By Tim Ferguson, 23 January 2008 15:53
NEWS
Microsoft will invest $235.5m over the next five years in a programme providing technology resources and training for educational use.
Speaking in Berlin, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates outlined plans for the company's Partners in Learning project to reach three times as many students, teachers and schools globally as it has done so far.
Since 2005 the Partners in Learning initiative has invested around £3m in the UK, helping 2.4 million students and providing training materials to 134,000 teachers.
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The programme works through organisations such as the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) and government education tech agency Becta.
The main UK focus has been building teachers' confidence to use technology in the learning environment through various training programmes.
Steve Beswick, director of education at Microsoft UK, said technology will underpin the direction of education in the UK over the next five years.
He added IT will play a larger role as it can help deliver the level of education required by the government's Children's Plan and give pupils the skills they increasingly need for the world of work.
One of the initiatives in the Partners in Learning programme is the Gateway Project, which is a virtual school environment for pupils across England, France and Spain to work collaboratively to learn foreign languages.
Tim Tarrant, head of ICT at the TDA, said the programme's support for its projects and the IT expertise it has provided have both been great assets.
Comments
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1. Steve Niemiec
This is 'Product Placement' by another any other name!
Why would Microsoft spend that sort of money on anything unless it directly increased its sales of its operating systems and productivity software?
This is a simply ploy of paying to brainwash future teaching staff in the UK to be afraid of buying anything except Microsoft.
Who is going to be there to vet the documentation this company claims is training material when most of it will be marketing propaganda?
Will the company provide fair comparisons between its software and that of say Apple, Sun or even Linux? Which ‘statistics’ will it provide to ‘prove’ the company has the best of everything and has the lowest cost of ownership every time?
2. David Fletcher
In complete agreement with Steve.
The objective of this is not to do any good in the world. The objective is to have more generations of children brought up without the benefit of exposure to Free and Open Source Software.
It is a desperate measure by a company watching hundreds of thousands of OLPC machines going out to children in so-called developing nations, each running FOSS not Windows. If we're not careful, we in the UK are going to be the developing nation when the rest of the world turns to using FOSS and we're left lagging miles behind.