Wednesday, June 29, 2005

New Microsoft educational products

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jun05/06-28NECCProductsPR.mspx

Microsoft has announced their new education products. They include:

  • Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office: a set of add-ons to Office XP/2003 that includes toolbars, tutorials and templates for common student tasks.

  • Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP: software tools and documentation for locking down shared computers. A public beta of this is available at http://www.microsoft.com/sharedaccess

  • Microsoft Student 2006: "a productivity resource to help middle- and high-school students complete high-quality homework assignments and projects". Features include:

    • "Graphing Calculator software to help students visualize and understand difficult math and science concepts through 2-D and 3-D graphing capabilities
    • Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office
    • Additional tools streamline Internet searches to provide trusted Encarta content

    It is interesting to note that they are not marketing this as "Encarta plus extra stuff", but rather as a student productivity suite. In fact, they only subtly say that Encarta is included as part of the product.

  • Encarta Academic Online: "a new academic-specific, online version of Microsoft's reference library, suite of homework tools and rich multimedia content. Encarta Academic Online features a new interface optimized for academic searches and gives students one-click access to Encarta reference content in seven languages for 11 countries."

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