Tag: Flash Fill

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Microsoft365

When Life Gives You Lemons… Eat Dog Food

LemonsI have been in Singapore this past week at the APAC Education Partners Conference which was a great event and an awesome time to connect with many new partners and also re-connect with the colleagues in my team based in Singapore that I have not seen for a few months.

I ran a bunch of sessions including a Minecraft:Education Edition three hour training event to 30 partners. Being Asia, a group photo after the event was mandatory:

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I also enjoyed the usual sights and sounds of Singapore:

One of the true highlights was visiting the Tanglin Trust School for a couple of hours on Friday morning where we were hosted by Steve Morgan who shared the school’s journey from students almost exclusively using MacBooks to now using ‘touch and pen’ enabled devices and Microsoft OneNote. This was quite the transformation and involved significant planning, trialing and communication but as I wandered the halls looking into the classrooms it was evident that virtually all of the teachers had embraced OneNote in a serious way – it was everywhere!

https://twitter.com/stevesingapore/status/971995253031895042

I liked the following educational take on ‘The Ten Commandments’ that was on the wall in the school:

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The Problem – Being Given Lemons

On the day before I was to fly out I was asked to help configure 60 Surface Pro 4 devices in preparation for the Microsoft E2 Educators event being held the following week (12th March – follow along live here). I discussed the challenge with my colleague Amit Pawar who was also asked for how best to achieve the required outcomes which were essentially:

  1. Office365 ProPlus needed to be installed (with latest version to support inserting 3D Models into PowerPoint)
  2. Minecraft:Education Edition installed
  3. Paint3D (meaning at least the Creators Update of Windows10, otherwise would need to install it via the Microsoft Store)

Not knowing what state the devices would show up in meant we had to make some assumptions, so we prepared a handful of USB drives with the ‘Click 2 Run’ O365 installer (along with a .bat file to execute the install), along with the Minecraft:Education Edition Win10 Installation file.

After returning from the visit to Tanglin Trust School on Friday morning, we found to our dismay that the units had still not arrived meaning we were going to be severely pressed for time. When they did eventually arrive mid-afternoon it was evident our original plan above was not going to work. The devices all had various versions of Windows10 installed on them, different versions of Office365 with multiple language packs (but not the latest version that included the support for 3D models in PowerPoint) and other gremlins that suggested the devices were not going to be the most functional.

The Solution – Making Lemonade

Surface
Some of the Surface Pro needing configuring

It became clear that a Plan B was going to be required to get these devices ready in the very short period of time that we had available and so Amit and I conferred and decided we would need to change tact. Our solution was to:

  1. Create a demo tenant here – https://demos.microsoft.com/ – this gave us temporary demo licenses for M365 A3 and A5 meaning we had temporary O365 ProPlus and Intune liceneses.
  2. Map a domain name to the demo tenant to make it easier to use (fortunately, my forward thinking colleague had a spare one handy).
  3. Create sixty demo user accounts in the Tenant using Excel and FlashFill
  4. Download the ISO and create Windows10 installation USB drives. Fortunately, being in Singapore there is a local Microsoft Data Centre only a few kilometers down the road meaning it did not take long to download the ISO. I had my ‘always travel with’ USB of Win10 so we could get a head start with that one.
  5. Amit then configured Intune for Education in the demo tenant to automatically push out Office365 and Minecraft: Education Edition to any users who signed into the Tenant that were connected via AzureAD and Intune and were licensed appropriately (see step 1 above).

Configuring the above did not take long, with the biggest wait being having Windows 10 reinstalled on the Surface Pro devices.  When the first couple of devices were complete they presented us with this screen in the Windows10 setup steps:

setup-for-personal-use
We chose to “Set up for an organisation” meaning we could automatically enroll the devices into Intune

By choosing the first option of “Set up for an organisation” we were presented with the option to sign in with an email address and password where we used the user names we created in step 3 above. Because the users all had AzureAD P1 and Intune Licenses they were automatically enrolled into our demo tenant (based off the domain name of the email address) and then the magic started to happen:

Office365 ProPlus applications and Minecraft:Education Edition started to immediately download to the device with no need for any further intervention. Intune For Education took over and recognised the configurations of Amit had set up and automatically pushed out the applications to the correct users.

We could then test the first few devices to ensure that Minecraft:Education Edition could be signed into and that when launching PowerPoint it had support for the 3D Models and as an added bonus, the user was automatically signed into Office365 and activated it based off the temporary demo licenses in the tenant – there was no need to manually activate Office.

Selling The Dream – The Lemonade Stall

At this point, I may be stretching my analogy around life, lemonade and lemonade stalls, however what excited me about this was it proved, in a real-world time-sensitive and under pressure situation, that the modern device management (MDM) dream can work very effectively. Intune for Education and AzureAD worked exactly as intended meaning once the initial configuration was completed, it was as easy as signing into the devices with one of the demo user accounts to complete the deployment. In the end, I had to leave at 5:30pm to catch a flight home out of Changi Airport and my colleagues all had other events to get to. As a result, they had to come in on the Saturday morning to finish the re-installation of Windows10 which was the longest part of the whole process, and then simply sign into the freshly installed Surface Pros with the new user accounts and wait a few minutes for the download and installation of Office365 ProPlus and Minecraft:Education Edition to complete.

