Gateway College – The first school in Sri Lanka to offer Microsoft A3 Licences to all students
View(s):Being the only Microsoft Showcase School in Sri Lanka and one among 325 in the world, Gateway College has lived up to the accolades received thus far, to empower all its students and teachers to rise to the challenges that the education sector is faced with today.
In the endeavour to be at the forefront of technology in education, the school has made further investments to upgrade all student licences to Microsoft M365 A3 licences – the first school to do so in Sri Lanka.
These licences that will be offered to all students completely free of charge, will also bring ideas to life through 3D and data visualisation tools, with applications such as Minecraft, in addition to the facilities that they enjoy now.
The M365 A3 suite includes high end security features to protect identity, apps, data and devices, with intelligent security, enhanced by machine learning. The school expects to deploy these features in stages, during the coming weeks.
Gateway has also invested in Microsoft Office 365 A5 licensing for the Management, Heads of schools and the Team Leaders as it provides additional features that support broadcasting, intensive security management and additional analytics tools through Power BI.
An award winning digital
assessment platform from Sweden
The Gateway Group has also signed up with the Swedish Edtech company Dugga Assessment to incorporate Dugga, the state-of-the-art digital assessment platform to facilitate the school’s teaching and learning process. Dugga is platform (PC, Mac, Chromebooks, iPads) and OS-independent and is used to conduct digital tests, exams, home exams, digital lessons, assignments and other types of assessment in education.
The platform Dugga is the result of a research project initiated in 2012 in which researchers and developers participated from the Stockholm School of Economics and the Stockholm University, among others. Dugga was formally launched at Stanford University, California, USA in the fall of 2015 and since 2016, has been a partner with Microsoft, working on several research and development projects on how to employ artificial intelligence to support the examination process.
Built in Microsoft Azure with features such as Immersive Reader, Dugga is making a significant impact on Office 365 and Microsoft Teams activations, while helping to incorporate important services such as plagiarism analysis and proctoring. From a set of more than 3,300 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide, Dugga was recognised as the Microsoft Education Partner of the Year 2020.
Commencement of the
new academic year
Gateway College has just commenced the new academic year for the secondary school. Due to the prevailing situation, the school made arrangements to deliver school text books to the homes of students. The school is in the process of setting up the Clubs and Societies and electing the leadership teams for the School Houses. All sports activities are now being conducted online and the students have been requested to engage in at least one sport.
The new academic year for the Primary School (Play Group to Year 6) will commence in September.