Tek4L

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Could be useful in small group learning situations I suppose.

http://www.popfly.ms/

Microsoft’s answer to Yahoo pipes. It is done using their new silverlight app so is much more drag and drop/flash like than pipes.

Stumbled across this project from JISC

http://www.xcri.org/ 

Which may be worth looking at it relation to the virtual learning network here in NZ, which acts as a broker/aggregator for courses available in New Zealand secondary schools.

There has just been a bit of a debate on a New Zealand email list for IT people in Schools. It centred around a ministry decision to fund MS Office for schools. One side of the argument says they have to do it because students need to be taught the applications they are going to encounter in the work force - the other side says the money could be better spent elsewhere as there are perfectly usable open source office applications.

I go with the second one. I hate to think how much the Ministry is paying MS for Office lincenses for all schools, but however much it is they would be better off putting it towards paying for technical support to backup a roleout of Open Office. I imagine that for the same price as MS Office they could imploy a full time help desk person in each of our main centres just to take Open Office enquiries.

The argument about students needing to be taught the applications that they will encounter in industry is a nonsense. For a start the chances of them encountering the same version of the same app on the same OS is limited anyway, and secondly schools should be teaching concepts and IT nouse, not step by step instruction on specific apps. If somebody has a good understanding of IT concepts and a bit of nouse then they will quickly pick up any application that is thrown in front of them.