For the countries and the students who are doing well and achieve high scores on the tests it can be a source of amazing pride throughout the country.  It seemed like everyone I talked to was reflecting on the fact that New Zealand's education system was fairly healthy comparatively from around the world.  And that's good.  It's good to see a country take pride in their education's success and successful outcomes. On the other side of the coin, I encourage education leaders to just not focus here, because fundamentally you don't want to not only rest on the education progress you're making but also take too much into any one measure. We've got to continue to innovate and elevate our education expectations regardless of one or two national assessments that happen every few years.  Ultimately, we've got to continue to push hard.

I was excited to see the leadership in New Zealand is embracing that challenge and seeing that the way in which technology can make a difference and impact in the country is certainly nowhere near where the potential lies. There's lots of amazing conversations happening around how do think through everything from 21st century skills integration to how do we think about digital access to accessibility, technology, and making a meaningful impact. There’s also a fundamental connection to the industries and industry motivating elements like entrepreneurship as a key focus in the education system.

Although New Zealand may have good test scores, there’s clear motivation from people to continue to make improvements, and I'm confident they'll continue to be a world leader and push for change that can be helpful for the rest of the world to look at and learn from.

I was impressed with all of the U.S. projects I was able to see. It was great to see classroom projects tackling real-world problems like oil spills, unemployment, diabetes, disaster response, wildlife and more that help students build 21st century skills they’ll need for the workplace. The examples of creative uses of technology in learning represented the Pre-K–12 spectrum and included great ideas for blended learning, student video game design, professional development, flipped classrooms with students teaching their peers, and improving communications skills for those with autism and other special learning needs.

Check out the video below and my interviews with three teachers. Michael Braun teaches at Rainier Beach High School in Seattle, and he’s using Touch Develop to get kids interested in computer science by teaching them how to develop mobile phone apps. You can learn more about his learning activity on the Partners in Learning Network here. Vince Interrante from Mineola Middle School (New York) and Robyn Hrivnatz from Lamar CISD (Texas) teamed up on a rocket bottle project that spanned more than 225 students at five schools on three continents! You can learn how they made this happen here.

The U.S. team will be sending 16 finalists to the Global Forum in Prague, Czech Republic on November 28-December 1. The 9th annual Partners in Learning Global Forum is the culmination of local and regional events that reach nearly 200,000 participants from over 115 countries. This year’s forum will gather 500 participants, including the most innovative global educators, school leaders, education leaders, and government officials.

For updates on the event and how to participate in the future, follow our #pilgf Twitter hash tag and our Facebook page.

Imagine Cup is one of the best things that Microsoft does for students.  The 10th annual event is the world’s premier student technology competition. It takes the passion and capabilities and desire to make the world a better place that students have and channels it with technology to create real impact. In addition to the potential impact of the students’ projects, Imagine Cup helps students prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, gaining direct experience in technology innovation, entrepreneurialism and teamwork.

This year's competition was exciting, because we saw for the first time students tackle application development on Windows 8 and the Windows Metro Style app challenge, as well as Kinect. In fact, two-thirds of all the education-focused projects attempted to make education more interactive with Kinect for Xbox 360. Like every year, the quality of the students’ work continues to grow and improve, and the viability of the projects that students are creating to have a meaningful impact on the world is certainly at hand.

This year I was pleased to see so many creative ideas on how to better education, and especially proud an education project won one of the major competitions. The team Drexel Dragons from the United States won the Window Phone Game Design contest. Students from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania created an engaging game designed to teach math and problem solving in new ways to elementary school students. “MathDash” provides a fast-paced, rewarding gameplay experience that reinforces math skills taught to elementary school students. It encourages players to approach problems from a different perspective, giving them an intellectual advantage by teaching them to think outside the box.

I continued to be inspired by the students, their enthusiasm, their energy and their optimism for how technology can play a better role in the world. I encourage you to take a look at all the education projects below. More information is coming in the next month around next year’s Imagine Cup competition. Russia will host the 11th annual event in St. Petersburg in July 2013.

Congratulations to all the 2012 participants!

Education-focused projects:

Argentina – Team BoddyMusic

BoddyMusic is a virtual classroom application that specializes in music education for people with disabilities, enabling users to play various musical instruments with body movements via Kinect for Xbox 360.

Belgium – Team Make A Sign

Make a Sign is a sign language database for all languages, based on Kinect technology, enabling students of many different languages to learn to sign.

Brazil – Team Doers

The objective of “Do More” is to make players aware that through teamwork, every problem can be solved. This game encourages players to participate in changing the world by giving donations, volunteering their time or even by changing their mindsets.

