BETT 2008

What is Bett?
Bett is the British Education Technology Show (Not sure what the extra T stands for!). The purpose is bring all the relevant and leading companies, educators, ministers and teachers under one spectacular (it's held at the famous London Olympia Center) roof for four days. As the worlds biggest event it allows a platform to look ahead at the technology that will shape the learning from tomorrow.

Whats New?
The main themes are actually not new, but instead, how current technologies can be incorporated together, especially in the form of smaller mobile devices (Mobile phones, pocket PCs and ultra thin mobile pcs). 2008 will continue the revolution of taking learning out of the hands of the school and placing it in the hands ( literally in the case of Hand held devices) of the student. These children's lives are enriched with high end media, from Digital TV, consoles to Mp3 mobile phones. Social Networking (or Web 2.0) technology saw a boom in 2007 with sites such as Facebook and Myspace user number exponentially increasing. It is therefore of little surprise to see Microsoft presenting how its Learning Gateway linked with Windows Vista can meet this demand for a slick media interface.

The other key term of interest which is starting to spread around developers and again made it into the Microsoft Presentation is "Push Technology". Consider the example of looking for a holiday online. Up until recently the web utilised "pull technology" where upon using a search engine to look for some sites, the search engine pulled the information to your screen. The difference with push technology is that the computer has made decisions for you, and pushed only relevant information (based on your preferences and prior decisions). Where this gets exciting within education is that a student could be pushed information based on their subjects or even more specifically their weakest areas of a subject. This information would continually change based on their performance in online tests or exercises.