It’s been nearly a month since I attended the BETT 2013 exhibition and I haven’t yet written about the event. I’ve been super-busy with a couple of writing projects which have taken up a lot of my time recently which probably hasn’t helped. But the more I think about it the more I realised that it’s probably because the BETT show just didn’t excite me that much this year. There wasn’t really anything new.
The venue was new and shiny – with Excel taking over from Olympia which for me made it was much easier to get to. But I found the whole space quite disorientating. Stands were hard to find, and it was quite easy to get lost. I’m personally hoping that the BETT app next year has GPS and turn by turn navigation!
I’ve often said that you need to skip a show or two from time to time. The change from year to year is quite subtle, and this year was basically the same as last year and the year before. There were newer Interactive Whiteboards, more iPads, lots of VLE platforms, sleeker visualisers etc. Everything that was here last year was here this year, but a little more shiny and a little more polished.
Several stands were still pushing 3D as a viable option for a classroom (it’s not) and I even saw a 3D visualiser (just hold the object up!). Lots of cheap Chinese whiteboards without useful software ( I saw one demonstrating MS Paint) or a knocked-off clone of Smart Notebook.
I don’t think I saw anything new that made me think – WOW, what a great idea.
That’s not to say there wasn’t stuff that I liked.
For example:
BrainPop UK were demonstrating their new Game Up UK area of their website which had some very interesting games for students to play. Some good problem-solving activities to encourage collaboration. Go take a look.
Espresso was showing off their new coding module and iPad friendly layout.
I liked the look of the YoYo Game Maker which lets students code their own games and apps.
Rising Stars launched their online CPD products, which look rather interesting. And they were pushing their excellent Switched on ICT books.
I was interested to see that Steelcase (formerly Eno/Polyvision) were providing a customised version of Splashtop remote to let you control your IWB via iPad. Will be interesting to see if other IWB manufacturers follow suit in future.
Zu3d’s new animation software looked rather nice. Simple and easy to use. And not too expensive.
I went to the SMART press conference, and it was interesting to see that with a change of CEO there’s more of a push towards collaboration – like the Smart Notebook XC plug in that I wrote about after BETT. The other thing that did interest me was the SMART Interactive projector which you could operate with your finger. It worked really well and I was very impressed with how accurate it seemed to be.
SMART also unveiled their new table, and it does appear they’ve listened to a lot of the criticism of their first version. There’s now no projector, it’s a flat LCD screen. It’s wheelchair accessible, and you can now create resources in Smart Notebook rather than struggling with their amazingly complicated resource creator. The price is still crazy though – somewhere around £8000. I can see most schools going with a set of iPads for the same price. Did look nice though!
So that was BETT 2013. As always it was the people that made the event for me. It’s a good opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues at companies I do training or writing for. It’s also good to just bump into twitter mates. As always the highlight was the TeachMeet on the Friday night, where nearly 250 people got together to share great ideas and network. It also had one of the best ways of recording meeting minutes that I’ve ever seen – see the video below!
And yes, I’ll be back next year. Hopefully there’ll be something new to make me go WOW
