My thoughts about BETT 2020
Last week, I went to BETT 2020. They claim its the biggest Edtech conference in the world.
Who am I to doubt it? Certainly, most of the world seemed to be on my tube out of the London Excel.
A conference of that size is exciting and exhausting for all concerned of course. I enjoyed it very much; my only disappointment is that I wasn’t accosted by Lord Sugar’s Apprentice candidates, desperately waving a suggestively-shaped dongle in my face.
Actually, if I’m honest, it wasn’t my only disappointment.
Don’t get me wrong! I did see some amazing, innovative products with the potential to genuinely transform children’s experience of education.
But I did also see a huge number of ‘solutions’ to problems I’m not sure really exist.
By the end of the day I was weary of walking past another enormous, high-definition touchscreen where someone had scrawled ‘hello’ and drawn a smiley face before running out of ideas.
I was left thinking that that would probably be their fate should they ever make it to the classroom.
And who can really afford to equip their classrooms with this stuff? If you have one, please don’t tell the teachers who are running raffles to pay for their photo-copying.
I do admit I am susceptible to a gadget - you should see my kitchen - and when I was staging theatre productions at school I was often drawn to the exciting potential of a ‘new bit of kit’. It reached the point that my colleagues and I would force ourselves to end every production meeting with the question, ‘but could we do it with a bit of wood instead?’
We even put a sign up in the backstage area as a kind of shorthand. (The sign was a simple piece of wood, hand-painted by an artistic Sixth Former - I obviously wanted one that would light up whenever anyone came into the room).
It served as a very useful reminder to focus on the outcome we wanted, the real, human connection we were hoping to achieve with an audience.
In fact, that outcome is no different from the one we, as educators, want to achieve in any learning environment.
Are we communicating with the people in front of us? Are we helping them to think and to understand and to explore?
Or are we showing off our new toys?
I don’t expect the organisers of BETT 2021 to put up a similar sign above their door; they wouldn’t flog as many tellies.
But the teachers flooding in should ask themselves if they are really buying a solution - or merely inventing a problem.
Maybe, then, they’ll be able to pick out the technology that will truly transform their children’s educational experience.
January 2020
Comments