As the dust settles on this year’s BETT Show, bloggers have been frantically sharing their thoughts on the 2010 instalment of the educational technology behemoth.

It was my first time. I had been given many warnings as to the overwhelming nature of an event which brings together 30,000 people amongst more green and purple than a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles convention. But none of the warnings could have prepared me for the sheer scale of BETT.

It was really nice to see mycurriculum.com get a lot of visibility and attention on QCDA’s stand. The website is looking really good now and it was great to see the branding up and demos taking place.

Ray Barker, Director of British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), the trade association for the educational supply industry, identified two major themes of this year’s BETT in an interview with Teachers TV. Firstly, Mr. Barker said that this year’s show was “very practitioner-led”, with a focus on professional development and training for teachers.

Secondly, he emphasized the importance of “pupil voice, learner voice” and of “the kinds of technologies that young people are using.” Google and YouTube both exhibited for the first time this year, and the Playful Learning area seemed to be a big hit too – at least with the students who were taking part in the gaming. Some bloggers have commented that there may have been too much emphasis on the “playful” and not enough on the “learning” here. The pupils certainly weren’t complaining.

Whatever the value of the games exhibited here, this seems to me to be a worthy shift in attitude (if indeed it is a shift in attitude). The potential for fun on show at BETT – from 3D video to “serious”  gaming – is encouraging. Schools have traditionally tended to fear technology, often feeling more inclined to ban new devices than integrate them into the learning experience.

If BETT 2010 does mark, or at least reflect, a greater willingness to blur the boundaries between work and play and to help pupils enjoy learning more, then this can only be a good thing for young people and those children just entering the education system. In fact I rather envy them.

BESA, BETT, BETT 2010, Education, Game, games, play, Playful Learning, technology

Wednesday 13^th January sees this year’s BETT Show roll into town. Housed within London’s cavernous Olympia and playing host to 600 exhibitors and almost 30,000 visitors, BETT is the largest educational technology conference in the world.

Every year BETT gives teachers and those involved in education the opportunity to enhance their knowledge of learning through technology. We will be there, catching up with friends, partners and clients – and investigating some of the new developments at the start of an exciting new decade for ICT in education.

The central theme that seems to be coming out of the build up to BETT 2010 is playfulness. Professor Stephen Heppell will be running a new feature at the expo entitled ‘Playful Learning’ – an interactive area where visitors can immerse themselves in educational gaming at its best and use fun technology to overcome learner engagement issues.

Prof Heppell points out that “survey after survey suggests that our UK schoolchildren may be some of the least happy in Europe” and thinks he has the solution: “Playful learning is great fun and has re-energised classrooms, rekindled school-parent relationships and re-engaged brains.”

Other new features for BETT 2010 include the Future Learning Spaces area, which will give visitors a glimpse of what classrooms could look like in several years’ time, and TeachMeet Takeover – thirty minute slots when vendors hand over their stalls to informal, teacher-led discussions.

BETT 2010 looks set to reflect the trends and developments of the past year. The last twelve months has seen the continued rise of social media, and particularly the explosion of Twitter into the mainstream. There has been a degree of acceptance that these media are valid forms of communication for children and young people, with suggestions that they can improve confidence and literacy.

The prominence of these topics is reflected in the seminar programme at the event. Other significant issues of the past year include augmented reality (AR) and eSafety. The former is represented by Futurelab’s Spark, a mobile exhibition which uses 2D AR markers to enhance pupils’ experience in the classroom. Meanwhile Roar Educate’s Us Online seeks to educate pupils on safety, security and good citizenship in the online world.

The Government’s Home Access scheme is being formally launched at BETT 2010. A trial of the scheme – which will seek to remedy the ‘digital divide’ by providing 270,000 low income homes with computers and internet access – “went like a rocket” according to Becta, the government agency in charge of it. The scheme is exciting news for all those working with ICT in education – but it is likely to cause controversy given the state of the economy as a general election approaches.

We will be helping our good friends at QCDA. Since last year’s event we have been working hard together on mycurriculum.com, a website which allows teachers to connect and collaborate with each other by discussing best practice and sharing resources, activities and examples of pupils’ work. QCDA will be showcasing the site on two of their four ‘pods’ so come and check it out at Stand J30.