Chile – Team LifeWare

IntegraKinect is a tool for people with cerebral palsy that enables them to interact with a computer through a Kinect sensor and microphones to capture sound and movement.

India – Team D Labs

D Labs allows tutors to understand the behavioral patterns of children with dyslexia by using games to assist them in alphabet identification and movement recognition.

Mexico – Team ReImagine

KIWI is a platform that helps to both diagnose and treat attention deficit disorder. It consists of educational software and exercises, along with software that helps developers, doctors and teachers create and personalize applications that will enhance the treatment for these students.

Peru – Team Wake Up

Project Wake Up allows children with Down syndrome to improve their attention, memory, communication, motor skills and perception by using Kinect and Natural User Interface. Additional components of Wake Up include gesture recognition, color tracking and artificial intelligence.

Philippines – Team Divided By Zero

KidCAMP gives teachers and families of autistic children affordable education tools designed to monitor student performance, improve communication and augment existing special education curriculum by using the Internet and a mobile application.

Romania – Team Complex

Seedbit is a Web application stored in the cloud that unites individuals, companies and NGOs in a fun, social way to get them involved in social causes they are passionate about.

Slovakia – Team OwNet

OwNet addresses the negative impact that poor Internet connectivity can have on schools, offering teachers and students a faster and more efficient way to use the Web for educational purposes, including collaboration tools.

The event is always a great opportunity to not only salute and thank our partners for their commitment and connection, but also to align to make sure that we're working together to serve schools effectively in the year ahead. With the range of new technologies from Microsoft like Office 365, Windows 8, and the continued expansion of our cloud services with products like Windows Azure, the opportunity for partners to build on our platform and provide rich and robust solutions for education have never been stronger.

Connecting with partners at WPC always feels me with optimism for the work ahead, and it's a great sense of gratitude on the Microsoft approach of being focused on partnership as part of our core DNA.

It's fitting that a long term partner was recognized this year as our Global Education Partner of the Year, and that's Dell Corporation.  Dell has been a close Microsoft partner on the Windows platform with Windows devices, laptops, slates, and tablets for many years, but their partnership is actually much broader than just Dell hardware devices.  While Dell’s Education Data Management (EDM) solution won the award this year, the company continues to expand their platform with serving our mutual customers with education licensing, integration solutions, cloud solutions, and more. Dell has become a rich and valuable partner in many areas with a commitment to customer service and a real shared commitment to work in education.

Microsoft recently announced a new collaboration with Dell’s Assistive Technology Service to provide Microsoft’s accessibility guides and curriculum resources with their service. We’re also excited about Dell’s recent acquisition of Wyse Technology as we’re working together to jointly market school IT labs and one-to-one computing solutions that allow a cost effective delivery of innovative IT enabled education. I had the opportunity to talk to Andre Beuchat with Wyse recently about the tremendous growth and adoption of virtual desktops in education. Take a listen to the video below, and I will be posting more partner conversations this week.

Congratulations again to Dell, and a big thank you to all of our partners who are working so hard to make an impact in education.

There’s also great enthusiasm for the work we are doing with Windows 8. Lots of conversations on devices, tablets and bring your own devices scenarios that are very popular now in the United States. The other thing that I think is a broad theme here is the much expansive reflection beyond just digital content and digital reading to more of a focus on the holistic learning environment and actually put some of the core things in proper perspective.

A looming reality at the show, and across the industry in general, is the increased need for supporting teachers and how we can make technologies and tools more real and practical. In all the vendor booths, there’s focus on how do we use this stuff more sensibly. I think it reflects a more mature approach to these tools…as opposed to making technology the star, it’s really about how it is applied, how it’s used well, and how it makes a difference in classrooms. That spirit is something we’ve been trying to build around the Partners in Learning Network.

I met a lot of great people in San Diego...including Helen Gooch, who is the instructional technology coordinator for Clarksville-Montgomery School District in Tennessee. She is a Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) and she is helping rollout Office 365 to her schools. My conversation with her is below.

Office 365 for education builds off of the great platform we've established with Live@edu and is the next evolution to provide a better experience for communication, collaboration, and productivity tools for education institutions of all types…while saving costs and delivering a great connected experience for students and educators. With Office 365, schools get Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Office Web Apps at no cost. You can sign up today at www.office365.com/education.

