BETT - The CES for Teachers!
I was lucky enough to have my first experience of the BETT show today. Myself and a colleague from work pitched up at 11am this morning and were straight into Microsoft’s presentation on Vista in the classroom (given by a friend of my trip-mate). Vista has some interesting features for the classroom, most notable for me is the Journalling Filesystem (it’s almost certainly got some much fancier name that I can’t really be bothered to look up right now). Basically Windows Vista keeps a ‘Shadow Copy’ of each version of a file, so for those all too common (you’d be surprised) occurrences of “Sir, I accidentally click ‘Save As’ instead of ‘Open’ and saved a blank document over my work”, you can just click back and pull up the previous version of the file from the giant filesystem database.
This is nothing new, I had this highly useful feature available to rescue me from myself when I worked on the entirely text-based VAX-VMS systems at my last job. It is however the first time to my knowledge that it has made its way onto mainstream desktop computing and I for one welcome it.
Other highlights included a “hands on” (see, CES for teachers!) on the Samsung Q1 Ultra-mobile PC.
Originally I didn’t like this device, its 800x600 resolution put me off almost immediately, as a budding e-learning content creator, 800x600 makes it much harder to make fancy flash resources for my students. Now that I’ve actually had a chance to sort of poke about on one, I actually think that I could do some clever things with these and I’ll be pushing my school to buy a batch for our students.
I was amused waiting at Earl’s Court tube station on the way there this morning. The platform was packed and everywhere I looked I could see teachers. They were obvious, like they were wearing signs around their necks. I suppose I’m starting to look like one myself now.