foolhandy

Today I went down to London for the BETT Show at Olympia. BETT is “the educational technology” source, has over 600 stands belonging to anyone and everyone that has anything to do with IT in education and receive over 30,000 visits over its four days. It’s like a motor show for educational IT. Despite it having been going for years today was my first visit and I was charged with checking out a few pieces of software we have been thinking about getting at school, looking for anything new and exciting, and getting some quotes for the school’s new laptop lease. I was mostly successful…

It’s an astonishing event and in all I spent about 4-5 hours walking around looking at things of interest and avoiding eye-contact with people trying to sell you things that aren’t. I got to see the Softease people and tell them how great they are, and took the opportunities that arose to slag off RM. Almost inevitably I didn’t get to see everything but I gave it a damned good go… One highlight was the moment I was stood between the Microsoft and Apple stands. The Microsoft stand featured a suited middle-aged with a paunch explaining Groove, an Office program which allows group collaboration on Word and Excel documents. Turn around to the Apple stand and there’s a man in his early twenties sporting a t-shirt and an electric guitar explaining the benefits of iLife. It was like being in a real life Get A Mac advert!

It was a useful day. I’ve seen a few things that could be good at school, and a few things that wouldn’t. I also got some quotes for the laptops. And I got some prizes. Watching grown adults queue up and then fight for pens, lanyards and button badges is very undignified, and not something you’d catch me doing. Instead I hung around the BBC stand for a bit and watched out for the arrival of better quality freebies with one eye whilst finding out about the BBC Learning Zone on their website with the other. Why struggle for pens when you can get cotton bags, mugs and engraved oranges? That’s what I pay my TV licence for! Great prizes, great resource - thanks BBC!

And yes, every orange they gave away had the BBC logo carved into it - class!