Microsoft offer Office 365 to all students for free

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Microsoft have been losing students left right an centre over the last couple of years as they walked away from Office and Windows in droves for alternatives such as iPads, Google Apps and Chromebooks. 

However today Microsoft have announced that students worldwide will gain access to a full version of it's very impressive and to be totally honest the best available productivity suite for free.

This is a great offer which will initially be available to US students but released worldwide in the near future.

Full details can be found here.  Now go and get it.

Office 2013 - What is the difference?

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Yesterday Microsoft rolled out their latest version of Office.  Office 2013.  - I have been using this for a while now and put simply, I still see this as the most complete productivity suite available on any platform by a very long margin.

But it is not free - far from it.  Microsoft is trying to convince the average user to subscribe to their suite of tools for $100 USD per year that allows you to install it on 5 devices.  Not to bad, but not Google docs free.

Is it worth the upgrade from the already very capable office 2010?  Make your own mind up, take a look at CNET's review below.

Great collection of PowerPoints for Teachers

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Just a quick one for today.  Vicki Blackwell has put together a great collection of PowerPoint presentations for teachers to use including lesson plans, templates, tips and pointers.

Be sure to take a look at these as there is definitely plenty of work that has already been done for you.

Access it here.

Microsoft OneNote for Teachers

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Microsoft OneNote has been grwoing in popularity with teachers over the last couple of years as it does a brilliant job of storing, organising and sharing multimedia, data and notes, which is exactly what teachers require.  I have put together some resources below that will help you both get started and become a pro with Microsoft OneNote.

Download this teacher’s guide of tips for Microsoft OneNote. Download guide

Discover tips on helpful ways to refresh your lessons, manage class assignments, make quick work of daily tasks, and share information with colleague, students, and parents.

Organize your materials. Microsoft OneNote helps organize class lessons, web articles, videos, and other multimedia class content in one convenient application.

Videos

   

ICT lesson Plan - Make a christmas card using Microsoft Publisher

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It is coming up to the festive season and no doubt your students will be writing and sending some Christmas Cards. Microsoft Publisher has some great options for creating cards for all occasions and this lesson plan will really give your students a great starting point for creating cards in Publisher. Download the lesson plan here.

400 Free Teaching Teamplates for Microsoft Office

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Microsoft have really started to reinvest some time into education again over the last 12 months and today I came across this great collection of teaching templates for Microsoft office.  Nearly 400 of them.  they cover a mixture of purposes from classroom displays through to academic calendars, grade trackers and bookmarks for students and I guarantee nearly every teacher will find a couple of things here that would be of use to them. 

I would love to hear of any great templates you use in you teaching

Computer lesson plan for younger students. Inserting images into Word

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Thanks to Kate Scott for this one.  This is a very simple one page lesson plan you can hand to younger students to assist them in inserting clip art and pictures into Microsoft Office applications.  The illustrations really help.  Download it here.

Computer Lesson Plan - Graphing and sorting Data in Excel

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This lesson has been submitted by Mark Muldoon.  It is an excellent 2 page lesson plan that you can confidently laminate and hand to students to help them understand how to put together a simple graph and sort their data in Excel in simple and illustrated steps.  click here to download it.