Last week the Bett show took place at London Olympia, before setting out I’d been thinking about whether the show could get any bigger. Well, after a first walk around Olympia which seemed to take hours, I found that it had grown! The side hall (Olympia 2 I think) was used to house many more exhibitors. The sheer size of Bett must make it difficult for anyone to get round in one day.

Some of my favourite things were:

Microsoft Surface and the SMART multi-touch table

Ed and I were able to get a demo of the SMART table and tried many of the applications that were available. SMART told us that they were currently working on new development for the table and that the initial cost was over £4000 but they said that this would come down once it went into full production. There was a very neat addition activity where you are asked to sum 2 numbers and the users provide the answers by making contact points with the screen.

Surface uses similar technology with Microsoft also demonstrating its authentification process which can be used by placing a card on the table.

Garageband Live Demo

Apple had a great stand featuring live demos on all days of the show. James and I both watched a great session with Joe Morreti of makemoremusic. Joe did a session showing the new features of Garageband 09 including how to use the app as an applifier. With a guitar and a sax his session provided a great insight into online digital music education.

I also spent time talking to Sony about how the PSP is being used in Education and also by the Navy to deliver e-learning. Becta had a lot of information regarding next generation learning, including information for suppliers and developers which was great for us. Many of the hardware suppliers were showing off new notebook machines with one stand having their laptop section virtually ignored when I was there.

The standard of visual and interface design was very impressive with some of the primary content showing some fantastic graphic and character design.

As we work through all of the material that we collected we’ll share some more of our thoughts about the show….In 2 days we are heading to Open Innovation in Norwich and then next week it is off to Learning Technologies.

Hello to all of our friends that we managed to meet and bump into at Bett!

It is the day before Bett and I’m getting a list of stands that I want to visit, near the top of the list is the SMART stand where they are demonstrating

“the world’s first multi-touch, multi-user table for primary education”

I’m really interested in seeing this technology as I’ve read a lot about touch-screen tables in the press over the past year. The Microsoft Sphere also generated a lot of interest and media buzz so it will be interesting to see the effect that the SMART table has.

SMART are on Stand G40