Microsoft donates software to College of Education Laboratory School

The University of Hawaiʻi at The UHM College of Education (COE) Laboratory School received a timely and significant donation from Jeffrey Baker, IT Program Manager for Microsoft. In addition to a $700 monetary donation earlier this year, Baker has reserved 120 Microsoft Office licenses for the school.

"Because we have been impacted by a reduced per pupil dollar allocation and multiple holds on our budget by the State, we were unable to afford MS Office 2008 for our staff and students," said Mark Yap, IT Manager for the COE Curriculum Research & Development Group. The benefits of this gift are numerous and will serve all of the Laboratory School‘s 425 students and teaching faculty and staff.

MS Office 2008 will enable the school‘s three mobile labs to service elementary, middle, and high school students. In addition to a Computer Literacy course taught to all 8th graders, services are extended to science, second language, and English classes from middle through high school. And, when the mobile labs are deployed to the classroom, students are able to have their own laptop during class.

Along with MS Office 2008, Baker has included a single license of MS Standard Server 2008. All the software comes with two years of software assurance, a comprehensive maintenance plan, which means for any new version that is released within that timeframe, the school obtains it at no cost. The overall estimated retail value of the donation is $50,000.

Baker gave a presentation on careers in information technology to the Laboratory School‘s 9th grade Holomua program on November 26. "Through the generosity of the Microsoft matching program, I was able to gift the Lab school with 120 copies of Office for Mac and Windows Server 2008 license. I enjoyed visiting the school and meeting the teachers, students, and staff," said Baker.