This was a very satisfying solution and conclusion to a busy week and a great example of ‘eating your own dog food‘ (if you’re not familiar with this curious phrase, have a look at the explanation here).

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Microsoft365 Windows 11

Minecraft: Education Edition Builds A New Parliament

electionIn New Zealand it’s been pretty hard to avoid what has become a spectacularly unconventional general election, all culminating with voting happening on this coming Saturday, 23rd September 2017. No fewer than three major parties have had leadership changes in the last couple of months before the voting begins and that excludes the stepping down of the incumbent Prime Minister of the last 8.5yrs John Key.

Exciting times so far!

To further engage the younger population of New Zealand in the democratic process, the NZ Parliamentary Services partnered with Microsoft NZ to deliver a Minecraft: Education Edition solution whereby they could recreate virtual parliaments with their own unique twists on how these 11-13yrs think it should look. This was covered by our local media here, and NZ Parliamentary Services own news coverage here, which includes a good video walk through of one of the M:EE worlds:

MEE
Wellington’s distinctive Bee Hive parliamentary building recreated in Minecraft: Education Edition by students from St Benedict’s School in Wellington.

It was interesting seeing some of the reflections from the students involved in this project, with working together collaboratively one of the biggest challenges for them according to 12yr old Ben Vickers from Waikanae Primary:

Everyone had different ideas and ways of working and it took about a week for the team to gel, he says.

“It was difficult but we learned to work together.

“I think it was the collaboration with everyone else that made it different from just going home and playing it.”

From my perspective, this is one of the best things about game based learning – there is no manual or instruction book on how to build a project. Instead, students need to communicate, negotiate, assign responsibilities and hold each other mutually accountable to achieve the outcome. To this end, it aligns very well with the Key Competencies of the New Zealand Curriculum:

  • Thinking
  • Relating to others
  • Using languages, symbols and texts
  • Manging self
  • Participating and contributing
MEE 2
Students presenting their Minecraft:EE worlds. Credit: Stuff

As a teacher friend of mine pointed out to me when I was re-training to become a history teacher after a decade in the ICT sector, there are really only two “academic” Key Competencies (Thinking / Using Languages, Symbols and Texts) whereas the other three are really the soft skills, interpersonal and vital to modern workplaces which are expected to be far more collaborative than ever before. If you’re interested in how eLearning can be delivered through the lens of the Key Competencies, have a look at this presentation I delivered to Pukekohe High School teachers earlier this year.

Whilst not an educator, Microsoft NZ’s Director of Public Sector Jeff Healey acknowledged the above when he said Minecraft: Education Edition teaches not only maths and spatial awareness, but the skills of team work:

“Having a plan, people sticking to the plan, working a plan, people not being destructive.

“I know that when we hire people at Microsoft they’re some of the skills: do they have those critical thinking skills? Can you work in a team? Are they open to making mistakes and learning from those mistakes? They’re some of the valuable things that we’re looking for as an employer.”

I’ve blogged previously about the research showing game based learning with Minecraft can grow students’ Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) outcomes and hearing the students from this project share how they had to negotiate to achieve the goal reinforces this.

I was fortunate to be able to contribute in a small way in the background to this Minecraft: Education Edition project with Parliamentary Services through:

It’s really gratifying to see that the methods we know and use internally at Microsoft can be used to support a project like the above and work with students across a number of schools. This really was a team effort with multiple Microsoft NZ staff across a number of business teams working together for this outcome – One Microsoft!

 

Categories
Microsoft365

Flash Fill: An Excel Lifesaver For Monotonous Tasks

I am not an Excel guru by any stretch of the imagination, but plenty of people have to use this great tool on a regular basis. This often involves making lists, joining cells and similar tasks that can be very monotonous. I was having to do this recently to create some temporary users in a demo Office365 Education Tenant so students could play Minecraft: Education Edition.

Quite by accident, I discovered a game changer feature called Flash Fill. This has actually been around since Excel 2013 but somehow I’ve never come across it before.

How It Works:

Imagine you have a list of first and last names but you want to combine these into a new cell that has both names in them – this is a pretty common task e.g.

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What Flash Fill allows you to do is type the desired name in the first cell (C1 in this example), followed by the the start of the desired name in the second cell (C2) and it will then start to Flash Fill based on the pattern e.g.

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Note the names in grey in C4 and C5 are filled out by the same matching pattern after only typing the letter “B” in C2. Simply hitting enter will fill this for you for all remaining cells that match the pattern. In my real example I had thirty names to match so you can see this is a significant time saver :

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Tips For Help:

There is an instructional video showing you how to do this if you need some further assistance:

FlashFill Video.PNG

Flash Fill should be turned on by default in Excel for you, but if it is not you can check under the “Options” and then “Advanced” to turn it on as explained here and in the image below:

flashfill.png

I can imagine for Teachers that need to do a lot of work around student/parent names, contact details and results this could be a really useful tool that saves them a lot of time.