Upon my arrival at Bett this year my first stop was, as always, the Microsoft stand. The staff here had lots of software to demonstrate and assist with. My main focus here was to listen to the talks scheduled throughout the day. The first being “Innovative Curriculum Delivery” by Alan Enfield from New Line Learning Academy in Maidstone who gave a very polished talk on his new school build and the use of learning plaza’s. One part that particularly stood out for me was some web-based software, by LookRed, which visualises data in Sims and is great for anyone (regardless of ability) to be able extract data in an easy-to-use way.
Here is a video of some of the work LookRed are doing:
Following this I went to the talk on “Classroom Innovation for Free” by Dan Roberts and Stuart Ball. Here they demonstrated some excellent software that can be used in the classroom:
- Flash cards – this allows you to make interactive, online flashcards for use in revision.
- Autocollage – software that automatically creates a collage from a bank of pictures. I talked about this last year too which you’ll find here.
- Math add in – this is software that allows you to express mathematics equations in Word and OneNote
- Mouse mischief – Personally I think this looks great! Students can use their own mouse to interact with the teachers PC in order to answer questions on the board. This is an add-in to PowerPoint which allows you to create the interactive element of the interactive quizzes.
- Community clips and Innovids – Community clips is software that allows you to create screencasts to record what you are doing on your screen. It embeds nicely into Office or can be used to record specific windows. Innovids are tutorial videos created by teachers to demonstrate various aspects of Microsoft software.
- Teachers blog – Microsoft have a fantastic blog which tells you all about their various software and its’ uses within the classroom.
The final talk I went to was Futures run by Mark Stewart and Ray Fleming. In this they discussed the various tools that could be used in the classroom in the not-so-distant future, these included:
- Office web apps
- Office 365
- Windows phone 7 – the main thing I like about this is that you are able to edit your documents with your phone as it incorporates a full version office!
- Deepzoom Composer – This demonstration shows how this works better than I could explain!
- Photo synth
- Chrono zoom – interactive timeline of the world which you can zoom in and out of!
- Reading cloud – online reading community for students and educators from one of Microsoft’s partners
- Montage – Create an online montage/newspaper of a particular topic. Very easy and straight forward to use, I made this one in less than 5 minutes!
As I continued my journey around the various stands some notable software and tools stood out. Firstly is CrazyTalk Animator, this looks fantastic but I don’t think I can begin to do it justice by just talking about it so here is a video:
Another area I am particularly interested in is the SSAT Digital Leaders scheme, this is a programme witch trains groups of students to become “digital leaders”, these students then use their skills to train and assist staff in using ICT and technology more effectively. You can read more about this on the SSAT website.
A few other notable areas I came across were as follows:
- Games-Ed – simulation games for use in the classroom
- Young Coder – reasonably priced programming resources for use in the classroom
- Odd ‘n’ Izzi – kids travel and educational website
- Day Dream Education – lots of interactive resources for all subjects for the IWB and VLE
- Bamzonia – simulation where students build up a thriving island by learning about finances and money-management
Well that’s about it for my round-up of Bett 2011, my final highlight being meeting the Twitter bird! Please post comments if you have any questions or additional points to share.