ELECTRICCHALK

Image credit - John Connell on Flickr

I had these brilliant plans to do lots of live blogging/twittering/vodcasting from BETT this year but I couldn’t be arsed. Bad blogger. Sorry. It was just so hectic and noisy, plus the Premiere Inn charge £9 for 24 hours on their cloud! 

So, what did we learn? I’ll do some specific stuff about some of these points later so here’s a summary

1. There seemed to be more stuff about assessment, monitoring and systems this year and less interesting stuff about teaching and learning. My boss, who specialises in e-safety, thought it said a lot that the CEOP stand was a tiny, wee booth but organisations like Sentinel had huge stands – is this fueling the idea that e-safety is about buying a better monitoring system?

2. Interesting-looking things we saw on demo – True Tube (social issues documentary sharing service), Podium2 (easy-to-use podcasting software), 2 Do-it-yourself (game making software aimed at KS1-2 from 2Simple). More on these soon…

3. ICT CPD – sending people on loads of courses isn’t truly effective. It should be more about building collaborative networks. I need to process this one a bit more but had some interesting thoughts about how to model CPD along the lines of “Enquiring Minds“. Need a whole post to talk about that one…

4. There is no magic mobile device. There was stuff for running on mobile platforms but nobody was jumping up, saying “this is the machine to do it on!” I thought there would be more about the iPhone but Apple weren’t exhibiting and I coudn’t find much on the apps side. Is it just me or has the heat  gone out of mobile learning compared to 2 years ago? More convinced now that mobile learning will have to be designed to work on students’ devices, whatever that might be.

5. 3d screens are still at the interesting gimmick stage. It’s the first time I’ve seen one of these in operation but all they had to demonstrate was things like looking at the workings of the inner ear and a tudor street scene. Another CLC in our region is really pushing these which puzzled me slightly – once you get pack the “ooh” factor can it really sustain interest. Once you introduce more interactivity into it (maybe with motion sensors or similar) then it’ll be worth more of a look.

6.Why is ICT still dominated by interactive whiteboards? Not saying they’re not a useful tool but everywhere you look it’s Promethean this and Smart that?

On a minor note, I was surprised by the reaction of a managed service provider I spoke to involved in a LEA future schools scheme. I was asking about how a managed service would actually operate from a day to day perspective and he seemed extremely reluctant to talk about it. I was genuinely trying to broaden my knowledge and not get into a fight but he actually said that he didn’t want to discuss managed service and why weren’t people asking about all the great equipment they were putting into the new schools in their contract. A bit disappointing.

In summary, I didn’t come back feeling particularly fired up about ICT developments but the changes afoot concerning Building Schools for the Future and the shape of the curriculum made me quite optimistic about what’s round the corner. As someone wisely pointed out, it’s a trade show so if you want big ideas and inspiration then conferences are a better place to look.