See you there!

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2009 has been a truly dark year for the public image of piracy.

And I’m not talking about Somalian pirates, but the issue of digital rights, specifically in entertainment. It’s estimated that piracy and illegal filesharing costs the television, music and film industries £500m a year in lost revenues.

The issue has of course been around since at least 2000 when Metallica took on Napster in one of the more bizarre judicial confrontations in media history.

But whereas that story and the more recent imprisonment of Pirate Bay’s founders were knee-jerk events that had us all wildly jabbering / twittering, I feel that we’re now in the midst of a more subtle undercurrent of significant change in the distribution of online music and television, sustained by almost daily reports of possible mergers and deals, new technologies and services, alleged crackdowns and constant shifts of responsibility for monitoring and controlling internet usage.

In 2000 the issue of digital rights was the almost exclusive concern of emancipated geeks interacting and sharing in a space seemingly designed both by and for them; apoplectic heavy metal fans; and a not insignificant number of terribly confused people sat awkwardly in between.

Jump to 2009, and the internet has become for many the first port of call when looking for entertainment. Mobile devices such as the iPhone plug directly into online music stores, and almost everyone has an iPod or other portable media device. Similarly, network improvements and the penetration of broadband has helped BBC’s iPlayer and its competitors to become almost as popular as “traditional” TV.

In other words, the developments in online media distribution have become mainstream concerns.

However, there remains a fundamental conflict between monetising these distribution services and a historic perception of the internet as user controlled, open-source, a community network without restriction. People don’t like paying for stuff online. Although digital platforms account for about 20 per cent of recorded music sales, 95% of all file downloads are estimated to be illegal. If we want to hear a song once, we might YouTube it or call it up on Last FM or Spotify – if we want it on our iPods, the stats say we are most likely to download it illegally.

Similar issues exist for television and film, where downloads and particularly streaming have been giving producers headaches. The most recent example would be the furore over online leaked scenes from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which appeared several weeks before release.

(Why anyone would want to see this, for free or otherwise, is beyond me, but apparently it was an issue…) The problem is worsened by advertising – films and shows are heavily advertised on the web (i.e. globally) but release dates are staggered around the world and vary hugely. Inevitably fans are going to get impatient, and at present it’s just too easy to access content illegally.

However, things are changing. Responses to infringements are getting ever more serious and, as we have seen this year, it’s no longer empty rhetoric. The French are being typically Gallic about filesharing, just two weeks ago approving the “three strikes” bill.

The controversial bill proposes the creation of a new government agency, which translates rather grandly as “the High Authority of Diffusion of the Art Works and Protection of Rights on the Internet”, which could have the power to disconnect copyright offenders without legal recourse.

In the UK, creative industry groups such as the BPI, the Publisher’s Association and Equity and broadcasters Channel 4, BSkyB and Virgin Media, are all lobbying the government to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to police their users. Of course, this is the last thing the ISPs want to hear, and so they in turn are saying it’s the job of the content providers, leading to what John Woodward of the UK Film Council has reportedly described as a damaging “Mexican stand-off”.

To some extent this apparent impasse has already been breached by evolving the distribution channels and therefore providing more choice. Last year a raft of music subscription services, social networking partnerships like MySpace Music and new licensing channels emerged. Each day sees new reports of mergers, integration and innovation – so watch this space.

When it comes to TV, we’re also getting used to on demand programming. At the moment, broadcasters are giving us content for free, over the internet, and it’s brilliant. The BBC are the front-runners, though 4OD also provides a free catch up service on most of its programmes, (and recently, thankfully, opened its doors for Mac users). And if you’re the kind of person that enjoys pouring absinthe in your eyes, there’s the unforgivably awful ITV Player. But here, too, there are revenue-generating changes afoot. Both 4OD and ITV Player have “forced” adverts, and if the troubled broadband platform Project Kangaroo ever gets a buyer (Orange dropped out of talks just yesterday), on demand TV will almost certainly be delivered on a subscription basis.

