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.
Friendly neighborhood pet store opens hundreds of new locations with the support of Dynamics AX
As written on customers.microsoft.com
Almost a year ago, Pet Supplies Plus had 300 stores across the United States and was planning aggressive store growth in the coming years. Decision makers at the company knew they would need a strong technological backbone to support such an ambitious expansion, so they chose Microsoft Dynamics AX to replace the company’s disparate ERP systems. Now that Pet Supplies Plus has begun deployment, the company is beginning to see the fruits of its labor—and the validation that it made the right choice.
Brown recommends LCS to help reduce deployment times as well as lower costs, and she says, “we now have a better understanding of how to implement Dynamics AX across our stores and how to scale up more quickly utilizing the different tools and services in LCS. If you start with LCS and work your way through the cloud deployment, it’s your one-stop shop and your entry point into developing your Azure environment.”
Empowering employees to provide better service
Since Pet Supplies Plus deployed Dynamics AX to its stores last year, the decision makers at the business have heard lots of feedback from employees who are very happy with the change. “I’ve asked on a number of occasions if they’d like to go back to the old system and, across-the-board, nobody wants to,” Tedder says. “They are very pleased with the features and functionality of the Dynamics POS application and the future ability to evolve the POS application even further.”
The company is still in the early stages of its deployment process and the few dozen stores that are up and running with the new system are only a small sample size of the overall implementation. But Tedder says that he’s already seeing improvements in the time it takes to train employees on Dynamics AX. He explains, “Reducing training time for new team members is going to be extremely important and will result in a material ROI for any retailer using Dynamics AX.”
Taking care of neighbors and their pets
Pet Supplies Plus is also using Dynamics AX to help standardize its data, streamline its workflow, and standardize business processes across all its locations. “Dynamics AX is fulfilling our wish to have one system of record, one version of the truth, and a simplified applications portfolio, especially for the corporate office environment,” says Tedder. “The combination of those things coupled with business intelligence and reporting will yield efficiencies and improve our ordering in the ongoing months—we planned for this; it was part of how we made the decision to go with Microsoft Dynamics AX.”
The most important benefits, however, will be for the neighbors who come in and shop at Pet Supplies Plus locations. Tedder says, “We want to make sure that we provide a convenient option for our customers to purchase supplies for their pets, at a great value. Our goal is to make sure that we capitalize on that magic moment between team members and neighbors when we’re helping them select and purchase the products they need for their pets.”
"I’ve asked on a number of occasions if they’d like to go back to the old system and, across-the-board, nobody wants to."
- Miles Tedder: Chief Operating Officer, Pet Supplies Plus
Introducing guest access for Office 365 Groups
By Christophe Fiessinger as written on blogs.office.com
Sometimes you need to work closely with customers, partners, suppliers or consultants outside of your organization, and you need collaboration tools to make this possible. Today, we are pleased to announce the new guest access feature for Office 365 Groups—the group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365. The new guest access feature gives you the ability to include people outside of your company in an Office 365 group.
We are rolling out guest access functionality in phases. Starting today, group owners can add guests to a group in Outlook on the web. Once added, guests receive a welcome email, are granted access to group files in SharePoint Online, begin receiving email messages and calendar invites sent to the group, and can send messages to the group. They also have automatic access to cloud-based file attachments. Guests have the option to leave the group at any time and visual indicators remind all members of guest participation in the group across all Outlook experiences.
Guest access works for any email accounts including corporate and consumer domains (such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com). If the guest email identity is associated with a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 or Outlook.com accounts, for instance), the user is directed to a sign-in page to identify themselves. If the guest doesn’t have a Microsoft account, they will be directed to a sign-up page to create an account.
3 techniques for successful cloud collaboration
What’s your business’s motivation for implementing cloud collaboration solutions? The ones we hear most frequently are increased productivity, accelerated decision-making and improved sales. But here’s the surprise: According to the 2016 Connected Enterprise Report, one in four IT groups aren’t measuring cloud collaboration results by whether business goals were achieved. They’re not even checking whether users adopted the solution. They’re just measuring whether the tool was implemented.
But implementation isn’t a useful measure of success. Sure, it’s the prerequisite for effective collaboration, but it’s just the first step. Your enterprise can only see a full return on its investment in collaboration technologies when employees actually use the tools—so user adoption is the first measure to focus on.
Putting resources into ensuring adoption pays off. The same report shows that when businesses fully implemented and adopted collaboration technologies, they reported some exciting benefits:
Accelerated decision-making—85 percent say that using collaboration technology has met or exceeded their expectations.
More efficient business processes—79 percent say collaboration has met or exceeded their expectations.
Improved customer service—86 percent say collaboration has met or exceeded their expectations.
