Microsoft is proud to partner with WE, an organization that brings people together and gives them the tools to change the world. Microsoft shares that vision and, through its technology, is helping WE accelerate their impact.
I had the privilege of attending WE Day recently in Vancouver, Canada and meeting with co-founder of WE, Craig Kielburger.
As I met with Craig, I learned a great deal more about WE and we discussed some of the ways Microsoft is working with them to expand the WE mission to reach more students and empower youth as a force for inclusion.
Q&A with Craig Kielburger, co-founder of WE
Anthony: I attended WE Day in Vancouver, BC recently, and I was overwhelmed by the energy and commitment of these students. What inspired you to build this amazing organization?
Craig: At the age of 12, I was inspired to help improve human rights for children around the world after I heard a story about Iqbal Masih, a young activist in Pakistan, who stood up against child labor. I knew I couldn’t make significant change alone, so I convinced a handful of my grade 7 classmates to join me in making a life-changing impact. That was how WE was born and, 20 years later, we are still passionate about empowering young people to be leaders of today through WE programming, such as WE Schools and WE Day.
We celebrate the incredible commitment of these students to service through WE Day, an inspiring, stadium-sized, life-changing event that takes place around the world. It unites world-renowned speakers, presenters and award-winning performers with thousands of young people and families to celebrate and inspire another year of incredible change. These are hosted in cities across North America and the UK. What’s unique about these stadium-sized events is that you can’t buy a ticket to WE Day – students earn their ticket by taking one local and one global action on causes they are most passionate about.
Anthony: Tell me about your vision for WE Schools.
Craig: WE Schools is a free, year-long service learning program that focuses on empowering students with the tools to make an impact in their local communities and beyond.
The WE Schools program has grown to include more than 12,000 schools and engages nearly a million students. WE Schools provide educators and students with the necessary tools, including curriculum and resources, to identify issues they care about and to take action. Educators can sign up at https://www.we.org/we-schools/.
This year, we are partnering with Microsoft to make the WE Schools curriculum digitally accessible through Microsoft OneNote, widening our reach and granting more students and educators around the world with access to our service curriculum. Our goal is to bring a passion for service to as many students as possible and, by 2019, we hope to triple the number of schools participating.
Anthony: How do you see the partnership with Microsoft helping advance your vision and mission?
Craig: Microsoft and WE share a common vision to help students be a force for good, locally and globally. That’s why we recently launched WE are One, a campaign that educates young people about issues of accessibility and encourages them to use technology to make their communities more inclusive.
Using Microsoft products and programs, classrooms will be able to organize, collaborate and share ideas on important issues. With technology – especially tools like OneNote, and Skype – we can go from reaching a million students to millions of students around the world.
The WE are One campaign also comes with accompanying WE Schools curriculum, outlining ways to integrate OneNote, Sway, Skype and Minecraft: Education Edition into lesson plans, to help students create and share their projects. This campaign is a great example of how we are digitizing WE Schools curriculum and, as a result, reaching students all over the world.
Anthony: Of course, Microsoft is thrilled to be part of WE are One because it speaks so clearly to our mission to empower students and educators to do more. Can you share an example where technology has made a difference for a student looking to make a change to help others?
Craig: At this week’s WE Day Seattle, taking place on Friday, April 21, we will be joined by Maia Dua, a 16 year-old from River City High School in Sacramento, CA. He developed a robot as a cost-effective and durable alternative to a seeing-eye dog. The self-propelled, echo-locating Seeing Eye-Bot is made of readily accessible materials, making it more available to individuals of limited financial resources. The best part is that Maia developed this bot in just four days.
Anthony: As powerful is WE Day is, not every student can attend. How can those students (and their teachers) share this powerful experience?
Craig: Following WE Day Seattle, educators and students will be able to access the WE Day recap, which includes a virtual WE Day experience with motivational speeches and performances available at their fingertips, as well as educator resources.
In 60 minutes or less, students will be able to relive the celebration of young change-makers and experience exclusive, behind-the-scenes content. The WE Day recap pairs content from the event with WE Schools action planning to bring the spirit of the WE movement to the classroom. Now, thanks to Microsoft, WE Day lives beyond a one-day event, making it easier for students, friends and family to change the world together, regardless of their location.
How you can be part of WE
Learn more about WE Schools – and sign up – at WE.org, where you can download a free kit with everything you need for a year of changing the world.
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Updated portal and new languages for Microsoft Forms
Today, we’re introducing several updates to Microsoft Forms, including improvements to the Forms portal, more languages and right-to-left reading support.
