Creative ICT

The BETT show is always one of the highlights of the ICT year, and this year was no exception. I travelled to London with a group from Manchester LEA and we were treated to one of the most interesting ICT exhibitions for years.

The annual BETT awards are always regarded as highly prestigious, however, they now have a new rival in the shape of the Creative ICT awards!


Best curriculum software

The most interesting piece of curriculum software that I saw was produced by Kudlian, famous for Terry the Turtle, Banner and Splosh. "Slideshow" is a very simple piece of software that enables children to combine slides, movie clips and sound into a simple movie incorporating titles and transitions.
It is much simpler than full movie-editing software such as Apple's Imovie and Windows Moviemaker and so it neatly fulfils two roles. Firstly for those teachers who are nervous at trying to teach primary children movie making skills for the first time; and secondly it provides an entry for years 3 and 4 into the world of digital movie making in schools that already have digital video established in upper keystage 2.
At £220 for a site licence, and available in Mac and PC formats, it is an excellent little addition to a school's software catalogue. It does not allow the user to capture video from a digital camera, nor will it allow the user to edit clips - these two tasks will need to be done in advance by the teacher using one of the aforementioned packages. That said, it is so simple to use that surely any child will be able to make their own movies. www.kudlian.net



Runner-up for this award went to Smartassess (also mentioned in the best named company award category) for their Screenflash utility. This small software house has produced an excellent screen-capture utility that utilises Flash - available on practically every pc. In effect, it "videos" the screen and records the commentary made by the user as he or she demonstrates what they are doing. Anyone familiar with Camtasia wil know what I mean.
In school this can be used in two ways. Firstly, ICT co-ordinators can use it to record "how tos" for common network processes such as accessing the school's email system or shared resource areas on a network etc. Equally, it can be used as an excellent assessment too for children to record how they did a piece of work.

Best tool for ICT co-ordinators

One of the most difficult tasks for the ICT co-ordinator is the deployment of new software titles to the school's network. Even experienced ICT co-ordinators like myself leave this job to the network engineer.
Until now, schools have used Symantec's Ghost software to install software on a single machine and then send an image of this machine to all other machines on the network. Neat; but the main problem with this system is that each different type of machine requires a different image, creating more work for the engineer and ICT co-ordinator.
Viglen have obviously been thinking hard about this problem and have come up with a network utility called V-RAM. V-RAM offers the ICT co-ordinator a number of benefits:

•  It will produce an audit of all software installations across the network, thus ensuring compliance with license restrictions

•  It allows the co-ordinator to download a software title from the internet and specify which machines it is to be installed upon

• It allows the download of operating system "hotfixes" to be deployed accross the whole network from a single workstation

• It will uninstall applications from one workstation and move them to another

V-RAM will not be released until the summer and pricing is not yet available. It will run on all Windows 2000 and 2003 networks and as ICT co-ordinator trying to manage a 90-screen network, I can't wait to get it installed! www.viglen.co.uk


Best piece of hardware

No fancy electronics here, the best piece of hardware on display at BETT, to my mind, was RM's Intellidesk. This workstation neatly, securely and safely hides a fully working pc with glass-fronted flatscreen monitor and keyboard within a desk. When closed, the desk functions as a normal workstation; lift the lid and the screen keyboard and mouse are revealed.
At £450 it's certainly not cheap, but may just be the answer for schools that struggle to find space for teaching assistants, but also want workstations for independent ICT around school. Go to www.rm.com/primary and search for "Intellidesk"


Best T-shirt

The was very little competition to the www.sickofsims.net t-shirts on offer on the Scholaris stand. Apparently, Capita took offence at this little jibe!
Actually, Scholaris had an excellent web-based report writing package that allowed teachers to write reports online (and hence, anywhere). At £250 per annum, the price was almost too good to be true. www.scholaris.org


These are products that just "caught my eye", and I am sure that I must have missed many "must have" items. Overall, the Manchester LEA trip was a resounding success, not least for the excellent dinner that some of us had at Carluccio's! Roll on next year's show...