Three techniques to increase adoption
Want comparable benefits for your enterprise? Here are three techniques our customers have used to increase adoption of collaboration tools and get great business results. Each company’s story is a little different, but they’ve all improved productivity and agility.
Start with a familiar interface—For fashion group BCBGMAXAZRIAGROUP (BCBG), successful adoption was simpler because they started with a familiar interface.
After evaluating Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, the IT team at BCBG was concerned that the unfamiliar Google interface would create a training and adoption challenge. “We needed something our employees could adopt now with minimum disruption to day-to-day business,” says Kent Fuller, director of IT Infrastructure Services at BCBG. “We have a lot of infrastructure transformation going on, and Google would have introduced new challenges.” With a familiar interface and credits for online training materials included with subscriptions, BCBG employees can easily adopt Office 365.
One of the main benefits has been productive collaboration. With an updated, advanced messaging and productivity environment, BCBG employees can send and receive email messages faster; have the right tools to produce better documents, spreadsheets and presentations; and collaborate more effectively with colleagues, customers, suppliers and other partners. “With Office 365, we can build a more effective, more comprehensive collaboration environment than we could have with Google Apps,” says Fuller.
Turn executives into enthusiasts—For the KCOM Group, a national communications and information services organization in the United Kingdom, the rollout of its collaboration solution started at the top.
The company originally chose 40 senior executives to evaluate the Office Communications Server 2007 instant messaging, but the number of early users expanded organically and rapidly. “The technology sells itself once you start to use it,” says Dean Branton, group CIO at the KCOM Group and director of customer operations. “The senior team members immediately decided they wanted their direct reports using it as well, and then their extended teams, and then their personal assistants. Before we knew it, we had rolled out by stealth.”
“Now,” says Bill Halbert, executive chairman of the KCOM Group, “We are more flexible, more agile, and we can make quicker decisions, because it is much easier to find the information we need.”
Let the experts help build your plan—The process of building an Office 365 adoption was a little different for Mott MacDonald, a global consulting company. The Microsoft FastTrack Team helped the company with its adoption plan by providing both self-service resources and expert advice. “The FastTrack adoption methodology is really beneficial,” says Simon Denton, the business architect responsible for Office 365 implementation at Mott MacDonald. “It sets out quite clearly the steps we needed to go through to define principles and scenarios. Once we did that, we knew adoption would come easily. We based our entire adoption plan on the FastTrack documentation. It gave us a really good foundation.”
For example, Mott MacDonald encouraged adoption of its new Yammer enterprise social network with a “30 Days of Yammer” campaign, which involved all the staff and more than doubled the number of active and engaged users. Employees started using it to break down barriers within the organization much more quickly than anyone had expected.
The most important step: Start!
As soon as you roll out your collaboration solution, start measuring and tracking user adoption, and move decisively to address any hitches in the process. Implementing a suite solution and preparing your IT team to get employees up and running can be a daunting task—but Office 365 lets you move at your own pace. With our suite of available tools, you decide whether to migrate employees over in groups or by program. The ability to implement a steady rollout enables your teams to work at their own pace, allows you to save costs, and increases productivity by helping your business adapt to new streamlined solutions over time. Additionally, FastTrack for Office 365 provides customers with hands-on support to drive deployment and adoption at their own speed.
Outlook’s new and improved calendar on iOS and Android
Whether you’re planning your next dinner date or an upcoming meeting with teammates, the Outlook team’s mission is to provide you with the best calendar app out there. Today, we’re happy to share that it’s about to get even better on iOS and Android—with new features and a better overall experience to help you manage and make the most of your day.
Here’s a look at what’s new:
Stay connected with Interesting Calendars
A few months ago, we introduced Calendar Apps to let you connect your favorite apps—Wunderlist, Facebook and Evernote—to your calendar. Our goal? To give you a complete and clear view of your day with your events, tasks and notes in one place.
Today, we’re taking this idea one step further by adding Interesting Calendars, which allows you to subscribe to your hometown sports team’s calendar and see the events automatically pop up in your calendar. TV shows and more will be following soon
Interesting Calendars is available today to Outlook for iOS users with an Office 365 email address (coming soon to Android). Users with an Outlook.com email address will be able to subscribe later this year, with Gmail and other accounts to follow.
Add some personality to your agenda with event icons
Try typing “coffee” or “lunch” next time you create an event and see what happens in your agenda view—the keywords automatically trigger an icon that matches your event title. Icons come in handy when you want to scan your day quickly and see what’s coming up. Also, they’re fun.
For Sunrise users, we even added new icons on top of our regular list. Let us know once you’ve found them all.
Know where you need to go with maps in event details
Don’t want to get lost on your way to your next appointment? Just start typing a location next time you create an event, choose one of the handy suggestions (powered by Bing) and Outlook will include a map with your event details.
Now, before your next event, you can simply tap on the map in the event details and get directions from your favorite maps app.