Announced as part of the one-year anniversary of Office 365, prestigious K-12 and higher education institutions around the world are moving to Office 365 for education. Our cloud suite was chosen by the Scottish Government to supply Office 365 for education as the integrated productivity suite for the future of the renowned Glow Platform - representing upwards of 1.2 million students and teachers across the country. In Qatar, all 93,000 students and 15,000 teachers will have access to Office 365 at their fingertips. There are many schools across Europe moving to Office 365, including the University of Dundee that is moving off Novell GroupWise to expand communication capabilities on campus. These schools join other large academic institutional and countrywide commitments to Office 365 such as the India Council for Technical Education with 7.5 million users and the Catholic International Education Office with over 4.5 million users across 102 countries.

Students must be more than consumers. They need to be creators. They need to know how to communicate and collaborate with others. Office 365 is the best productivity experience that’s used all over the world and that companies are demanding expertise in. And there is no compromise for going to the cloud with Microsoft. The experience and features that you expect on the desktop and offline are also there in the cloud. Schools can connect all devices to the cloud, and every student and teacher regardless of location, to realize the potential of online learning.

Teachers can create curriculum, record lectures and publish them on online class sites in the cloud where students are able to view, open, produce, edit and share their homework. Office 365 provides new ways to extend classroom teaching time and distance learning, tutor students online, and whiteboard ideas. Students can engage in ad hoc instant messaging or video chats to collaborate on class projects in real-time, regardless of where they’re working or on what device. They can create documents with Office Web Apps that provides the same features as the desktop version of Microsoft Office, share class notes by synchronizing OneNote notebooks, and create digital portfolios.

What I’m most excited about is Lync Online which will enable teachers to create purposeful, personalized and fun learning experiences. The University of Massachusetts Amherst and the National University of Ireland, Galway are using Office 365 to create virtual teams and prepare students to be more effective in the business world than other graduates. They are immersed the very first day of class in the cloud. Take a look at the video below.

With Office 365, learning possibilities are limitless. And I can’t wait to hear how it’s helping to increase students’ success in your school.

Today, Microsoft and Dell are announcing a new collaborative effort to make it easier for schools to empower students and teachers with accessible technology and training. Dell’s Assistive Technology Service—created by special education teachers and accessibility specialists—simplifies the process of selecting accessible devices and assistive technology products. Through this Service, schools receive support and training including Microsoft’s accessibility guides and curriculum resources that illustrate how to use accessibility features in Microsoft products, like Windows and Office, in order to enhance learning and create accessible teaching materials like digital talking textbooks.

Dell and Microsoft share the belief that accessible technology provides educational opportunities for students with disabilities and learning-styles differences. At Microsoft, we actively listen and learn from our customers to identify best practices of accessibility in schools and report recommendations for providing accessible technology. Dell’s Assistive Technology Service adopts these recommendations so educators can focus on instructional practices that empower learners with disabilities, and not on the administrative tasks of deploying technology.

When educators have more time to focus on instruction, teachers have opportunities to develop intriguing ways to use technology in the classroom. I’m inspired by the ways educators are using technology to make lessons come to life. Many schools are using Kinect in the classroom to encourage students with disabilities to engage with curricula using physical gestures and their voice. Lagoa Secondary School in Portugal noticed that the use of Kinect classroom activities can boost subject matter proficiency, promote class cohesion, and strengthen social skills among students of varying abilities and disabilities. Teachers from Loudoun County, Virginia are sharing their advice on using Kinect in special education classrooms.

In Washington state, a school for students who are blind uses Microsoft Lync―part of Office 365―for distance learning. Office 365 for education―a free tool for educators and students worldwide―empowers educators and students to work together on classroom projects and documents simultaneously, collaborating in real time with virtual meetings, and participating in instant messaging and video conferencing across the globe. To help keep students safe as they learn online, we promote a safer online experience for students by providing online safety resources as part of Dell’s Assistive Technology Service. 

Together with Partners in Learning and Dell’s Assistive Technology Service, Microsoft is dedicated to providing creative accessibility solutions for education so every student can realize their potential.

Today, the Catholic International Education Office (OIEC) took an exciting step toward delivering a brighter future for Catholic students around the world, demonstrating there is no greater resource to invest in than that of youth. Recognizing changes were needed to provide their students with the 21^st century skills they’ll need in their future careers, OIEC is partnering with Microsoft to bring Office 365 and other resources to more than 200,000 Catholic schools all over the world with the potential to reach 43 million students.

The partnership between OIEC and Microsoft deploys some of the newest technologies, including more than 4.5 million subscriptions to Office 365 for education – a free tool for educators and students worldwide, which will be made available this summer during the first wave of deployment. The agreement empowers educators and students to do a number of things, including working together on class projects and documents simultaneously, collaborating in real time with virtual meetings, and participating in instant messaging and video conferencing across the globe. They’ll also be able to create and maintain compelling websites and edit them as easily as they would a Word document, and access a new “Social Network of Catholic Education,” designed by Microsoft and based on Windows Azure, as a private element of the Partners in Learning Network.

