Students – Page 2 – Tom on Tech

(Disclosure: Like most things Microsoft related, I am attending TechEd as a guest of the Microsoft Corporation. Flight, hotel, meals, and conference pass have been provided by Microsoft.)

I’m writing this post from 10,000 feet above the ground using GoGo Inflight Internet as I fly from Phoenix to Atlanta. (So cool!) I’m on my way to Atlanta for Microsoft’s TechEd North America conference.

TechEd is one of the premier conferences for IT professionals and developers alike. Obviously since it is being put on by Microsoft, it focuses on Microsoft technologies. This year, Robert Wahbe and Jason Zander will be keynoting the event and as my friend Mary Jo Foley has noted on her blog, we’ll probably see some cool stuff around SQL Server, Visual Studio (I hear there is a Kinect + VS demo!), and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some more info about the future of System Center and its role in facilitating public / private cloud interaction as well as management and consolidation in the datacenter.

I’ll be spending most of my time in sessions this week and will do my best to update everyone with the highlights. Also, I’ll be bringing a preview of what will be seen at the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals this summer.

Upcoming events that I’ll be at

I’ll be attending TechEd North America 2011 in Atlanta, GA this year. As an IT Professional, I’m looking forward to all the sessions and networking to be had. (P.S. If you’re a vendor in the SMB space and will be at TechEd, send me an e-mail. (tom at tomontech dot com) I’m always looking for new things and would love to meet up.)

I’ll be attending the 2011 Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in New York, New York this year. The Imagine Cup is an incredible event, with students from all over the world coming together and showing of technological solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems.

Seattle-bound for MVP Summit and Student Insider Meetup

I’ll be in Seattle February 23rd-March 3rd for Microsoft Student Insider stuff and the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. I’ll be taking my new SLR digital camera with me and taking lots of pictures, so look for those over the course of those eight days.

Please join me in welcoming the following to the Student Insider program for 2011:

Den Delimarsky –@denniscode – dennisdel.com – Den is what I consider a Windows Phone Ninja. He knows the platform inside and out and blogs about it extensively on his own website and on DreamInCode.
Drew Devault – @sircmpwn – sircmpwn.blogspot.com – Drew is an XNA and Silverlight wizard (and he’s still in high school!)
Billy O’Neal – @MalwareMiniGun – winwrench.com
Steven Nowak (Don’t have any blog or Twitter handle for Steven yet. When I do I’ll update this.)

MVP summit content is covered under the Non-Disclosure Agreement, so I’m not able to talk about what I’ll be doing there, other than to say that I’ll be meeting with the Home and Small Business Server team at various points through out the week. If you have any questions that you want me to try to answer, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Hey students, want free Microsoft development tools?

If your answer to the question is yes, than have I got a deal for you!

Microsoft has a program called DreamSpark. The DreamSpark program is a way for you as a student to gain access to Microsoft technologies that you can then use to create amazing applications for the PC, the cloud, and the phone.

Dreamspark includes some really amazing things such as:

Visual Studio 2010 Professional
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
Expression Studio 4 Ultimate
SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition
Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3
Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools
Virtual Lab training for SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Visual Basic
IT Academy Student Pass
1 Year free membership to the App Hub and Windows Phone Marketplace (Yes, FREE! There is no $99 fee for students to build and sell Windows Phone 7 apps.)

All it takes to join DreamSpark is sign up, get verified as a student, and download the software.

I highly encourage any student that wants to get hands on experience with Microsoft technologies to sign up for Dreamspark and start playing and creating.

To find out more about DreamSpark, visit http://www.dreamspark.com

Microsoft software now available to ASU students for free

Hello my fellow Sun Devils! This post is specifically for you.

As an ASU student you can get access to over 300 different pieces of Microsoft software for free. Yes, FREE! You’ll have access to such pieces of Microsoft goodness like Windows 7, the entire Expression suite, and Visual Studio.

All you need to do is be an active ASU student enrolled in a science, technology, education, or math class. (STEM classes for short as they are commonly referred to within the education community.) For a complete list of qualifying courses, click here.

To access the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDNAA, for short), you’ll need to follow these steps.

1. Go to the ASU MyApps portal (http://myapps.asu.edu) and login with your ASURITE

2. In the search box, type in “MSDNAA” (no quotes) and click Search.

3. Click the “Download from 3rd party” button to login to the MSDNAA portal

4. Once on the MSDNAA Portal, you can either use the drop-down menu to select the software you are looking for or use the search box to navigate the portal.

5. Once you have chosen a piece of software, you’ll need to add it to your cart. Click the “Add to Cart” button. If you have multiple pieces of software you want to download, add them to your cart first, and then download them all at the same time. You’ll be prompted with a usage guideline agreement. Read the agreement and click the “I accept” button if you agree to guidelines.

6. When you are ready to Checkout and download your software, click the “Check Out” button

7. Fill out your name and e-mail address on the next page, and then click “Next”

8. You’ll be shown an confirmation page. To download your software, click the “Download” button

9. You’ll be taken to a details page. Click the “Download” button. It will ask you to download a small file to your computer. Download this file to your computer. This is how the software will be downloaded. Open the file, and choose a location to download the software.

10. Click Continue. Your software will download, and you can monitor the progress at the bottom of the download window.

That’s all there is to it.

Mobile Learning with Blackboard

School has started and my university uses the Blackboard Learning Management System, and I was told about a feature called Blackboard Mobile Learn that may enhance my learning experience.

Blackboard Mobile Learn is available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices over Wi-Fi, and Blackberry and Android devices on the Sprint network.

Mobile Learn allows students to access the same features available through Blackboard on a PC such as accessing grades, discussions, and content uploaded by instructors.