The BBC are now behind Project Canvas, which plans to allow viewers to watch on demand services and other internet content via traditional TV – i.e. bring on demand away from the PC in the bedroom and back into the living room (although there must be more to it than that, as cable services such as Virgin Media are already offering on demand services including the iPlayer?)

These suspiciously named “projects” are controversial, in a way partly because of their ambition; the aim seems to be to partner with other broadcasters, channels and media companies to develop an apparently essential media platform, which is an inevitably fiddly business. BSkyB have already thrown an anti-competiveness strop over Kangaroo (which has all but killed it), and last week they accused the BBC Trust of “deficient” consultation over its more recent plans for Canvas.

There’s a more obvious complication for the BBC to grapple with: just where the licence fee fits into the various projects, (iPlayer / Kangaroo / Canvas) is, frankly, anyone’s business.

At this point, It wouldn’t be right to ignore what Bob Geldof thinks about digital TV, so here is what Bob Geldof thinks about digital TV:

“In the age of the internet, the notion of television itself is as archaic as the word wireless – even if that has been reinvented for the digital age.” (Bob Geldof)

To conclude a somewhat wayward post: it seems to me inevitable that our perception of the internet as a distribution channel is set to change over the next couple of years. There will always be infringers pushing their luck, and there will also always be a lot of good stuff available for free.

But we will, I think, also have to get used to the idea of paying money, or suffering adverts, to enjoy premium content on the internet.

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So.  The BETT show is over.  Online CC spent a great deal of time at the event, which for the second year in a row struck me as an unholy marriage of a livestock pen and a telesales call.  I only spent a day at Olympia, but the experience sapped my strength so much that it felt like a week.

I don’t have much of a problem admitting that I didn’t like BETT – it seems to be pretty much unanimously agreed by everyone I spoke to there that time at a show like BETT takes its toll; which isn’t to say that the whole thing is pointless or uninteresting of course.  It’s a very good thing for people in the industry to get together like this, and every year some real gems come up, which  make the over-priced refreshments and crawling through Learning Management Software stands worth it.

Take Rafi.ki, for example. Rafi.ki is an online learning community which builds partnerships between schools all over the world.  Pupils exchange information with one another, embark on projects together, and make friends.  Simple?  Yes.  Worthwhile?  Undoubtedly.  Successful?  It seems so.  The gent on the stand (one John Macnutt, lovely guy) pointed out that on facebook, most children simply collect people who are already their friends and remain in those groups.  Here was something that allowed children to make new friends, and work together on projects that can be extremely valuable.

Or Roar Educate’s  “Us Online“, an ‘online learning module’ which allows children to learn about what exactly you can do on the internet, via the experience of a set of fictional characters.  I saw a demonstrator show how a learner can help a girl set up a myspace page, from choosing her screen name and picture to making friends; and it’s only once you’ve set up a profile picture of the character in her underwear and befriendied a suspicious individual called fluffybunny73 who says he ‘likes to play’ that the program takes you step by step through what you’ve done that might have gotten you into such a situation.  This kind of digital literacy is working its way up the agenda as people accept that things like Myspace are now a fact of life, and learning through experience and simulation is a great way to get across the idea that your actions in the digital realm are not without consequences.

Or Pixton, a really fun site that allows people to (fairly) easily create and share their own webcomics.  I don’t know a great deal about ‘Pixton for Schools‘, but there’s been a lot of talk about video games’ ability to present content to children.  Comics, as another staple of my youth, show real potential to do the same.

Rambling around the upper levels I stumbled across some charming gents from Rolling Sound, who run multimedia courses for schools, community groups and young people ‘at risk’.  Roll 7 is a recent expansion of Rolling Sound, and are a company making socially responsible video games, actively recruiting from the young people that complete courses at Rolling Sound.  Their flagship piece is a game called ‘Dead Ends‘, which managed to make it onto Channel 4 News in its treatment of knife crime.  It’s even got Jon Snow in it.   I also almost tripped over Serious Games Interactive’s very small stall; these guys make a series of games called ‘Global Conflicts’, which aim to inform on the (extremely complex) issues behind some of the most intractable and damaging conflicts in the world.  As ever, I’m a sucker for video games and so must admit to taking a disproportionate amount of interest in stalls like this…

