I like firsts. Trying stuff out. Learning new things.  So a first visit to BETT was an exciting prospect. Someone asked me before what I was hoping to get out of it and my reply had been along the lines of , “Awe, wonder, inspiration, ideas – and meeting some of the people I had been tweeting with”.  The day didn’t exactly get off to a good start – on the way to dropping off the children in the morning, the youngest realised she had forgotten her violin so we needed to do a u-turn and then I was thinking about school and turned towards school rather than towards the station! Not a great start.  But the journey ran smoothly after that.

I had a plan before I went, a list of people I wanted to meet, stands I wanted to visit, teachmeet takeovers I wanted to see and an idea of the sort of things I needed to look at for school. This really put paid to my normal “supermarket sweep” style at exhibitions where I go up one aisle and down the next in a systematic way and I found myself probably walking 3 times further than necessary! I’m sure some stands thought they were being stalked by me…

Loads of interesting stuff – on the hardware side, the biggest impression that I was left with was the Epson projector that makes any blank wall an interactive whiteboard – at a fraction of  the cost of existing whiteboards.  Looks like a neat bit of design, too.  On the software side, Scholastic were launching Class PET that should help with recording of APP. I’ve enjoyed using their products for a while so will be interested to try this one out…. There were a couple of bits of software that look as though they could be integrated well into the learning platform to actually provide some learning content, too.  The Uniservity Life Learning Cloud looked like a really interesting development and I’m looking forward to checking that out a bit more to see how it can enhance our learning platform use. I have to admit to being a little disappointing with the playful learning aspects as there were lots of games being played but not so many examples on stands of how that could be developed to enable the pupils to learn what we have to teach them – it seemed like play for playing sake rather than play for scaffolding learning.

It was interesting to read a tweet later from someone bemoaning the fact that anti-commercialism (I take it that means wanting to use opensource/freeware/web 2.0 tools) smacks of amateurism and that we wouldn’t want our surgeons to work in a similar way.  There are resources that are worth paying for and using in our classrooms, but I have to say that with budgets being so tight in schools and technological changes happening at such a pace, it is professional to make sensible judgements about how we spend our resources so we can move forward quickly when integrating tools in the classroom to enhance learning. There was nothing amateurish at all about the way these free tools were being used to enhance learning as demonstrated very capably by all those inspiring teachmeet takeover and teachmeet 2010.  There were demonstrations of twitter being used in school, wallwisher, voicethread, animoto, xtradimension and Tom Barrett’s amazing use of google maps for maths maps, just to mention a few of the highlights! It doesn’t seem to matter what you spend or don’t spend on a tool or application.  The driving factor in its effectiveness is the way in which it is used.  The most expensive product doesn’t necessarily provide the most effective learning.  Making those professional judgements about when it is most appropriate to use freeware, open source tools is far from amateur. The teachers I saw presenting were far from amateur.  As someone who gets involved in the spending of the school’s money on ICT, I’d rather make sure I have a viable infrastructure, that we are responsible with taxpayers money, that we can justify spending so we don’t waste it on tools that are rarely used and that the tools we use enhance learning in an effective way (and are easy for me and my staff to learn to use!).

Teachmeet was amazing! The buzz, the hype, (sorry, that’s a line from one of our Christmas play songs!) – the atmosphere was great, people chatted, I met lots of people I had spoken to on Twitter, missed lots of others, was challenged by some of the things that were said in the evening presentations – Ian Yorston and Daniel Murphy.  Got isnpiration for how to use Vokis as a step forward from the Doppelme avatars we currently use in class from Ian Addison, recognised @digitalmaverick even without a t-shirt pulled over his mouth when getting a drink (the Captain America outfit later was a fantastic visual prompt for his talk), I put my bag on a chair on a table with people I didn’t know to go to the bar, only to find when I came back after chatting to people that I was sat between John Davitt (my first twitter follower – how’s that?!?!?!)  and Russell Prue (maybe I should have asked for autographs!). I chatted to @lisibo, @joga5, @dughall, @singingsprocket, @olliebray and more….  It was just such a shame I had to leave before the end in order to catch the last train to Crewe. Sharing of good ideas – not amateur, professional. Not commercial – but things I can take away to try out in class. It was priceless – some things are beyond putting monetary value on.

And it was surprising that there wasn’t more about the co-construction and collaboration opportunities of wikis, skyping, working with other schools that I’ve been involved in – it was probably on the days I wasn’t there, or after I left. Or the snow lesson opportunities when schools were closed, for example @DeputyMitchell’s inspiring use of Coveritlive, which even made it to the TES this week. Maybe next time I’ll know the ropes enough to stand up and tell them about it…