Belated thoughts on BETT 2010
Date: 5th February, 2010
It’s coming up for a month since BETT 2010, and a few days off work sick gives me the opportunity to gather my thoughts…
Without doubt, Microsoft had the most impact for me. They seemed to have more prominent stands this year, in the prime spaces on the ground floor, near the centre. What struck me? Their vision of cloud computing for education, named live@edu, and the fact they were actively encouraging people to use Office 2010 beta.
So, what is live@edu? It’s a free resource provided by Microsoft for educational institutions. With it you get student email, access to collaborative Microsoft tools like Office Live, help with keeping students’ data private, 25GB of online storage per student and a few other things.
I’m excited by it because I see it as the ideal future for the VLE. It’s free, which is very desirable considering the potential cutbacks to education funding due to the recession, and, it’s secure, something which concerns me with the VLEs procured by LAs in England. Then, purely from a learning point-of-view, it’d be exposing children to real applications rather than products designed to mimic such applications in a school environment (although that’s probably only relevant in KS1 and KS2).
I noticed 2009 brought some changes to Microsoft’s attitude towards Beta testing. I don’t know how they did it before, but it seems they have been very positive in encouraging home and small business users to use beta versions of Windows 7. I downloaded it in July, for example. At BETT 2010, they were actively telling people to donwload the Office 2010 beta, although I’d actually done that in December.
Anyway, I really like Office 2010, and have no intention of going back to Open Office. Office 2010 just works, and we’ll happily pay for whatever licences we need come the Autumn when the beta runs out.
Thanks for the post… I used to attend BETT when I worked for MS in Ireland… it is a great event.
I would be keen to hear your thoughts on how the Office Web Apps can be used in the classroom by teachers and students? Have you tried those out yet?
My headteacher came to BETT with me this year, so we were both really fired up by what Microsoft had to offer. I immediately looked into it and was quite excited: picture Google Docs with the style and panache of Office 2010 (albeit with limited features), with integrated storage and email (see the second video here: http://bit.ly/AmYyD – it seems intended for older students but Microsoft were keen for all schools to take part). Imagine my dismay when I realised it was blocked at school!
Setting it up isn’t something an ICT subject leader could do, mind. I’m thinking this is more something Local Authorities should be looking at, perhaps as an alternative to the clunky VLEs most of us are being nagged about.