Finally, I did a double take at the back of Olympia Grand Hall when I walked a stand where grown men and women seemed to be playing Dance Dance Revolution on the kind of wet-pour rubber surface that you get on playground floors.  It turned out to be Smartus by Lappset, an intriguing hybrid of digital game based learning and physical exercise – whether it’s stepping on marked tiles in the right order, or running round posts as quickly as you can, Smartus has developed installations for playgrounds or indoor halls which have children taking orders from weather friendly consoles.  Though I didn’t partake myself, I imagine it to be like performing mental arithmetic whilst playing ‘tag’.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

BETT, marketing, Publishing

Everyone at Online is looking forward to the BETT conference this week. It is always a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and to see some of the exciting current developments in our industry.

The great success of the event in recent years is testimony to the fact that for educational technology, practical show and tell displays are a great way to convey ideas.

BETT will open in London just as another massive technology event closes: the Las Vegas-based Consumer Electronics Show. The difference between the two is telling. CES was marred this year by hyped up press coverage of the economic downturn, every gadget and gismo now being judged according to whether or not its lifespan will be nipped in the bud by straightened consumer spending. In the light of this grim message, BETT seems much more positive.

The future of learning will be the dominant theme at BETT this year. There is a special exhibition area entitled “Future Schools” in the galleries upstairs. It can also be expected to drive Stephen Crowne’s keynote speech, and has no small connection with the success of the Beyond Current Horizons programme of research and development.

Beyond Current Horizons is a project launched at last year’s BETT and has come a long way since then. With the immediate future looking rather economically stagnant, the government is looking further ahead to sunnier climes, and has therefore been well advised to invest in education. The motivation behind Beyond Current Horizons (a DCSF and Futurelab project) is to make sure that the UK has a workforce equipped to drive the country back into prosperity in the longer term.

What this means right now is that policy makers are attempting to ensure that the teachers of the present and near future are properly equipped to prepare their students for the circumstances of the more distant future. Investment in keeping learning abreast of technological change is not just a matter of seeking better ways to teach the same old lessons. It is a matter of seeking teaching methods for teaching the new kinds of lessons that will be salient in times of new technologies requiring new kinds of skills and work.

Dan Sutch has recently commented to this effect in an article on the BCH blog. In the terms he sets out, in the next few years, educational technology is going to become an even more exciting industry to work within, one of the most optimistic industries possible in the present economic climate.

But while things may look up for this industry as a whole, I can’t help thinking that the optimism for the learners themselves is just as significant and may lie somewhere slightly different. Matt Locke, Channel 4 Education’s Commissioning Editor, has pointed out that the future needn’t be some great monolithic thing, confined to great utopian or distopian vistas, that “the vernacular is both the wake of detritus that is tidied up to make history, and the tiny atoms of our potential futures”. He is encouraging us toward points of view very different from those of policy-makers and centralized planning.

The optimistic thing for students today is clearly not the provision of tools to build the British economy in the future, but tools to build the future itself, to imagine the future through their own specific vernaculars. With BETT dominating our work this week, we should keep this in mind.

DCSF, future, futurelab, technology

Last week Online ventured north to the 2008 Scottish Learning Festival … always worth the trip because of the buzz around the show (and the fact that it’s far more manageable than London’s rather overwhelming BETT show).

The show itself is ok, but the talks, meetings (e.g. Teachmeet) and case studies on offer around the festival is where the good stuff happens. Channel 4 was there to showcase their latest education projects (e.g. The Insiders), and LT Scotland impressed with their attitude towards and demonstrable results of the use of commercial games in schools. Who knew that the Nintendo Wii and games such as ‘Endless Ocean’ could be such an effective learning tool! LT Scotland’s Derek Robertson clearly does and has been busy ‘evangelising’ and persuading students, teachers and parents through his work at the Sottish Centre for Games and Learning – Consolarium. He has just been nominated for special achievement award at the upcoming Handheld Learning show, and I can see why.

They even found time to organise a Guitar Hero competition between schools on Glow, Scotland’s national learning ‘intranet’, with the final taking place at the show, which livened things up a bit.

