Microsoft and Social Media

Following some recent successful trials using SkyDrive to promote collaborative learning I thought I’d look further into the social media activities of Microsoft. Our school predominantly uses Microsoft Office and rather than confusing matters by encouraging the use of much-lauded Google products, I’d rather keep things as simple as possible for ease of access for staff, teachers and parents.

Microsoft is not a name that I would instantly link to social media having largely remained on the sidelines while Facebook, Twitter and Google tested the water. Some have seen this as Microsoft missing the opportunity, but sometimes arriving late the party can be hugely beneficial. Windows 8 and Windows 365 already look like they are going to be very successful, along with very positive reviews of the Surface tablet. SkyDrive is very user-friendly and I have started to see some excellent collaborative work by my students and if Microsoft products can match the diversity and use of Google apps and other popular social media sites then I believe there’s a better chance of it being used rather than having multiple log-ins and social media experiences that aren’t connected in any way.

Socl (pronounced ‘social’) allows users to share ideas through rich collages of images, links, captions and videos. It is similar to Pinterest and uses the Bing search engine. Microsoft have said that they do not want to compete with Facebook and in-fact you can log on to Socl using your Facebook account, so the two are clearly complementary. Socl started as a project with Microsoft’s Fuselabs research team aimed at helping students learn. This has now been expanded to general use but the possibilities of collaborative learning are clear. Socl can also link easily to pictures files in stored in SkyDrive.

Microsoft Docs is another tool which links directly with Facebook and allows users to share Microsoft documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint as well as pdfs. This has always been one of the drawbacks of using Facebook for educational purposes and could be an interesting development.

Kodu Game Lab encourages kids to create games on the PC or Xbox via a simple visual programming language.

Montage is a flexible web-based service to create and share visual albums from the web.

Microsoft are also linked to Skype and Wordpress for those other functions that are so appealing on Google (Hangouts and Blogger).

I intend to explore these over the next few weeks with my classes to see which have stickability and generate opportunities for worthwhile interaction and collaboration.