Tag: Microsoft 365 for Education

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Microsoft365

The Ultimate Collection of Intune / Endpoint Manager Resources For Education

Intune for Education

UPDATE 19th July 2021: added some additional interactive guides from Joe Cicerco showcasing common scenarios with MEM for Education (specifically, configuring Enterprise WiFi and wrapping .exe files for deployment) as well as an AutoPilot in Edu guide.

UPDATE 24th May 2021: added another section of third party blogs/resources that are helpful. Specifically today, a post to show how Win10 Location Finding services in Intune works.

Looking back over four years of blogging during my time at Microsoft, I realise I’ve made a couple of “Ultimate Collections of ….” blog posts and my rationale for these is very clear: if I can make a “one stop shop” for people to get resources and then keep that one blog post updated as things change, it becomes easier to simply refer customers and partners to that location. The two I currently have are:

  1. Ultimate Minecraft:Education Getting Started Guide
    1. This has proven incredibly popular, regularly on the ‘trending posts’ on my blog and whilst I’ve not added a heap to it recently, remains a great starting point for educators and IT admins alike.
  2. Ultimate Collection of Resources for Remote Learning With M365
    1. This was purely a response to the COVID19 pandemic and was being shared (and accessed) regularly during the first half of 2020 and seen as a go to collection for educators around the world.

Now, I’m always very clear that none of my blog posts should ever replace the official Microsoft Documentation and I always try to link back to this as the source of truth and guides to best practice. I’m also very clear that I try to indicate when changes / updates have occurred by adding a date stamp at the top of the blog post and then using the strikethrough of text when something is no longer relevant.

With this in mind, I’m going to start collating resources on this blog post and keep it updated over time and if I’m missing any obvious ones, please let me know in the comments below or ping me on @samuelmcneill

My Own Blog Posts

There are others, but the above are the more recent / in depth posts but to check the rest, simply click this link to search for Intune across by blog.

Video Resources

The Microsoft Intune for Education Deployment Workshop is a tremendous collection of 21 videos taking you through the deployment stages – click here to access the entire library Here is the embedded playlist:

Documentation

This is a somewhat ‘catch all’ area for largely written documentation that should prove helpful – I’ll add a comment below each link to give you more guidance on what it is before you click the link.

Third Party Blogs / Resources

Partner Specific Content

There may be some overlap here between Documentation and content generated by MSFT specifically for Partners, but worth separating it out too:

People To Follow On Twitter / LinkedIn

A very incomplete list and in no ways ranked, but just some very knowledgable people you could learn from (as I do every day!)

Categories
Microsoft365 Windows 11

Webinar: Moving A School To The Cloud With M365 Education

Technology is a great servant of pedagogy

imagesToday I hosted a webinar with Aaron Overington, the IT Manager at Oneschool Global NZ and we discussed his two year journey of moving the IT infrastructure he manages into the cloud. He achieved much of this using the solutions inside the Microsoft 365 Education suite and he went into detail around the planning, objections raised (and countered!), proof of concepts and ultimately the delivery and completion of this project.

I started this blog post with the quote above because, whilst there is a lot of technical discussion in this webinar, if you listen closely to Aaron talking you hear that his driving motivation is to ensure he contributes towards the best possible learning environment for the teachers and students of Oneschool Global NZ, that will result in the highest learning outcomes possible. It’s very important, in my mind, not to lose sight of that outcome because when done well, technology should fade into the background of effective learning scenarios.

This digital transformation journey took Aaron and his team approximately two years from the genesis of his vision through to the completion of the execution and included the powering down of all the on-premise servers across the multiple campuses he supported throughout New Zealand in January 2019:

LinkedIn - Project Done!

Webinar Recording:

We recorded the webinar using Microsoft Teams (I forgot to hit record so missed the first minutes!) and you can watch it here:

Some Key Points Of Interest:

The following points are time stamped – click the link that interests you and it will launch in YouTube on that topic.

Slide Deck From Webinar:

Aaron kindly agreed to share his deck from the session and you can view this below:

My Point of View:

I’m hugely grateful to Aaron and the team at Oneschool Global NZ for sharing their journey on this webinar and allowing the recording and deck to be shared after the event as well.  Oneschool Global NZ has a reasonably unique set of requirements in terms of close management of applications, content and network filtering for users across a geographically diverse set of campuses. Through the use of M365 Education Aaron was able to move the school’s IT infrastructure completely to the cloud and keep it integrated with their cloud LMS (Canvas), video conferencing solution (Zoom) and cloud Student Management System (Edge Learning Solutions).

In completing this project, Aaron was able to achieve significant cost and resource savings for the school and deliver a more efficient platform to drive teaching and learning outcomes for the teachers to leverage and the students to benefit from.

Ultimately, this is the key message from this story in my view: technology remains a great servant to pedagogy and, when deployed effectively, can truly accelerate the digital transformation of an organisation.