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Windows 7 @ School of the Future

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At about 8:30 this morning I received a call from Mr. Machos, the new Music Technology educator at the school, he asked me "did Windows 7 release today?" upon which I answered, "Yes of course", he then proceeded to count one, two, three, at which point the school's band, which meets at 8am every day, began to play The Final Countdown by Europe quite apporpriate since today was the day that Windows 7 officially launched.

Everyone has been talking about the launch our VP of Worldwide Education, Anthony Salcito, describes the value of Windows 7 very succinctly in his blog post and clues everyone into a couple of other key features that schools will find valuable.

 There's several blogs that you can go to in order to find out about Windows 7 specific to education, my favorite is my colleague Rob B's blog with 7 Things Teachers Will Like About Windows 7 (hope he doesn't mind if I borrow the first two tips)

 Posted from 7 Things Teachers Will Like About Windows 7 Blog:

1. Things work more quickly - starting up you PC is faster, if you let your machine go to sleep, or you are moving around school with a laptop, it resumes and is ready to work with little delay. Critical for those first few minutes of class when you need to get the momentum going, launch the PowerPoint or web page and start class. If you connect to an LCD projector to display to your class, projecting just works, no delays.

 

2. Find things on your PC fast - just above the Start button is the Windows Search box. If you don’t use your PC's search, I suggest you give this a try as it works, and it works fast. So finding that assignment sheet you created last year (along with accompanying PowerPoint) that you want to tweak for a project (tomorrow!), or an email discussion you had with a parent two months ago, is all indexed and searched by Windows and the results are presented in one result set - and fast! See a short demo here.

 

We've been using Windows 7 on several laptops at the school, and next week I'll post some video about our Windows 7 installation on 3 year old UMPC's. I can tell you that the learners and educators at the school absolutely love Windows 7, and I'll definitley share our experiences using it on a daily basis in my weekly posts, stay tuned!