I was lucky enough to be given a day off to attend the BETT Exhibition again this year. I really enjoy going to this every year as it gives a real insight into the changing world of technology and allows you the time to investigate how new software can be used to enhance teaching and learning.
As usual a noticeable highlight was the Microsoft stand with lots of great talks running throughout the day. Microsoft Office 2010 looks particularly good, all applications (including Publisher) now have the ribbon-style menu layout and have features incorporated for collaborative working. One such feature that was demonstrated was using PowerPoint. A presentation can be delivered remotely by sharing the presentation online and giving users an access code to view the presentation while it is being delivered in another location. The Office 2010 Beta can be downloaded from here.
One interesting product that was demonstrated by one of the speakers was OneNote. With this students can set up a “folder” of notes in order to work on collaborative projects. As a teacher you can view each of your students “folders” and notes and leave comments and feedback on them. It looks like a great tool and certainly one I would like to explore further.
Another fantastic product being released soon by Microsoft is SharePoint 2010. We already use SharePoint 2007 in school as our VLE and although it is very good the new version promises a whole host of new features that make everything a whole lot simpler. For example, pages act more like wiki pages now and can be edited very quickly using the familiar ribbon-style layout from the rest of the Office applications. One particularly useful feature is that when opening Office documents from within SharePoint it actually runs a version of the application within the browser, meaning students who do not have Office at home can still use the features of the software from within their web browser. Fantastic!
Semblio is a product Microsoft have developed to allow teachers to create resources by bringing together lots of sources from different places, it appears to run as an addition to Visual Studio. I plan to look at this in the future and will hopefully post a blog entry once I’ve explored all of its features.
The final point I shall talk about regarding Microsoft is their large array of free software for teachers and students. As a teacher if you sign your school up to DreamSpark your students are given access to software they can then download at home, particularly useful additions being Visual Studio, Expression Studio and XNA Games Studio. I was given a demonstration of Games Studio, running form within Visual Studio, and it looks like it has a lot of potential, using the C# programming language it allows users to create games for Windows, Xbox and Zune. I plan to investigate this further at a later date.
Microsoft aside, there were so many stands of information to look at, several robotics retailers which I always find interesting (but I spoke about these last year so won’t repeat myself!). One new addition to the world of games programming that seems to have potential is Games Factory by Clickteam. It allows users to build games in minutes using a huge library of graphics and an “events”, “conditions” and “actions” style of programming. The only downside to this is that it is £599 for a site licence with an added cost of £300 to be able to export to Flash format. The software does look very good but with Microsoft’s imminent and free release of Kodu Game Lab coming up I’m not sure I could justify the cost.
OCR’s contribution to the exhibition was a free caricature for their visitors, this is how mine came out! Not too flattering but no less than I expected!
Finally, no trip to BETT is complete without a visit to the Dell stand to see the Dell robot (and receive sweets and other goodies!). I didn’t seem to find too many freebies around this year, compared to previous years, but then I guess we are coming out of a recession after all. I did, at least, collect a few pens and stress-balls!
Well, that’s about it for now regarding BETT, please add comments to contribute on anything I may have missed.