Microsoft Student 2006 is a collection of tools aimed at students – or more likely the parents and grandparents of those students.
In this issue we’re going to look at a Microsoft add-in for Office that has been gracing store shelves in recent time. Microsoft Student 2006 is a collection of tools aimed at students – or more likely the parents and grandparents of those students.
Usually these extra offerings from Microsoft are more marketing hype than useful and while there are plenty of outrageous promises, there are also some handy elements in the Student 2006 mix.
We’ve asked our chief researcher, Michael Barden to check out the product. Michael is a recent university graduate with better memories of school than the rest of us ‘oldies’.
MS STUDENT 2006 REVIEW
By Michael Barden
Microsoft Student 2006 is marketed as “a comprehensive, subject-specific resource designed to help middle- and high-school students complete high-quality homework assignments and projects in less time”. According the front page of its product website, it is the “shortest path from a blank page to an A+”. Another blurb says it “provides trusted homework tools and resources students need to create high quality, accurate work that leads to academic success”.
Are your children having trouble starting their assignments? Do you want to give them the extra assistance they need to unlock their potential? Consider the Microsoft Student 2006 add-on for Office XP or 2003 as a possible step in the right direction, but not a savior.
Simply using Microsoft Student will not ensure “academic success” for your child. If only parenting, education or life itself were as easy as Microsoft marketing makes it sound. This program is no substitute for learning from a school teacher, involved parents, nor is it a substitute for a motivated student who listens and participates in class.
FEATURES AT A GLANCE
Microsoft Student is a homework-helper for students between the ages of approximately 8 and 18. It acts as a compendium of resources, mainly geared towards getting projects started and heading in the right direction. And for what it is worth, it performs this task quite well.
Microsoft Student combines curriculum-based templates and tutorials, a graphical calculator, trusted encyclopedic content, a web companion to help find editorially approved content along with hundreds of other extra features and ‘eye-candy’.
The main substance of Microsoft Student consists of its curriculum learning. Categories include: Mathematics, English, History, Geography, Social Studies, Science, Music and the Arts, and Foreign Languages. You can browse down to more specific levels in the hierarchy, and when you see a button entitled “Student Selections”, clicking will bring up 25 articles relevant topics for the student along with multimedia if appropriate.
The majority of information found under these categories comes in the form of Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia articles, photos, audio and videos. Microsoft Encarta Premium encyclopedia and a limited-time access to Microsoft Encarta online are included in the Microsoft Student license.
Along with the Encarta articles, Microsoft Student has a graphical calculator, a world atlas, an English dictionary, and a language translator between English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
REQUIREMENTS
You’ll need Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 4, or Microsoft Windows XP. In order to obtain full functionality out of Microsoft Student, you will need a copy of Microsoft Office XP or 2003. Earlier versions including Office 2000 are NOT supported. This is a big consideration when buying a $99 piece of software, as you do not wish to have to shell out even more than that again in order to be able to use most of the main features! For all practical purposes MS Office is required for MS Student.
Make sure your computer has a DVD drive to be able to use the software, as the program only comes on DVD format. Additionally, some of the features such as the Encarta updates require you to have an Internet connection, although this is not totally necessary.
The installation of the software itself is a guided process, but one interesting option you will be given is whether or not you would like to install the entire contents of the DVD onto the computer (around 2.1GB). Not selecting this option will save you disk space (with “only” around 750MB needed), but will require you to have the DVD present in the DVD-ROM drive when running the program. Having this choice is great considering the mammoth size of the content involved.
PRICING
The pricing on Student 2006 varies even more than usual so don’t just grab the first one you see. It was set at around $100 and many retailers are still basing their price on that.
The official price is now US$69.95 but some retailers are charging higher than that – up to $99.95!
When we looked around Amazon had it for the best price of $59.99
STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
It is easy to get caught up in making an assignment look good. While teachers are not robots, they are fairly used to the idea of style over substance, and it won’t generally get a student very far.
From my own experience at school, students with the best looking report fell into one of two categories: the perfectionists and the procrastinators. The perfectionists would often spend day and night getting the right format for their assignment after the main body of work was done. The procrastinators on the other hand, spent all their time getting the format right to begin with and skimped on actual content.
Using the templates provided can save both of these types of student time in making their assignment look professional. Time not spent on formatting is time that could be spent on doing the actual work!
Aesthetically, Microsoft Student is very pleasing. It sports a very slick user interface with all the curves, bells and whistles that you’d expect from Microsoft. The program itself acts like a browser, which adds a level of familiarity. On the left-hand side of the main screen is a hierarchy of categories to choose from that includes your main subjects. There is also a traditional style menu at the top of the window.
