Microsoft Surface

Microsoft announced today a remarkable new interface called Microsoft Surface. It is an entirely touch and gesture based interface and the demos look very impressive. Initially it will be out of the price range of your typical individual, but I'm sure that will come down over time.

At this point it's hard to tell if this is just marketing hype or a truly new innovation in computing. What always impresses me though is when systems adapt to the natural way that people behave. In the demo videos, people shrink and enlarge photographs by squeezing or spreading their fingers together. They download pictures by setting a camera on the surface, and the system automatically connects to the camera and "spreads" the pictures out for viewing.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how a system like this could be used effectively in education. Any time the interface doesn't get in the way, we have a much better opportunity for learning.

It looks very exciting and it's great to see something this innovative come from Microsoft. Check it out!

MAP Go-Live

I want to apologize to both of my faithful DigitalEdu readers for the rather sparse blogging of late. Both my professional and personal lives have been incredibly busy lately and it's been tough to to find any time.

Got a few minutes right now and I'm very pleased to announce here that we went live with our "My Academic Plan" project on April 26th. I am very pleased with how it turned out. Our design team did an amazing job on this project, and I can't say enough about them. It was one of the best experiences I have ever had on a project. Their dedication to creating a truly great academic planning tool for our students was amazing. It was a long road, but I believe our students are going to benefit from all the hard work.

MAP is now available for all students through our new MySite 2.0 portal, and available to any staff member by request. If you are not in our district, I created a MAP Information Page that gives you some information which includes a demo login you can use to check it out.

One question any developer always asks is "If we build it, will they come?". No one wants to put a lot of work into a system and then find out that nobody really wants it. That was answered for me when I checked our stats for the first week. We had 840 plans created in the first week of availability, and we have yet to do any promotion. When you count the over 400 plans that were created during the focus groups, it means we are already above 1,200 plans. That is the part I love about my job. When we first made the link live I was watching the stats, seeing students using MAP for the first time and realizing that we were truly helping them make better decisions about their course selection. Very cool!