As I made my way through Olympia’s vast halls to the Education Today stand, I couldn’t help but think that BETT resembled something out of Tomorrow’s World. A few conversations later however, and it became abundantly clear that it wasn’t tomorrow’s world I was looking at, but today’s. While we all like to wax lyrical about the demise of ‘traditional education’, perhaps what we ought to be talking about is how to make it a more relevant one. Every exhibitor that we spoke to aimed to do just that.
Free laptops for poorer students
The world’s largest educational technology event, BETT didn’t disappoint. Before it had even opened its doors, the media had shone its spotlight on the new Home Access Programme from Becta, the government agency responsible for technology in learning. The scheme has been set up to provide grants for computers and internet access to over 270,000 eligible learners in Years 3 to 9 inclusive before 2011. With an election just around the corner, it almost sounded too good to be true, so the first question Education Today needed answered was that of eligibility. Designed to reach the poorest children, Executive Director Niel Mclean was keen to explain how this could be achieved: “I must stress that this is a grant. The same criteria applies to those learners registered for Free School Meals. It’s a very simple criteria and you can register by phone. Some 14,000 calls were received within three hours of the registration line opening.”
Breaking down the barriers to education
Not having a computer at home has, to some degree, become like not having the right textbook to work with. We asked Niel to what extent socio-economic conditions affected the life chances of those the scheme was set up to support. “Typically wealthier families have better technology at home. Additionally, children that have this technology do better compared to those that do not.” Nowadays not being computer literate poses just as many obstacles in life as being illiterate did in the past, driving a cycle of deprivation that can be difficult for any individual or government agency to break. The parent must be motivated to apply for the grant and while Becta has done as much as it can to help poorly educated parents, by allowing them to register over the telephone rather than fill out tricky application forms, quite how you drive home the importance of this type of education remains to be seen.
What’s more, for children to use this technology at home productively, parents must be adequately supported. We asked Neil how Becta plans to work with parents to ensure that they are fully conversant with topics such as online safety, so that they can monitor their child’s use of the computer more effectively. Niel explained: “Online safety is paramount; the laptops are safe straight from the box”. Indeed, reading through the literature later, we discovered that the Home Access computers are installed with a range of pre-loaded software to help families get online easily. This includes pre-set parental controls designed to help keep children safer online, the ‘Know It All’ safety guide for parents, as well as office productivity software to enable families to create documents, spreadsheets and more. Additional pre-loaded Assistive Technology software is also included to support language and literacy, easing access to the internet for people with a wide range of needs including dyslexia, visual impairments and learning difficulties. Once a family signs up to the scheme the support is there, the difficulty perhaps moving forward will be in ensuring take up remains high once the current news stories die out. Constant monitoring and encouragement from Becta and the schools themselves will be Key to its success.
Supporting Professional Development
Steljes used BETT to launch the IRIS connect, a web application and mobile camera system that claims to revolutionise the process of lesson observation and sharing best practice. Based on extensive research into effective ways to support teacher Professional Development, it has been developed as a versatile, community based CPD platform, allowing colleagues to make time-linked verbal or written notes about the practice they are observing. These notes are automatically added to the lesson recording at the relevant point to support professional dialogue. As immediate feedback has been identified as a critical factor in supporting teacher development, IRIS connect facilitates direct communication between mentor and teacher. This either happens in real-time or via an in-ear link, or later via a dialogue on the IRIS connect network.
The great thing about this product is that it stores the information forever, allowing teachers to view it at leisure - perfect for time poor members of staff who want to improve their own performance, or that of their team. If the management structure of a school is supportive, rather than feeling scrutinised, teachers will see it as key to their development. It is also useful as a means of behaviour control as, removed from the situation, an observer is in a much better position to help deal with a potentially difficult situation without their actual presence changing the classroom dynamic or undermining the teacher in charge. “We have had people saying they have been looking for a product like this for three years,” said a spokesperson. And it’s not only teachers that will benefit from the use of this technology, students can use it to develop their own skills, in debating societies and mock job interviews, for example.
I was keen to take a look at the GCSEPod, a product that uses audio and visual techniques to aid in learning. Covering eight subjects and over 330 titles it represents the next generation of study notes, on an iPod. Is it there to replace books? Not at all said co-founder and director Anthony Coxon: “It is there to re-enforce learning in a way a student can digest. You can even create leader boards to put on facebook.” Going back to my earlier point about making education relevant, here is a product that does just that. Social networking sites are part of everyday life for GCSE students and by blurring these boundaries it suddenly becomes ‘cool’ to be good at a subject, simply by making it socially relevant. Schools can stream the information contained on the iPod so that students can continue their learning at home - much more appealing than lugging a heavy textbook in its place, I’m sure!
Hannah Young dropped by the Education Today stand on behalf of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to tell us about the Young Brits at Art programme, which, utilising painting, drawing, soundscapes, textiles and glass, asks students to convey a world without prejudice. This is another fine example of the Commission engaging students with issues that are relevant to them now and in the future.