Even a talk on classroom voting technologies and devices proved to be a lot more interesting than expected. These things have moved on a lot since I last paid attention to them. In fact they do their best to appear and function much like a mobile phone. How long, I wonder, before students will be able (and allowed) to use their own phones?

learning, technology, Wii

So the BETT awards for educational technology have been announced and from looking at the winners we can only conclude that standards have been raised. The winning products are bright, original and versatile resources that fulfil the needs of teachers and pupils alike. Upon assessing the winners, I found the most attractive products were those that encouraged creative user experimentation. Critics have always accused educational software of stunting the scope of a child’s imagination. Perhaps in the early days this was a legitimate concern. But the winners of the BETT awards are a testament to how educational technology has moved away from its prescriptive confines. These resources invite a complex response from children, encouraging them to learn abstract concepts through creative play. Check out the winners at www.bettawards.co.uk

Screenshot from Focus on Beebot.

Focus on Beebot by Focus Education Ltd is a surprising product. It consists of a 3D sequencing programme where students can experiment with sequencing tasks to map out a route for Beebot, a bee coloured robot with a permanent smile. Students can guide Beebot through virtual worlds, but they can also programme their sequences into the Beebot floor robot in the actual classroom. This is a wonderful feature as it allows children to apply the abstract principles they have learnt from the software onto a physical piece of machinery. Children can feel satisfied about what they’ve learnt , enjoying the end result of their work by watching Beebot zoom around the classroom.

The sense of a fulfilling learning experience explains the success of 2Simple’s 2paintapicture. This is an art package that allows students to play with a range of artistic techniques. Children can see the results of their efforts attractively displayed on the screen. What gives this product the edge over other art packages is the ability to recreate the styles of well known artists. A child can learn the technical secrets behind great art at the same time as painting their own masterpieces. Noisy things by Q & D Multimedia won the Early Learning Solutions award because of its innovative approach to introducing young children to musical concepts such as rhythm, pitch and tone. Children play around with a variety of colourful, mischievous characters that make different sounds at the click of a mouse. The genius of Noisy Things is its intuitive design. There is no text to disrupt the experience, the children simply learn instinctively through interacting with the characters on screen. This is perfect for early learning because it allows children to learn about music through independent experimentation.

Screenshot from Noisy Things.

Another aspect of the winners was a new emphasis on software that allows for easy assessment and profiling. Bluewaveswift won Supporting Institutional Leadership and Management Solutions award. It was built on a lot of research done by head teachers in Leeds and is designed to provide a comprehensive profile of the state of a school’s development. Testimonials by head teachers all over the country tell of how Bluewaveswift saves hours of work.

Smartcat Profiling by Screen Learning is a selection of thirteen games that assess children’s reading, spelling, mental arithmetic, motor control, language skills and even emotional recognition. This allows teachers of children at the foundation stage to keep an eye on how each child is developing and ensure that they fulfil the needs of each child as an individual. The world of education is currently anxious about low levels of literacy and numeracy skills. Often this is a result of children not keeping up with the rest of the class. Smartcat Profiling has come at the right time, since it ensures that teachers know exactly which children need more help, ensuring everyone learns at the right pace. But what makes it really work is that each exercise is a game that the child can enjoy. This is a refreshing approach to assessment , making it feel less scary and more fun.

Screenshot from SimVenture.

Learning through games is the secret to the popularity of SimVenture. Venture Simulations Ltd have created a programme that allows students to set up a virtual business. Liam Godfrey, lecturer in business studies, has come from a background in banking and has a wide experience of simulation programmes used for professional training. He says that SimVenture is the most comprehensive software of its kind. Students are getting hooked on the game. The more competitive they get about scores the more clued up they are about the real dynamics of the business world. This is the beauty of these winning programmes: they draw children into a genuine passion for a subject. Technology isn’t there to make boring subjects interesting but to make fascinating subjects accessible. When you get sucked into a subject you love, learning is always fun. These products are taking full advantage of this phenomenon, taking us out of the Victorian austerity of the three r’s and into a future of varied and enjoyable learning.

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