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Two visions: Apple vs. Microsoft


Microsoft and Apple use Misco 2013 to present very different visions of technology in education


engagement, excitement and emotion but that was more or less where the overlap ended.


A


Microsoft: Empower the educator Up first was Jon Griffin, for Microsoft, talking about how to 'excite the learner, impress the educator'. As you'd expect, this was delivered with PowerPoint support and presented the Redmond vision of how to empower educators and students alike. One of Jon's main points was that the digital content revolution meant that mere automation and online delivery were no longer enough. Students had developed the ability to 'learn without us'. While digital devices can improve atainment by around 20 per cent, these don't make schools smarter. Rather, this needed teachers to become 'content curators', using ICT to bring new personalisation and emotion into learning.


Windows 8: Where are the apps? But while Windows 8 was 'almost specifically built with education in mind', only 12% of educational apps actually run on the platform. "We were late to market – I’ll make no bones about that," Jon admited. However, Microsoft was now working hard to make up the lost ground, in particular by Cloud-enabling Office 365, configuring Lync to support remote learning apps and, most importantly, the offerings from the Microsoft IT Academy and Partners in Learning programmes, with the later now reaching out to more than 202 million students in 114 countries. For Microsoft, in short, the future is about enabling content to be delivered anytime, anywhere, in providing the tools for it to be repackaged to become personal and emotional, so that teachers and ICT could both be heroes in driving change.


Apple's tablet-shaped future Next up was Neil Emery for Apple exploring 'the changing face of technology' and in particular how the tablet explosion had the potential to revolutionise education. This was a much less reverent presentation; deliberately playful and making few apologies for treating the devices and apps as the stars of the show.


n interesting contrast in corporate approaches to the use of technology in education was on show at this year's event. Microsoft and Apple were both seting out their stalls, but in very different ways. They both agreed it was all about personal


So Emery shared the stage with onscreen 'Virtual


Neil', with his words zipping up on screen, teleprompt style, and holding dialogues with the Siri computer, all courtesy of iPad apps. His starting point was that tablet and apps are the future – get over it. The numbers seem to back him up. A landmark will likely be passed in 2013, with tablets outselling laptops. By 2015, it's projected that tablets will outsell all other devices combined and by 2017, tablets are likely to be outselling laptops by a factor of six. Moore's Law continues to operate – there's more processing power in the modern iPhone than there was in one of the huge G5 towers that powered design studios in the early noughties. The message here was that anyone still using programs to generate files on a computer, while not an actual candidate for euthanasia just yet, certainly ought to be booking holidays via the Saga website.


“WE'VE BEEN PARTNEREDWITH MISCO FORMANY YEARSNOW.


WE'VE JUST LAUNCHED AWHOLE NEWRANGE OF IPADPRODUCTS AND ACCESSORIES SO THE EXPO


Figuring it out So the thrust of Neil Emery's presentation was to show what a teacher could do in the classroom, armed with litle more than an iPad and an IT infrastructure that actually works. So there was Figure, using finger movements to compose a musical theme that could be orchestrated in GarageBand, combined with visuals and text and shared via iTunes University. Emery presented a black-tee shirted Apple vision of a future that was playful, tactile, spontaneous, with content repackaged 'on-the-go'. It was thinking different all right and made the Microsoft presentation look staid in comparison. Not quite sure where the educational content was, though... ET


HASMADE PEOPLE AWARE OF HOW LARGE OUR OFFERINGS ARE.” TRACIE LUCAS, TARGUS UK


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