Microsoft and its hardware partners have revealed lots of new low-cost Windows 10 laptops likely to compete with Chromebooks contained in the education market.

The new devices, announced to coincide with all the Bett show this week, include notebooks for under $200 and 2-in-1 laptop/tablet PCs for under $300.

Lenovo is announcing the 100e, a new Intel Celeron Apollo Lake powered PC, starting at $189, and in addition the Lenovo 300e, a 2-in-1 PC that comes with pen, starting at $299. For emerging markets, JP will sell the Classmate Leap T303 notebook, starting at $199, as well Trigono V401 2-in-1, starting at $299.

Each of these new devices are spill resistant and ruggedized, and have been meant to have have long battery life and 2x2 Wi-Fi for faster connectivity.

Among the many slew of other education-related news, Microsoft also said it is usually building support for voice dictation directly into Microsoft Office from February. While dictation has been supported in Office, previously it required users to install Microsoft's Dictate add-on, which supported dictation in 20 languages and real-time translation of upto 60 languages. Office's Immersive Reader text-to-speech functionality will also be made available on Microsoft Word for Mac, iPhone, Outlook Desktop, Onenote iPad, and Onenote Mac, with support to have a variety of new languages.

Microsoft Onenote Class Notebook, a collection of handouts and shared work for classes, has been updated to include assignment and grade integration along with the most widely used School Information Systems from the UK, SIMS Capita, and U.S., PowerSchool. Teachers will now also be effective at lock pages as read only. The easy-to-use graphing program Desmos will also be enabled within Onenote.

Presentations in Microsoft PowerPoint can now be recorded-including slides, video and narrations-and published to the Microsoft Teams communication platform, a change Microsoft says will help give students easier access to teaching materials and lessons.

Microsoft is pushing augmented and virtual reality headsets as being a key tool for education, dropping the price for its Hololens headsets for academic institutions prior to the end of May this year. It also revealed that, from March this year, Pearson will begin rolling out six new educational HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality applications. Microsoft is additionally partnering with PBS and NASA to expand its Mixed Reality curriculum from the Bringing the Universe to America's Classrooms initiative.

Microsoft and LEGO Education will also be offering a new free online Hacking STEM lesson plan, containing students use the Pythagorean Theorem to explore and measure topography in 2D/3D space. Rrt is going to also partner with BBC Earth to bring Oceans: Our Blue Planet themed content to classrooms and museums worldwide. Minecraft: Education Edition is in addition being upgraded by using a free Chemistry Update.

Finally, Microsoft also announced that organizations that buy Microsoft 365 Education licenses between February and December this year will likely to be eligible for free training on easy methods to use the service.