Event
The Bett Show
Jan 29th
The BETT Show is an annual trade show in the UK marketing IT in Education and the first Bett show was held in 1985. Since 2013 it has been held annually in January at the Excel Centre in East London. I think I have attended most shows since the early 1990s, much has changed, both in the world of ICT and the use of technology in society. The show is big, lots of stands, talks, and increasingly corporate, with the largest stands from Microsoft and Google. Promethean, the Interactive Whiteboard manufacturer, was also prominent.
Trends
- Meeting apps
- Virtual Reality
- STEM )Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) and STEAM (STEM +art)
- Robotics and coding
- Fewer mainstream publishers had stands, as did many other specialist technology companies that usually have a large presence such as Sherston Software, Education City and Little Bridge. That said, many of these companies had staff attending for business meetings in and around the exhibition.
The international focus remains, with a Dept for International Trade (DIT) stand and stands from France, Israel, UAE, Finland, Spain, Hungary, and Moscow City Dept of Education.
Mobile learning presentation webinar
Dec 14th
I’m greatly looking forward to my mobile learning presentation this weekend for the IATEFL Learning Technology SIG, see details on their web page. I will report on a survey of language learning apps carried out with Paul Sweeney, and the features that we liked and those we didn’t and describe how I have applied this learning in two mobile app projects that I am working on.
The first is an arcade style iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad vocabulary learning game called Word Carrot that I have been working on the past few months with three colleagues in our new company, LearnAhead Ltd. The app will appear on the Apple App store in early January 2012.
ESU Awards: have the digital entries got any better this year?
Nov 13th
A year ago I posted an article on this site that was critical of the entries for the Duke of Edinburgh’s “President’s Award” for innovation and good design in digital materials for English language learning. I was a judge again this year, and I suppose the answer to my question above is “yes, they are somewhat better, but nowhere near good enough”. The winner was Cambridge English Online’s Phonetics Focus app, which we felt was a great tool for teachers and learners to learn the Phonemic alphabet, with a clear and attractive user interface and visual design. There were some other interesting entries, though we felt a couple were not quite finished enough for us to consider and we have contacted their developers to explain this. Otherwise, we were relieved to see some mobile apps, albeit of variable quality, though surprised to see CDROMS, even for entries that were web-based.
Developing Mobile Language Learning – Brighton
Apr 15th
Paul Sweeney and I held another knowledge building event on mobile language learning, this time in Brighton on the fringes of the IATEFL conference presenting our new whitepaper on mobile language learning which we will publish in the next few weeks. Before then we’ll also publish a summary of the event.
The event was kindly hosted by Paul Slater of the University of Brighton on Friday 15 April with a panel representing ‘traditional’ publishers, course providers, language app developers and educators will engage with the emerging challenges of developing apps for language learning.
Should the British Council ELTONS be “spreading the love”?
Feb 27th
Posted by Caroline in Comment
1 comment
It was fun to attend the ELTONS last week, the first time since I left the British Council last year, free of any sense of responsibility for the event, and with an “outsider” perspective. The awards were started by my former colleague Cherry Gough in 2003, and I have been involved as a judge for several of the intervening years.
Having seen some of the entries already when helping judge last year’s ESU President’s Award, I rather rated Macmillan Global’s chances, but Macmillan, along with the other major UK ELT publishers, came away empty handed. Instead United International College (UIC), a London-based language school won with their entry Communication Station, alongside the BBC, with two web-based learning resources.
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