ENCARTA SEARCHES
Performing an Encarta search is as simple as typing in a search term into the box on the top-right hand side of the window. The results window for Encarta shows results based on categories such as articles, maps, multimedia and web-links. This window can be expanded and minimized, and will always show the results of the last search.
Other than the self-explanatory Encarta search, finding the rest of the useful features within this extremely large program is going to be the first problem a struggling student is going to have to overcome to find out what is useful, as there seem to be a large amount of useless features. But as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’m not sure that this applies to students though…
LEARNING ESSENTIALS
One of the helpful features in Microsoft Student is the Learning Essentials section, which can be opened by clicking the similarly named button at the bottom-left hand side of the main screen.
The Learning Essentials module adds templates, tutorials, toolbars and menus to Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs. Templates and tutorials include those for essays, research papers, book reports, creative writing projects, oral presentations and charts.
Wasted time with meaningless formatting and layout problems can be averted by selecting a template from the ones provided. Additionally, each tutorial is written by experts in the educational field with extensive guidelines to follow. This process could be a great help in kick-starting the creative process.
Microsoft Student launches the appropriate Office program for each template and provides additional menus and help columns to assist. Particularly useful are the templates for writing French, Italian, German, and Spanish papers in their respective languages. Additionally, there is a small window for quickly adding foreign characters to your document as well as an appropriate foreign-language dictionary, translation and spell-checking features.
Microsoft Student 2006 performs particularly well in helping the student get more out of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. The contextual help is particularly good, as it provides a separate window with a list of instructions or check-boxes depending on the particular task, template and tutorial.
Many of the learning features that interact with Office can be achieved without Microsoft Student. However, since a student may not have the technical knowledge to find these things out on their own, the step-by-step contextual help and tutorials for using certain parts of Microsoft Office are an extremely good idea.
TRUSTED CONTENT
Knowing what content to trust and what not to trust is often a hard lesson to learn. Most students nowadays go straight to the Web to do the bulk of their research. As a result, most will waste large amounts of time sifting through irrelevant information and unreliable sources. On the Web, anyone and everyone can be an “anonymous expert”.
Microsoft Student automatically provides around 68,000 trusted Encarta encyclopedia articles. In addition to this, searching on the Web with Internet Explorer will activate a Web Companion add-on. This will bring up the editorially approved Encarta results alongside your browser results. Trusted content is important for students, especially before they develop higher analytical skills.
The subscription to Encarta Premium is a welcome feature in Microsoft Student as it will often give a student a solid place to start with a basis in verified facts. Whilst it may not give you the absolute detail required, it will get you moving in the right direction with subsequent Internet searches and library research.
Microsoft Student also provides online mathematics homework help through its Encarta Premium service. Students can access popular mathematics textbooks online and receive step-by-step instructions, tips, and tricks for solving mathematical problems.
THE GRAPHICAL CALCULATOR
The customizable Graphical Calculator is a fantastic feature for students studying algebra, calculus, and trigonometry who wish to visualize and solve complex mathematical problems. It can be accessed by clicking on the ‘Graphical Calculator’ button on the bottom left hand corner of the main window within the Microsoft Student “browser”.
To me this feature stood out as the best of all within Microsoft Student. The more I looked at it, the more I wished that I’d had this very piece of software to help me in my struggle through late high-school and even University mathematics.
The calculator software lets students hide buttons they don’t need, as well as store and change variables. Moving the cursor over a calculator button will make tool-tip-text appear that describes the function of the button.
Students can type in equations and have the program solve them and display the answer. They can even create complex 2D and 3D graphs with the ability to view, rotate, and animate them, helping them to visualize concepts and specific functions. For completeness, students can also save their results in a type of worksheet file.
As a student-focused tool, being able to solve equations you type in is great, but what you really need to see is the working out, which unfortunately is not shown in the program. As a result, this feature is really only useful to check answers, or provide a goal answer to work towards. After all, plugging in equations to a piece of software won’t get a student through their final exams.
THE VERDICT
Microsoft Student 2006 provides a useful resource for students. You can get started on an assignment through templates and tutorials, to check and graphically produce answers on the graphical calculator, and to pique interest in learning through bite-sized morsels of information covering a wide variety of topics.
On the whole, Microsoft Student lacks the depth on any particular subject to make it the sole teaching resource for a student. What it does provide however, is just enough contextual help to set a student on the right path for many of the common tasks they will be faced with.
It is a useful adjunct to Office, saving time on formatting chores. It can also help a student become more familiar with Office. The Graphical Calculator was the real stand-out and deserves greater prominence.
Just don’t expect miracles!
If your child has a lack of direction to begin with, you can bet that Microsoft Student will collect virtual-dust and the typical assignment page will remain as blank as ever.
