Nathan Clevenger, Enterprise Editor, recently had the opportunity to talk with Bill Hagen, whose focused on mobility strategy in education at Microsoft. His responsibilities revolve around selling Windows Mobile-based solutions to customers, developing business plans and strategies for K-12 and Higher Education segments, supporting beneficial relationships with Microsoft OEMs, mobile operators, and independent software vendors that support the Windows Mobile platform.

Students can use Windows Mobile devices for one-on-one interactivity with learning tools.

How is Microsoft helping to bring mobility to education?

Microsoft is fully committed to the education market, and this is seen by our support of the learning processes and administration effectiveness when Windows Mobile is part of the mobile solution. The key to using mobility for the education market is to develop a strong set of solutions and partners in this ecosystem supporting Windows Mobile in all countries and workloads. Our platform continues to be strong with 48 OEMs with 150 form factors from 125 mobile operators in 55 countries and we recently celebrated our shipment of the 10 million devices. In terms of the education market, in 2003 there were only a limited amount of solutions in education and today there are hundreds of solutions that enable students and educators in three main categories: mobile learning, mobile administration, and mobile communications.

The education mobile ecosystem incorporates independent software vendors that serve the education market, device manufacturers, system integrators or professional development consultants, and the mobile operator. We are able to bring mobility to the education market by supporting our partners with conferences and marketing events; expanding mobile services in our platform; and of course, by reinforcing our field sales teams to promote mobile solutions and offerings to schools and students. We measure our success by how well we are able to empower the faculty and staff in terms of mobile learning, mobile administration, and mobile communications systems; specifically around teacher- student collaboration, productivity, safety, discipline, assessment, and distance learning.

How are educators using Windows Mobile in a K-12 environment?

Overall, primary schools are in various stages of using mobile tools to improve administration and communication efforts within the district. Many teachers are also testing the boundaries of the traditional classroom by investigating if a mobile device provided to the student will improve literacy, math, science, and overall comprehension rates measured by state standard testing. Today there are projects in several districts to gauge the effectiveness of mobile handhelds in all grades. There are even smartphone deployments for middle or high school students. Many educators feel a phone in the classroom is a distraction and should not be allowed, but a few schools are evaluating the effectiveness of allowing a Windows Mobile phone as a learning tool. The inflection point will occur when the devices prove statistically that they can improve the outcome of learning and are easy to manage from a district perspective.

E-Rate is a helpful program that the federal government has put in place to assist schools in mobilizing their solutions since it pays for voice and data usage depending upon the percentage of students who are on a free or reduced lunch program. This has helped districts who most likely could not afford to provide their faculty with a mobile device but now can, and with effective solutions too. Some of the solutions that administrators are utilizing are mobile forms of messaging (i.e. unified communications including e-mail and instant messaging) and over the past few years greater strides have been made to improve campus security with student information being available on mobile devices to monitor student, campus, and field trip activity. Data about the students can be synchronized with the districts Student Information System in real-time wirelessly or via ActiveSync as needed.