Microsoft Forms portal improvements
We are introducing significant improvements to the Forms portal page. With the new design, users will see a snapshot of each form, which includes the form title, background image and number of responses. The new search box, on the upper right corner, will help users quickly find a form either by its title or owner’s name.
Updated Forms portal page.
Search in Forms portal page.
More languages and right-to-left reading support
With this update, we’re introducing 26 new languages to Forms—bringing the total to 68 languages. We are also enabling RTL (right-to-left) reading support for Hebrew and Arabic users, so users can create and respond to forms, as well as view forms results.
Forms RTL (right-to-left) reading support.
Create your own form or quiz
Educators can easily create a new form or quiz, add questions, customize settings, share their forms and check on the results. Just follow these simple steps:
Teaching proper research methods is about so much more than enabling students to turn in the perfect paper. When done thoroughly, it imbues them with the ability to evaluate resources for credibility, avoid misleading misinformation and mount a cogent argument. Teaching students how to research is about empowering them to think critically, both in the classroom today and beyond.
“It all comes back to the purpose of school,” says Aron Early, research technology specialist at Sammamish High School in Bellevue, WA. “Not so much about content, but teaching kids how to learn. Like evaluating information and being a critical thinker.”
In many ways, the Internet has made research easier. In many others, however, it’s complicated the task of discerning verifiable, accurately sourced and cited material from the misinterpretations, half-truths and flat-out falsehoods that live online. A lengthy study by Stanford’s Graduate School of Education concluded in June 2016, found that even older students could stand to improve their skills in correctly identifying true stories online.
Meanwhile, the role of librarian continues to evolve in support of long-term learning. Research technology specialists are 21st century figures, standing at the nexus of technique, knowledge, community and social collaboration. For Aron, whose students in Washington have come to rely less on textbooks and more on the Internet, this means actively coaching them on ways to refine their information-gathering abilities, both in the classroom and the library.
Aron has also found help in Researcher, a tool within Microsoft Word that makes finding those credible sources simpler. With Researcher, anyone can search for and incorporate reliable sources and content, including properly formatted citations, all within a few clicks and without having to leave the document.
“It’s really bringing the library to the students and enabling them to be good researchers,” Aron says. “Being able to research sites, collect and curate your information all in one program is kind of amazing.”
Researcher displays source material found using Bing’s Knowledge Graph, which is tailored per a mix of algorithms, human oversight and measured criteria for what constitutes a “trusted” source. By vetting for sources that have an established history of accuracy and high level of online citations, Researcher can present a body of reference materials that includes national science and health centers, well-known encyclopedias, history databases and more.
In managing how sources are both gathered and displayed, Microsoft’s engineers consider Bing’s role in Researcher as a pro-active step, making good research quicker and less daunting.
“How do we get people to the good information and get them away from the bad information as quickly as possible?” asks Microsoft Researcher Engineer Douglas Taylor. Veracity, he says, and timeliness are the goals with Researcher. “We think the fact that people spend so much time learning, teaching and scrutinizing any website to see if it’s trustworthy is a problem worth solving.”
Aron adds that Researcher is not intended to replace the library for students, but rather to complement it. “As much as we are bringing the library to them digitally, we also want to make sure the library stays important in a student’s life,” he says. To that end, Bing and Researcher can point users to the nearest library for source material that isn’t yet digitized.
Ultimately, Aron views Researcher as a valuable teaching tool with the power to promote critical thinking among students and adult users alike. For more insights on research practices and other modern tools in education, you can follow Aron Early on Twitter.
Researcher, which is currently available to Office 365 subscribers, will continue to be updated with additional resource material over time. Students and teachers who haven’t already subscribed can download their free version of Office 365 with Word 2016* using a valid school email address. Researcher is also available as a mobile app for iOS and will make its way to other platforms and Office apps in the near future.
What the coming educational VR revolution teaches us about the tech’s future
Imagine the following scenario: A fifth-grade science class has just begun and the teacher makes a surprise announcement — today the students will be dissecting a frog.
I’m sure you remember dissecting a frog as a kid — the sour-pickle odor of formaldehyde, the sharp scalpels slicing into rubbery skin. You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to grimace a bit thinking about it.
But here comes the paradox. In this scenario, like-minded fifth-graders who are queasy about cutting open animals are excited to participate in this dissection. Indeed, no animal was harmed when the specimens were collected. What’s more, the teacher promises the students that they won’t have to clean up a messy station afterward.
How? Thanks to the paradigm-shifting creations of zSpace, an educational VR/AR company, students can harmlessly dissect an animal on an interactive screen known as the zSpace 200. Students wear a special pair of glasses equipped with sensors and use a stylus that allows them to engage with a virtual image that can be turned or even disassembled.