I’ve been trying out Mobile Learn to see what, if any, value it brings to the student learning environment. Since I’m not on the Sprint network, I can’t test it on my Android based devices, so my tests come from the iPad version.

When Mobile Learn is launched, you’re asked to search for your university. After typing in the search criteria and selecting the university you are prompted with either the login prompt provided by blackboard or the Single Sign On prompt used by the university.

Once logged in, you are able to choose from a list of available classes or view the Dashboard. In the Dashboard you will be able to see notifications of new content that has been added to each available class.

Navigating within a class on Mobile Learn is much the same as using Blackboard on a PC or Mac. The overall structure is the same, and the same features available on a PC are available within Mobile Learn. For instance, if you need to register a TurningPoint branded clicker, the registration tool is available and will open in a browser window within Mobile Learn.

Accessing content that is in the form of PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint slide shows, or other common file types is incredibly easy through Mobile Learn. When you select a piece of content, for example, a PDF file of notes for Biology class, you are presented with two options. The first is to open the file in the browser, and the second is a direct link to the attached file. If you tap the button to open the attachment, it will open within Mobile Learn, and you can browse the PDF file just as you would normally.

What impressed me the most about Blackboard Mobile Learn is the feature parity with accessing Blackboard from a PC. My testing has shown that if it’s accessible through Blackboard on a PC, then it can be accessed from Mobile Learn. The only real limitation seems to be, in this case, the iPad itself. If content contains Flash or Windows Media Video, then it won’t play, as the iPad does not support those types of files.

What I’m not so impressed by is the business deal between Blackboard and Sprint. I do not see many, if any, students who use Sprint. It’s Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile that students are using. To be honest, while Mobile Learn provides some compelling features, I wouldn’t change to Sprint just so I could use it on my cell phone. Hopefully, we will see this change and Mobile Learn will be available to any user on any cellular network.

A couple other minor annoyances are that there is not an ability to choose a school as a default. There have been times where the search I have used to find my school has stayed and other times I have had to search for the school all over again. For most people, being able to search for the school once and setting that school as the default would be a good feature to have. Another thing is that the application will occasionally hang after I login and I won’t be able to open any classes or open the dashboard, but after going back to the home screen and re-launching Mobile Learn, everything works okay.

Overall, I’m giving Blackboard Mobile Learn 3.75 out of 5 stars, with a full point deduction for partnering with Sprint and a quarter point deduction for the inability to set a school as the default when launching the application.

Imagine Cup 2010 Wrap-up

(I totally meant to have this posted right after the Imagine Cup finals, but due to some blog issues, and work, the posting schedule slipped. –Tom)

Wow, what a week! I’ve just finished attending the 2010 Microsoft Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in Warsaw, Poland. I’ve had the opportunity to interact with students from all over the world, meet the top executives for Microsoft worldwide, have lunch with education ministers and dignitaries from all over the world, and see some some incredible projects at this year’s Imagine Cup.

At the World Festival on Thursday evening, Jon Perera announced that the 2011 Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals will be held in New York, New York. After Perera’s introduction, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke to this year’s finalists via video, and congratulated them on their accomplishments, and talked about how excited she was that the Imagine Cup will be in the USA. This is incredibly exciting to see the Imagine Cup travelling to the United States. I highly encourage all tech students to compete in the Imagine Cup competition. I’m not sure when the Imagine Cup website will be updated with information for next year’s competition, but keep checking www.imaginecup.com for updated information.

I want to take a moment to thank the City of Warsaw and the government and country of Poland for their wonderful hospitality. Warsaw is such a beautiful city. Throughout the week there were events at different venues within Warsaw. We were at the Palace of Culture and Science, the Warsaw Opera House, a castle in the beautiful town of Pultusk, and several hotels in the city center. The event concluded with an awesome party at the Platinum Nightclub, and after partying into the wee hours of the morning, I returned to the hotel for a few hours of shut eye before heading off to the airport.

One of the biggest takeaways from the Imagine Cup is that no matter how young or how old, students have the power to create innovative solutions to the world’s problems through software. I was totally blown away by how awesome these projects were. Quite a few of the projects are already being looked at by world governments and the private sector. Most of the teams that made it to the final round of judging said that they are working on plans bring their projects to market, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for that.

I want to thank Jacek Murawski (General Manager Microsoft Poland), Jon Perera (General Manager Microsoft Education), the entire corporate Microsoft Imagine Cup team, and the team in Poland that worked to pull off an incredible event. I also want to thank everyone at Microsoft and Waggener-Edstrom for making this trip possible. I had a great time, and I look forward to the 2011 Imagine Cup.

The 2010 Windows Phone 7 Rockstars

Earlier this year the Windows Phone team along with the Imagine Cup announced the Windows Phone 7 Rockstar award for this year’s Imagine Cup competition. Participants were given one month to design a Windows Phone 7 application either in Silverlight or using the XNA Game Studio.

I’m very excited to be able to announce that the first ever Windows Phone 7 Rockstars hail from my home country, the United States. Eric Lo and Christian Hood, from the Advanced Techology Academy, a public magnet high school in Las Vegas, Nevada, have won the 2010 Imagine Cup Windows Phone 7 Rockstar award.

Their project, Droid Assault, is a two-dimensional Windows Phone 7 game written in XNA using C#, that involves a player controlling a machine that destroys other machines using the accelerometer functionality in Windows Phone 7.

Team Beastware plans to publish their game on the Windows Phone Marketplace in time for the launch of Windows Phone 7 devices. I highly encourage everyone to check out their game, and to give them a huge congratulations in their accomplishments.

You can find Team Beastware on the web at http://beastware.co.cc

Tag: Students

TechEd North America 2011- Keynote

TechEd North America 2011–Day 0