It seems amazing that I am now writing my third Bett show review as an independent consultant! The show continues to grow at an alarming rate and stand prices are shooting upwards ever higher, but this doesn't seem to deter the companies attending who are ever eager to get their mitts on your school's cash.
I spent the majority of the show talking about blogging and Moodle on the Partnership Matters stand, but still took some quiet moments to have a mooch around.
Highlights
The real highlight for me was a personal one. Last year, whenever I mentioned blogging to a teacher, the overwhelming response was "Huh?" This year I found real enthusiasm among teachers who were happy for me to show them blogs from schools that I have worked with. Maybe 2007 will see the real rise of blogging as a powerful tool to raise standards in children's writing and increase interactivity between a school's website and its community.
Blogging aside, I thought that Smart's new voting system was excellent, particularly as the software is embedded in the latest version of Notebook. This will appeal to existing Smartboard customers who don't want a completely different software platform just for a voting system. Called Senteo, the product won't ship until June. Smart also had a neat ICT suite/classroom management tool. In function it works very like Ranger or Viglen's Remote Learning, the main point of difference being that again it can be embedded in Smart Notebook and can lock pdas.
As a lot of my customers are Knowledge Box users, I had a good look at the new Knowledge Box Primary Learning Environment. It's fantastic, and anyone who has not yet subscribed to a resource bank such as Espresso could do a lot worse than consider Knowledge Box.
Key features include:
- Support for new Literacy and Numeracy Frameworks
- School Filestore to allow teachers to share saved resources
- Filestore allows storage of externally created resources such as whiteboard files, digital videos, worksheets etc, which can be tagged to allow these resources to be searched
- Ability to set up internal chatrooms called "Talkboards"
- New content includes Starwriter for upper KS2, new resources in the basic modules and some great BBC Active stuff, including videos that you can annotate.
As long as your Knowledge Box subscription is up to date, you will automatically be upgraded to the Primary Learning Environment over the next few months. Look out for training in your area.
One other area in which there was a great deal of interest was Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). It's only a year to go before every school is supposed to have one and there are lots out there. The one I have spent sometime investigating is Moodle. It won't be to everyone's taste, and many LEAs are pushing their own strategies, however, Moodle is Open Source (and therefore, free) and there is a large industry of suppliers of Moodle hosting, training and consultancy out there. Schools can thus do ut themselves (if they have the expertise) or choose from a range of suppliers, and if you don't like the service you are getting from one, you can pack up your Moodle and take it to another supplier. In other words, you are avoiding some of the dangers of going down a 
proprietary route. Partnership Matters have a neat solution to anyone wanting to evaluate Moodle without the hassle of downloading and installing, and that's the Moodlestick: Moodle on a USB pen. Several people told me that this was the best thing they had seen at Bett and I sold several on the stand! Moodlestick can be ordered for about £35 from me, just send me an email.
So, my favourites from Bett 2007 are:
- Blogging ( I no longer feel I am speaking Greek)
- Smart's Senteo voting system
- Knowledge Box Primary Learning Environment
- Moodlestick (ok, I know I sell it, which is hardly impartial, but I got such positive feedback that I felt it ought to go in!)
My only academic success of any note was achieving an 'A' at 'A' Level history which led me on to reading History and Geography at Keele University. My interest at the time was in the Tudors, although since that time I have become interested in the history of the Third Reich. I always have a book on the go, and I have just finished