By importing VR/AR into the classroom, one minute students can explore the anatomy and organs of an animal without harming it, and the very next build and test circuits or set up experiments that test Newton’s laws.
For young students who have been inundated by tech in almost every other domain of their lives, this form of learning comes naturally.
“Kids say, ‘Well of course it should be like this.’ They believe they should be able to reach into a screen, grab something, pull it out, and interact with it,” said Dave Chavez, chief technology officer of zSpace.
The next step in the democratization of knowledge is VR.
As for parents (and the rest of us), we continue to adopt the tech slowly. In 2016, only 6 percent of Americans will own a VR headset. While this can be attributed to cost and other barriers to entry that are being knocked down as the technology evolves, learning more about how VR is being used to reshape student engagement and communication teaches us more about how it will soon shape our digital experiences by serving as a conduit for previously impossible connections.
“Virtual reality puts people first,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after his recent demo onstage at Oculus’ Connect Conference. “It’s all about who you’re with. Once you’re in there, you can do anything you want together — travel to Mars, play games, fight with swords, watch movies or teleport home to see your family. You have an environment where you can experience anything.”
The democratization of experiences
Throughout history, monumental developments have expanded society’s access to education. In the early first millennium BCE, the first written alphabets appeared and provided an easy medium for recording information relevant to the common good, whether it be a religious text or a business transaction.
The following centuries witnessed the creation of books and libraries, which then allowed for written content to be stored and accessed by more than just the super-wealthy.
Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press in the 1450s made it even cheaper and more efficient to publish and purchase books on subjects like philosophy, mathematics and commerce. In the 20th century, the computer and internet transformed educational access more than any other past advancement, democratizing the world’s collective knowledge to anyone with a connection.
A student’s capacity to discover and learn will no longer be limited to the environment around them.
The next step in the democratization of knowledge is VR. This emerging educational platform will make it possible for students to virtually visit museums in other continents, communicate in virtual learning spaces with fellow students in Johannesburg, Beijing or Sydney or attend a lecture at a prestigious university thousands of miles away. It can not be overstated how important this is for the future of education — a student’s capacity to discover and learn will no longer be limited to the environment around them.
From a UNICEF Teacher’s Handbook based on facilitating the education of children around the world:
“Children learn best from experience. Children learn by doing, using their senses, exploring their environment of people, things, places and events. They learn from first-hand and concrete experiences as well as vicarious forms of experiences. Children do not learn as effectively when they are passive. Active engagement with things and ideas promotes mental activity that helps students retain new learning and integrate it with what they already know. If it is not possible to always provide concrete, first-hand experiences for the student, efforts must always be exerted so that the student will be able to understand the concept in a clear and concrete way.”
With educational VR, it will always be possible to provide concrete first-hand experiences. While the current cost of adoption is too high for VR to reach under-funded schools, it will eventually decrease, as is almost always the case with new technologies. In the time that it takes, I’d bet the world becomes a fully connected place.
The internet democratized knowledge, VR will democratize experiences. It will continue to shrink an increasingly globalized world and facilitate better communication and collaboration across physical spaces. It will be the next innovation in the transmission of knowledge that not only shapes how we learn, but how we conduct business and maintain relationships with our friends, family and like-minded people, wherever they may be.
How VR enhances communication and collaboration
Increasingly, the success of businesses hinges on their ability to communicate and collaborate.
VR is the perfect medium for achieving these ends. Because VR will become a more and more integral part of the business world, the earlier students are exposed to non-gaming uses of VR, the more prepared they will be to interact in the virtual work spaces of tomorrow.
Some students learn best by hearing, others by seeing. With VR, you get the best of both. Educational visionaries that develop educational VR hardware and software are not just improving learning; they are rethinking it altogether.
One of the features that distinguishes the aforementioned zSpace 200 from other VR educational technologies is that students can easily collaborate and speak with one another while using their VR computer.
“The most profound thing I’ve ever heard a teacher say is that many technologies build a barrier between us and the kids but this seems not to,” said Chavez.
Far too often, VR is mistaken to be a solitary, lonely experience.
But even VR platforms that place the user in virtual worlds are not necessarily isolating experiences. Immersive VR Education, a developer headquartered in Ireland, has created a social learning platform called Engage. Engage gives educators the tools to create their own lessons and immersive experiences, all without needing to commit a line of code. Inside these immersive lessons, teachers and students can connect and use collaborative tools like an interactive whiteboard.
“In virtual reality when the avatar is two feet away from you, it really feels like they are two feet away from you,” said David Whelan, CEO of Immersive VR Education.