As someone who spent 20 years in the Catholic education system, I know the importance of a great Catholic education, and have experienced firsthand the exemplary efforts of the leaders to prepare their students for the challenges and opportunities of the future. It comes as no surprise to me that OIEC is pioneering this significant change to the education of their students – they have recognized the value of integrating technology into the classroom as a way to teach 21^st century skills.

With this announcement, we see the shifting dynamics of the modern Catholic classroom ushering in an exciting era for the worldwide Catholic community, and, hopefully, serving as a harbinger for traditional classroom changes around the world. Research from IDC states that in the next decade, 77 percent of all jobs will require technical skills of some sort, and when institutions like OIEC make announcements akin to the one they made today at the Vatican, I feel a boost of confidence that our students will be prepared.

We need to continue to get creative about the ways technology can make a real impact in the lives of students and prepare them for the jobs of the future. Through this partnership, we will do just that. I am proud the leadership of the Catholic International Education Office has chosen to partner with Microsoft to deliver on their commitment to educators and students to modernize its schools and further its mission to promote education for all. Together, we can make a real impact in the classroom for both students and educators, and look forward to taking this journey with the Catholic community around the world.

That’s why I’m excited about the new Family Safety features coming in Windows 8. You can read more details about the new features in Building Windows 8 blog here. With Windows 8, you can monitor what your kids are doing, no matter where they use their PC. Windows 8 gives you a “monitor first” approach, which provides informative activity reports for each child that summarizes their computer activities, including a list of websites they are visiting, latest search terms, what they are downloading and the amount of time spent on the PC and most used apps and games.

The Web is obviously a great learning tool both in and outside the classroom to help students build 21st century skills such as collaboration, problem solving, global awareness, knowledge building, and skilled communication. Microsoft has a lot of existing resources you can use to help provide kids with a safer experience online. Here is a site with some great resources.

We hear so much about what is wrong with the education in the U.S., but I know this week we can get beyond the debate and the dialogue to focus on celebrating teachers and how we can better support teachers so they can help students be successful. It is after all National Teacher Appreciation Week. The question should be…which teacher are you going to thank this week?

Teachers are the foundation of a strong education system. Some people even go as far to say that effective teachers are the number one predictor of student success. We're partnering with the Department of Education on www.teach.org to encourage more young pepole to go into the profession of teaching. I think what we have to do in the United States and all over the world is celebrate the value and role of teachers in our society, elevate the profession, and elevate the importance that they have in the lives of our families, of our children and of our countries. While it’s good to recognize the sacrifices teachers make, we need to shine a spotlight on the joys of being a teacher, the rewards, the impact and the value that being a teacher has on so many people’s lives.

That is why I started a new blog this year called “Daily Edventures,” where each day a voice of an “everyday hero” working to improve education worldwide is promoted. Teachers, school leaders, policy-makers, business leaders, celebrities…people who have embraced enhancing education as a core facet in their lives. This is their blog. Who are they, what inspires them, what frustrates them, what hopes do they hold for the future of education? Today, we highlight the 2010 U.S. National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Wessling. I encourage you to take a listen to my interview with Sarah to hear what she thinks makes a great teacher. I personally admire Sarah because she takes the chance to embrace failure, relates content to students’ lives, and most importantly, she tries to not only create life-long learners, but is one herself.

Those of us at Microsoft who are lucky enough to work in education feel a personal passion and commitment toward the future of education. And I have been so lucky to meet so many incredible educators around the world who have the power to inspire our children. There are amazing things happening from the work chess legend Gary Kasparov’s doing to use chess to improve learning, to Mamta Patel Nagaraja’s work at NASA to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers. This journey has confirmed what I knew before the year started…there’s no shortage of ideas, approaches or great leaders.  We need to work together to drive and scale change…and we can no longer tolerate dissension or distraction from our mission to help every child reach their full potential.

Partners in Learning is Microsoft’s $500 million global initiative to help improve teaching and learning. So far, we’ve reached 10 million teachers and 200 million students in 119 countries. In November, in Athens, Greece, we will convene hundreds of the world’s best teachers at the Partners in Learning Global Forum. It’s the culmination of regional and country events around the world where educators compete to represent their countries most innovative teaching that uses technology and helps students build 21st century skills. If you are a teacher reading this, I encourage you to apply to attend what promises to be a life-changing experience.

So, who will you say “thank you” to today? I am saying thanks to all of you out there who continue to work hard for our children’s future and inspire me every day to work harder to serve your needs.