Introducing marketing techniques
Talisma used BETT to present its Higher Education CRM modules. Designed to improve student prospecting and recruitment programmes, engagement and retention efforts, while offering components to manage that relationship, it can be used alongside existing software and charged as a standard expense, rather than a capital investment. “This is a highly configurable and flexible service,” said Managing Director Rajendra C. Mruthyunjayappa. Enabling campuses to store information on a central database, just as the GCSEPod blurs the lines between education and social activity, the direct marketing techniques used in the business world are being applied here to optimise results in education. If a student is getting low grades in maths, the software can identify that student - and others like him - to send targeted emails about study groups, for example. In an emergency you can send an email or sms to the entire database, making it extremely useful in terms of safety and security too.
EInstruction is a US based company that offers classroom solutions designed to promote daily and weekly learning so that exam results are no longer a surprise – otherwise known as ‘formative assessment’. “Students today are 21st century learners and this technology helps teachers to drive academic progress everyday. You can engage every child in class material by creating an interactive learning environment in your classroom. Students who normally remain silent in class can now answer every question without fear of embarrassment. And since you see instant feedback from the entire class, you know whether to move on or continue teaching a concept,” said senior vice president Samir Joglecar. Though it could be argued that contributing to class discussion should be encouraged rather than facilitating its avoidance, getting questions right over time will undoubtedly help to build a child’s confidence so that they feel more able to do so in the future. It also good for monitoring the progress of the quieter students.
Great for debate
Another company keen to talk about its learning response systems was Promethean. Called Activ Expression, it offers a teacher controlled mode of answering questions, the competitive element of which is effective in bringing the fun back in to learning. Not only does the system show who got a question right and who got it wrong, but how long it took them to answer it. This enables teachers to tell students to slow down and think about their answer, or if the whole class is struggling, reconsider the way in which they are teaching it. While this system also allows quieter students to take part in class discussion anonymously, an additional point made at this stand was that it was useful for identifying both struggling and brighter students, catering to the needs of both. All this data can be saved and analysed later or used at parent’s evenings to discuss a child’s progress. Great for opinion, voting and debate, it is a mobile system and with 32 in a set can be rotated around the school for each class to use.
With such wonderful technology available, the ‘small’ question of funding had to arise somewhere, so the Education Today Team set off for a chat with Philip White, CEO of Syscap, a company that provides finance for the acquisition of ICC. Philip explained: “We make strategic relationships with the sellers of ICC and have a good understanding of products and product strategy. With a new financial year approaching, schools need to maximise their investment in ICC. According to a poll only 13% of visitors have come here to look at hardware, most schools are networked now and 75% of spend is on software instead.” Syscap has Trusted Advisor status and recognises that while some buyers of ICC solutions have the business acumen to make the right financial decisions, others will need more support - after all, their primary role should be to teach!
We had an interesting chat with Amanda Fallbrown about a package called Careersetc from VTGroup. A careers portal that offers psychometric testing, it identifies relevant careers, looks at the qualifications required for a course and creates blogs so that students can find out if a career is for them. Not only does it alleviate pressure on the teacher to have expert knowledge in every field, it empowers the student to explore the options themselves with all the information they need at their disposal. Amanda said: “BETT has been fantastic for touching base with contacts in the education sector,” and having scooped a National Career Award at the Annual Conference for the Institute of Careers Guidance, theirs was a very busy stand throughout.
Making education relevant
BETT would not have been the same without Microsoft, there to talk about Windows 7, Office 2010 Beta and its involvement in the Home Access Programme; while Sony made the case for introducing culturally relevant tools such as Facebook and You Tube into learning.
As the show drew to a close, it was clear that, far from introducing gimmicks into education with ‘all singing all dancing’ technology lacking in any real substance, it had showcased a range of tools that will make education more interactive, more fun and crucially, more relevant to every day life.
Classroom of the future
In its ‘Classroom of the Future’ Panasonic unveiled a complete technology solution designed to improve both audible and visual communication, in a secure classroom environment. Easiteach is an influential and flexible software application for creating and delivering motivational, interactive lessons. It provides teachers with a wide range of cross-curricular teaching tools in both primary and secondary contexts. Teachers can use it to combine animations, videos, flash files, text, hyperlinks or number based activities in a single document. It can also be used to create personalised lessons or resources from scratch and create and prepare resources well in advance of lessons or use it as a high-end, narration tool to support lessons.
Other examples of Easiteach’s versatility is the function to record voices onto any object at the touch of a button, use the bouncy ball tool to assist the class in reading text in unison and finally, annotate selections of a page to emphasise particularly important messages to the pupils.
A demonstration of Panasonic’s Gesture Recognition technology showed how the combination of a Panasonic interactive whiteboard combined with a camera and PC can control presentations or videos through gesture recognition. Other capabilities of the system include recognising and registering faces and hand gesture.
The Panasonic HD Visual Communication System meanwhile, brings learning and world experience together into classrooms and lecture halls that are separated from the source by long distances. Another capability of Panasonic’s HD Visual Communication Systems is PC screen sharing. This feature allows camera images to be swapped with images displayed on a PC during a meeting at the touch of a button on the remote. A presentation can take place during a conference to share project work, a reference video, a website, a PDF or an image. Everyone sees the same visual on screen, which makes the educational impact and impression clear and consistent.
We were particularly impressed by the system’s ability to communicate with different locations, while the gesture recognition technology is fantastic for identifying those students that claim to be listening but are not!
