LMS Software. The more common method is based upon a yearly per user cost or subscription. The other model is a perpetual software license, with a required annual maintenance contract.

Evaluating those two options is not particularly difficult, but evaluating the total implementation costs can be. Put a pencil to the following costs to come up with a total figure:

·         Data conversion, entry, or import into the LMS

·         Course material creation, conversion, and licensing

·         Hardware and software required to support the LMS and content management

·         Initial setup, configuration, and training

My experience with decisions based entirely upon financial reasons is that they are not thoroughly vetted. After considering all the suggestions listed above, finances will likely become less crucial to the decision.

Summary

A Learning Management System might be a huge improvement for your school. And I hope nothing in this article would discourage you from considering it. But unlike some of the banks on Wall Street, your school is probably not too big to fail.

Evaluate objectively, think clearly about goals and outcomes, be realistic about the investment of time and resources it will require, and then choose the system most closely aligned with your existing infrastructure. Be conservative about the rollout by doing a solid pilot program and be sure to evaluate the total cost, if the choice between systems is down to financial considerations.

If you would like some help sorting out the issues, please contact us.