BETT show 2010

Going to the BETT show at Olympia for the first time as a punter with my 14-19 hat on and also the languages side of things too was very interesting. Stéphane Dérone's Linguascope stand was there although as with everything else apart from the BECTA stand I found it hard to find never having learned to navigate Olympia in 10 years of visits. Task Magic was also there as was Boardworks. I first saw Boardworks resources nearly 10 years ago when I thought they were very raw. The design of the Boardworks PowerPoint pages is now superb with lots of effort having been put into making the resources look clean and crisp which is what you need. There A level French resources look good as do their materials for other languages and levels.

What else inspired me? I liked very much the E2BN stand's offerings including the new "Learning Landscape for Schools whereby a school can purchase a site with huge potential for a range of web 2 processes for only £300 per year. This includes hosting of streaming video and recording of video from a web cam as well as blog, wiki, a file area and all sorts of other things. It's not intended to be a VLE but would make a really good collaborative school for use with partner schools. You can find it at www.ll4schools.co.uk where you can set up 20 free generic accounts for a school. You can also test out here http://www.ll4education.co.uk

Helen Myer's talk on the Saturday ran through a myriad of resources many of which I hadn't heard of and want to try out. Second Life sounds particularly appealing although when I signed up to it I seemed to spend most of my time crashing into walls and drowning. I also didn't realize that it now has an audio feed not just text. It was also great to meet Joe Dale again-although as I said to him he doesn't look like his TES pic much.

I suppose one of the big things it did was encourage me to keep plugging away at keeping working on the A level French resources: after all many of the organisations at BETT this year started off as cottage industries!