Whether inside the Coliseum or a hospital ER room, Engage allows educators to transport their classroom to wherever it is most relevant to the students.
“People learn best through experiences or doing tasks themselves. So if you are teaching, say, Aircraft maintenance and you are working on a Boeing engine. [In VR] You can bring in an engine, you can bring in parts, and have 4 or 5 students come in and collaborate in the virtual space. You [the educator] can say, ‘Alright guys you have 45 minutes to put this engine together and the students can lift parts that may weigh 4 or 5 tons, and manipulate them quite easily,” said Whelan.
For now, apps like this are primarily designed to shift how students and teachers interact in today’s learning spaces. In the future, educational work spaces such as Engage lecture halls will double as business boardrooms or co-working spaces for creative problem-solving.
Far too often, VR is mistaken to be a solitary, lonely experience — as a technology for play that enables escapists to further isolate themselves in a digitally created world. But this could not be further from the truth. Indeed, Facebook has invested so heavily into VR because their company’s vision is to connect the world.
“This is really a new communication platform,” said Zuckerberg after acquiring Oculus. “By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.”
The challenges facing educational VR in the U.S.
Much of the material VR companies are innovating for classes will not be purchased for personal use but by school districts, colleges and universities. The price for the hardware and software will not be cheap. For example, the Oculus Rift retails for $599.99 at Best Buy. Persuading these constituents to adopt VR/AR will be a challenge.
Marketing will be critical for getting constituents to adopt VR in schools and higher education. VR edtech companies will need to develop innovative marketing strategies that drive educational organizations to invest in VR. The impediments facing the adoption of VR edtech are similar to those VR faces in being adopted in other domains. Once parents see the upside of educational VR, they will become more comfortable with VR enhancing other forms of communication and its application in other work spaces.
VR educational companies will need to get creative not just when it comes to promoting VR to educators but also speaking with local and state politicians.
Convincing early adopters to buy into educational VR systems like zSpace and Immersive will be critical for its spread.
To give an example, one of zSpace’s biggest challenges is simply to get people to see it. Once young kids see it, they are enamored.
“I’ve seen a kid run out to the curb and yank his mom out of the car…and tell her ‘Mom, look at this! Look at what I did!’ It makes me want to tear up,” said Chavez.
“A lot people see VR as a gaming or entertainment peripheral, so the biggest challenge is getting educators who have been teaching lessons the same way for years and years to change their mindset,” said Whelan. “We have to convince them that it isn’t just a new way of providing the same old content, this a completely new way of teaching.”
Especially during this time when state legislatures are gutting educational budgets, VR educational companies will need to get creative not just when it comes to promoting VR to educators but also speaking with local and state politicians. This latter group must be persuaded that educational VR is worth the price. To persuade them, educational VR firms need to get in front of parents, students, teachers, administrators and political leaders. Educational VR innovators must convince them that the windfall warrants the upfront investment.
The next horizon in VR education
Where will educational VR head next? One possibility is that museums will begin to use 360-degree cameras and transform their collections and elaborate corridors into material that students all over the world can interact with by wearing an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Imagine a sixth-grade student in rural Arkansas putting on a VR headset in his social studies class. The teacher tells the class, “Today we are going to visit one of the greatest art collections in the world, the Louvre.” The app then transports the student to the gallery that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
What would normally cost several thousand dollars and constitute a luxury trip that most American students could only dream of can become an immersive, interactive component of the students’ curriculum.
These virtual spaces will consist of customized avatars that can express features ranging from happy to confused. It won’t be long before a fourth-grade class in Newark, New Jersey will be able to go on a virtual school trip to the British Museum with a class of fourth graders from Kyoto, Japan. While the kids are on the virtual school trip, their parents can attend to their VR business meetings.
You may think this sounds like sci-fi, but 10 years from now this futuristic school trip to the Louvre may seem like the Atari of VR.
“I’m old enough to remember when computers came into schools first in the late 80s and early 90s. They sat there for years gathering dust because teachers didn’t want to touch them,” said Whelan. “But just like computers, VR will creep its way into education. In fact, I believe it will be adopted much sooner because people my age are teachers and accustomed to the rapid change of technology.”
Whelan also points out that VR set-ups are actually much cheaper than early PCs.
“When PCs first came out they were two or three thousand dollars, now you can get a really decent VR headset connected to a PlayStation for under 800 dollars, and the technology is just going to become cheaper.”
VR will be the next link in the sequence that has witnessed the human urge to connect and enhance communication stretching back several thousand years. It is a reimagination of what education can become and it will prepare students for a connected future of democratized virtual experiences and global communication and collaboration.
