A good time at today’s Education Show at the NEC. The 10.00 am slot, and relatively low key publicity, meant that my Moodle presentation on the Becta stand didn’t attract the vast hordes that we’d had at BETT. There was some postive feedback, and some interesting conversations afterwards. The screen-recording from the whiteboard and the discussion forums seemed the bits that really captured people’s imagination. Time spent on the Becta stand after the presentation was also useful – talking through general IT in schools stuff with show visitors and demo-ing our Moodle set up to some of the Becta team.

On the IT side, there were large numbers of folks showing off desks with built in computers, which actually looked pretty cool, but on reflection might seem a bit anachronistic when the smart money is moving to personalised technology like lap-tops and PDAs. Spooky though to have achieved ‘name recognition’ from complete strangers – “Ah, Miles Berry, you’re the Moodle expert” – hardly! but it led to some interesting conversations, notably with the lady from EPICT:

EPICT partners believe ICT training for educators should be focussed on the pedagogical operations of teaching and learning and the occupational needs of the profession

Who it turns out have a Moodle VLE hosted by Sean Keogh’s Pteppic.net.

The Education Show is so much more relaxed than BETT, and really gains through having things other than just IT stuff on show. It was good to catch up with Jo Klaces at the National Literacy Association, who’d had a very successful launch of their resource guide the day before. Also, the show was a great opportunity to stock up on Berol pens and Staedtler pencils and highlighters!