Schedule in a snap with improved date and time pickers
As we continue to bring more of the Sunrise design expertise to Outlook, we updated our date and time pickers so that scheduling is easier than ever. Our new design provides a simpler, more intuitive way to choose the date and time when creating a meeting—matching how Outlook works on the web or desktop. You can try this out today in Outlook for iOS, and it is coming soon on Android.
Update meetings on the fly with recurrence editing
Recurring meetings can be edited from your mobile device. Now you can adjust the time, location, attendees or even delete the event if necessary while on the go. Outlook confirms if you’d like your changes to apply to the individual instance or all the meetings in the series. We will be adding the ability to create recurring events in an upcoming update.
Make meetings on the go easier with Skype for Business
Following our Skype integration, you can now create Skype for Business meetings directly from your phone. When creating a new event on your Office 365 calendar, the option to add a Skype meeting is now included. Simply tap the Skype Meeting toggle and Outlook includes your company’s Skype information in the description of the event. When the meeting arrives, you’ll also be able to join the call with just a tap.
And there’s even more to come!
Let us know what you think of our new calendar features! We’re not stopping here in our quest to provide you with the best calendar experience on iOS and Android. If you have other ideas for what would make the calendar experience even better for you, let us know right from Outlook by going to Settings > Suggest a Feature.
OneNote Class Notebook add-in now includes grade scales, improved LMS integration and sticker customization
First-grade teacher at the Ashton Elementary School, Rachel Montisano, said, “Now, with two clicks, I can send out all the tabs/pages I created or wanted to share with the students. Truly remarkable! Microsoft had just given me a tool that made me an even more effective teacher and gave me time back!”
Today’s updates for the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote desktop update include:
Grade scale support for Canvas and Skooler.
Skooler joins the OneNote add-in family.
Stickers—now includes the ability to customize.
Grade scale support for Canvas and Skooler
Last spring, we released Assignment and Grade integration for the OneNote Class Notebook. A top request from teachers and schools using Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Student Information Systems (SIS) has been to support additional assignment values beyond just 1-100 points. Many LMS and SIS have richer grade scales—such as custom points, letter grades, pass/fail, percentages—and teachers want to be able to have more flexibility in the assignments they create.
Today, we are releasing the initial updates to allow grade scale support, depending on the LMS or SIS being used. The first two partners that support grades scales are Canvas and Skooler. The Class Notebook add-in will support different grade scales, based on what the specific LMS or SIS supports.
In the example below, a teacher can choose a “Letter Grade” type when creating the assignment, and the assignment will be created in Canvas with that attribute. When the teacher goes to enter grades under the Review Student Work choice, a letter grade can be entered.
Example of grade scale support in Canvas.
Skooler joins the OneNote add-in family
Today, we welcome Skooler to the Class Notebook add-in family for assignment and grade support. Watch the Getting Started with Skooler video to learn more. As mentioned above, our Skooler integration will also add grade scale support.
Last month, we announced the arrival of stickers for OneNote Online and Windows 10. Today, the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote 2013 and OneNote 2016 for the desktop includes stickers, including the ability to customize them. To add a sticker to your page, check the Insert menu after you install the latest version of the add-in. We will release more sticker packs in the future—based on student and teacher feedback—so stay tuned!
Customizable stickers in OneNote desktop.
Since the school year started, we’ve been making improvements to the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote on the desktop. To update your OneNote Class Notebook add-in, just click the Update button on your toolbar to download and install the latest version. If you’ve never installed the Class Notebook add-in, you can get it from the OneNote Class Notebook website.
The new Office.com gets first major update
By Tom Batcheler as written on blogs.office.com
Back in April, we started rolling out a new Office 365 home page experience that provided a redesigned environment for commercial, education and home users to collaborate and work across every device. The update also delivered improved access to recent files and folders and introduced a new platform for faster delivery of innovative features.
We’re now rolling out new changes that will greatly increase the ease of navigating apps and improve access to frequent and recently opened documents. These changes started rolling out in December and will continue through early 2017.
Get back to your online documents
We know that your best work can take time, so we improved access to your unfinished documents. Users will now see additional controls within the “Recent documents” list to let users filter by document type across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Have a document that you go back to frequently? Pin it to the list so it’s always just a click away.
Know what’s coming up
We made it easier to see what’s coming up at a glance. Get an in-depth view of the day’s meetings and quickly respond to or join Skype for Business calls with one click. Enhanced people pictures help you build stronger connections with coworkers and help you keep track of your different teams and projects.
Stay on top of tasks
Create, view and complete tasks directly on Office.com that stay in sync across Outlook on all your devices. Need to add more details to a task? Double tap to open in Outlook Tasks to add additional details.
Contact us Today!
Chat with an expert about your business’s technology needs.
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.
The new Office.com gets first major update
