BETT Reflection 2 (finally...)

BETT was a couple of weeks ago, and finally found time just now to finish a reflective post...

OS Stand: image by Alan Parkinson

Saturday at BETT.
Wandered down Hammersmith Road in the sunshine, and at half past nine, half an hour before the show started, there were queues forming outside, although not as large as earlier in the week. There were also several people sitting with their laptops outside the Wetherspoons pub - the pub may have been closed (or at least I think it was), but the WIFI was switched on ;)
Exhibitor entrance was calm. Wandered through the main halls with space station style announcements: "the time is now 9.40 - BETT 2009 will open in 20 minutes".I liked the software produced by iBoard. This is primary software which had some nice activities. Tried a few which had been made available during the show. I liked this GOODEY'S MODEL style activity.
TWITTER is getting a lot of attention at the moment, and rightly so. It's been responsible for most of my recent discoveries of web based resources.
At the Teachmeet, Drew Buddie suggested that "Twitter is my Google", but then he does have around 2000 people both following him, and that he is following. He has also made over 16,500 'tweets'.

The plane crash on the Hudson last week was covered in all the media. This Twitpic was posted by a Twitter user who was on one of the ferries that was used in the rescue operation...
Had a German visitor to the stand with a twin school in Blackburn. He particularly liked the GA city guides.

Had a chat to Diana Freeman of Aegis 3: GIS software which is used in a lot of schools. Diana kindly provided software for a session that I ran at the GA Conference in 2007.
This now has some additional features, which I shall blog about more later, but one key additional feature is the streaming of OS 1:10 000 or 1:50 000 maps of areas into the worksheets.

NEN: National Education Network: this looked to have links to useful resources. It is an amalgamation of existing web services and 'grids for learning'. Ollie Bray beat me to it with a good post which picked out the geography content in particular. Plenty of interesting things there.

I liked the FAR AWAY FRUIT SALAD

Also a long chat with the nice people at ESRI: Peter O' Connor's GIS BOOK was being publicised, and there was a lot of interest.

Missed David Roberts, who wandered past in one of the few busy periods of the day. Catch you later David !

Brainpop: spoke to the good folks at Brainpop, who also sponsored the Teachmeet
Showed them MISSION EXPLORE - still hopeful of an 'outcome' here...

I also picked up on a Digital Urban blogpost, which mentioned something that was available in the main hall: Pico Projectors

Thanks to Alf from the Historical Association for his company on the day. I presume you've finished your book now....

Steve Sidaway showed me Txt tools, and a project of the University of Aberdeen project, which involved a real-time simulation of flooding. Students were told that they could receive texts at any time over a 3 day period, and at any time, and had to respond. The system can also take an RSS feed from a website / blog / NING and create a text message at a pre-determined interval, assuming there has been some change to the feed in that time. TXT Tools is well worth checking out. More on this in a future blog post...