Office 365 for Education provides students, teachers, and staff with the enterprise-grade communication and productivity services they need with the power and flexibility your institution requires. Sound inviting? You can get started with your complimentary trial right now.  

Office 365 for Education will allow you to:

Stay connected to your learning community

Simplify the way you work together with powerful communication tools.

• Keep people connected. Connect even more easily with a unified contact card that brings together SharePoint, Facebook, and LinkedIn updates and lets you start an IM, call, or video chat with just a click.
• Online Document Storage. Provide IT-managed online storage to everyone at your institution with SkyDrive Pro.
• Store documents in the cloud and share with others—even outside your organization.
• Hold multi-party meetings. Work together anywhere with conferencing that includes advanced sharing, note taking, and annotations.
• Help protect your data. Get peace of mind with a 99.9% uptime SLA, continuous data backups, robust disaster recovery capabilities, globally redundant data centers, and no scanning of email or files for advertising.

Experience Office virtually anywhere

Provide students, faculty, and staff with the Office applications they know, optimized for their devices, so they can work their best wherever they happen to be.

• Office Web Apps. Complimentary enhanced Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote Web Apps allow students to work across multiple devices, right from a browser. Multiple users can work on the same document together.
• Get Office fast. With the new streaming Office, you don't have to wait for Office installs or stop working to receive Office updates. Plus, the new Office can be installed side by side with previous versions of Office.
• Roaming settings. Your recent documents, settings, and custom dictionaries follow your Microsoft account, so you can quickly pick up where you left off from any device.

Run it the way you want

Office 365 provides the flexibility you need to run your educational institution the way that works best for you.

• Unified admin experience. Easily manage Office 365 services from any browser, while still having advanced PowerShell commands available for automating management tasks.
• Free up valuable resources. Reduce costs and free up time associated with deployment, maintenance, and management of on-premises servers, providing more time for IT to focus on education-related workloads.
• Take advantage of new apps. With the new cloud app model you can build scalable, and flexible cloud apps that integrate with users’ documents. The new corporate catalog app helps you manage apps available in your institution.

Want to find out more? View the detailed service descriptions here, and find out all of the features that are included. You can also check out the FAQ here.

We are still taking registrations for our Windows in the Classroom seminars, where you'll get to see a comprehensive demonstration of the benefits that Office 365 for Education can bring to your school. Find out more information by visiting our website. To book a Windows in the Classroom seminar at your school or for more information, please email nzeducation@microsoft.com.

We’re on somewhat of a role with our TED Talks here in the education team, and this one's arguably the most captivating so far. This week’s inspiration comes from Rita Pierson, a teacher for over 40 years, who has seen all sides of education.

Pierson talks in detail about the importance of relationships in keeping kids in school and passionate about learning. “Every child deserves a champion,” says Pierson, “an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.” Pierson delivers her talk with such enthusiasm and passion, it’s hard not to come away inspired. “Is this job tough? You betcha,” says Pierson. “But it is not impossible. We can do this. We are educators. We are born to make a difference.”

We would love to hear your thoughts on Pierson’s ideas.