How Stetson University democratizes data-driven decision-making and debunks myths
Making sense of the massive amounts of data universities gather can be tricky, but it can also be helpful when it comes to definitively answering the most pressing questions facing educators and administrators today. What makes students stay at your university or apply to transfer? What leads to academic successes or struggles, and what are the early warning signs? How can you optimize your curriculum?
This is a real story of digital transformation.
Crunching the Numbers
For Dr. Resche Hines, finding answers to these questions took time—a lot of it. As the Assistant Vice President of Institutional Research and Effectiveness at Stetson University—a university located in DeLand, Florida, a cool 20 miles from Daytona Beach and 30 miles from downtown Orlando—Hines regularly interacts with data and reports from across the entire university. This could range from research to better understand the university’s 4,300 students or crunching the numbers for a new construction project.
Hines recognized the need to find a more scalable, user-friendly solution that could empower his university’s faculty and staff to conduct their own data-driven investigations and engage students and alumni with the most up-to-date information. For Hines, that meant implementing an interactive data visualization tool that helped him draw smarter insights from his institution’s data. That tool was Microsoft Power BI.
Now Stetson’s community is more engaged and more frequently turns to data instead of inherited wisdom and intuition to answer questions. Students and alumni feel more knowledgeable and connected to their campus with readily-digestible, interactive information. Faculty feel supported in their never-ending quest for better curricula and offerings for their students. And perhaps most importantly, Stetson University has enhanced its ability to conduct complex research, have more productive conversations, and debunk long-held institutional myths.
Empowering Employees
“There’s so much data out there that it becomes overwhelming for people to consume. Though you have data on every element you want about your life, there’s no way to easily use it,” explains Hines. “You can get it, but what are you going to do with it? Power BI has allowed us to transition that data to make it usable for the end user, to leverage it, and finally start looking at the data in a comprehensive way.”
Big data is often complex, which makes it difficult for researchers, faculty, staff, and administrators to understand. To encourage user adoption and explain to the Stetson community that Power BI would help alleviate challenges associated with data engagement, Hines and his team went to every school and department chair and personally demonstrated how the tool could be leveraged. Through this personal interaction with his community, Hines was able to directly empower the Stetson faculty and staff.
The easy-to-use platform even transformed critics into advocates. Today, faculty and staff at Stetson are using data to have better structured, more informed conversations about transforming curricula and classroom supplies. “We had a faculty member who was able to use Power BI to ask the Dean of their school for additional resources,” says Hines. “That’s when I knew we were on to something special.”
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive enrollment report from Stetson University using Power BI.
Power BI has helped Hines debunk many long-held and potentially damaging institutional myths.
“There were some areas of the institution that I thought were pain points for us in terms of retaining students, but we’re actually doing very well in retaining students,” Hines explains. “I thought most of the data would tell us that STEM areas are pain points for any institution in retaining students. Our STEM areas here are out-retaining our general population, which was an amazing discovery. To see that through Power BI was definitely a myth buster for me and for the institution. It helps to change the conversation.”
Engaging Students and Alumni
For prospective, current, and former Stetson students, access to university information has improved dramatically. Federally required information such as enrollment trends, retention, and graduation data is more accessible than ever. Before Power BI, the university could make PDFs for people to download, but the data was static and complex. Students can now interact with and explore data online rather than being forced to download information.
Hines has even seen progress in Stetson’s alumni and stakeholder community. The university is in the early stages of developing a Power BI partnership with Stetson’s Alumni Gifting Program. Hines is currently working on a template to help them understand and leverage historical statistics about the program for the public. For every gifting program, they’ll be able to pull up data on the success of each campaign in progress and understand the intricacies of campaigning. The end goal is to help stakeholders and alumni see data points that have been previously difficult for them to see, such as the best time for email and calling campaigns or which days of the year are the biggest giving days.
Power BI has not only helped debunk myths and change the conversation at Stetson, it has also helped acknowledge students who often go unnoticed.
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive retention report.
“Sometimes students outperform their scholarships, which were based on high school performance,” Hines says. “How do we track this and show student appreciation and reward them? Power BI helps us track these students and provide better incentives to show appreciation for their hard work.”
Microsoft is proud to partner with Resche Hines and Stetson University as they continue to engage students and empower faculty and administrators to achieve more.
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Aron adds that Researcher is not intended to replace the library for students, but rather to complement it. “As much as we are bringing the library to them digitally, we also want to make sure the library stays important in a student’s life,” he says. To that end, Bing and Researcher can point users to the nearest library for source material that isn’t yet digitized.
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive enrollment report from Stetson University using Power BI.
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive retention report.
