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Another year, another BETT show! Here are all of my highlights from this year’s event:
- Lego have a new education robot building kit out - Lego Spike. Aimed at Year 6+, it does look noticeably more difficult than Wedo 2.0, although it does have the ability to be moved using button presses (without any initial programming) and has a cool 5x5 grid of lights that can be set to show scrolling messages and faces. I also learnt about in-school Lego Days provided by companies like Raising Robots and Team Building Workshops that look seriously cool!
- Robot Wunderkind looks to be a great robotics platform that enables children to easily build and program a variety of different of robots.
- Sleuth IT is a newly-released app-based series of mystery-solving adventure games. Initially created for high school transition days, it launched at BETT with different collections of mysteries for children aged 6-18 to solve with their friends. This look incredibly interesting and I think I really need to spend a good evening investigating this and its potential...
- Dipongo is a French app that is basically stories in which children have to interact with the characters by taking photos of their own real-life creations to solve dilemmas in the narrative, such as a bridge to cross a gorge. This look incredibly beautiful but I need to look into how much is actually translated into English.
- Learning by Questions - which I'd heard about initially last year - looks to be an outstanding online formative assessment tool for children with an ever-growing bank of quality, curriculum-linked question sets. At just £200 per teacher, it's certainly affordable and the staff of the stand couldn't have been more friendly or have answered my questions any better.
- uHandy Microscope is a little peg-shaped series of microscopes of various magnifications that can be attached to a tablet/phone's camera lens to allow it be used to enlarge what you're looking at. I've previously bought a similar device from Amazon and wasn't wholly convinced with the quality, although this brand does seem to be quite good.
- Computing Owls is a KS2 Computing Scheme of work that I've added onto my list of resources to investigate and research further to aid my own lesson planning.
- TTS had two products that caught my eye - STEM Challenge Cards and the four-wheeler outdoor-terrain robot Rugged Robot.
- WallArt looks to be an absolutely awesome company that decorate school walls to create them into very professional and shiny permanent displays. Just look at their case studies and admire their beauty!
- It was great to watch @Animate2Educate present - both in person about creative apps to use in the curriculum (such as to enhance photos with overlays, like I've done previously with Big Huge Labs) and via Twitter about Ofsted subject deep-dives into Computing during inspections. This was certainly fascinating since I'd just updated my school's Computing subject policy days earlier and it thankfully justified/affirmed its content.
- I was reminded again that I really could do with investigating OzoBot, a product that I've seen a few universities use with their students and I've read reviews about in the past, like http://primarybytes.com/2019/01/13/review-ozobot-evo-its-a-bit-better/
- Top Trumps send out six FREE packs for cards to schools who sign up to run tournaments with their children. Details here - http://www.toptrumps.com/category/schools/.
- National Online Safety - the company's whose e-safety information/advice posters for parents are shared across practically every school recently, were present sharing their new-look website.
- Mighty Writer gave me an impressive demonstration of their felt-based resource for helping infant children compose and write stories. They have lots of free training videos on their website so you can see the potential of their product in the classroom: https://www.mightywriter.co.uk/training-videos.html
- Lastly, it was fantastic as always to watch @Ideas_Factory present about how playing an ambient sound (like these https://nature.ambient-mixer.com/ ) to accompany a 360-degree look at a locality can really help immerse children in it. This video really is worth a watch.
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