LapSafe® at BETT: A review of day one at the BETT Show

So day one of the exhibition is over, and what a day it’s been for LapSafe® at BETT.

The show opened at 10am, when thousands of education professionals flooded through the doors of London Olympia looking for all that’s new in the world of educational technology.

The first day of BETT is always action packed, but today’s show was particularly busy for us because it saw the unveiling of our new, bigger stand in a different location to previous shows. The new, 70sqm, LapSafe® BETT stand is now in a more central location, H39.

With our new BETT stand came an entire new range of mobile ICT management solutions, including the Traveller™ charging and storage case for Nintendo DSi and the Traveller™ charge, sync and store case for iPads. If you’re at the show tomorrow, why not pop along to H39 and take a look?

After a morning of meeting and greeting, the afternoon only got busier with the first of our free teacher best practice events. These short sessions will be held throughout the week and are designed to enable teachers to discover how other schools utilise innovative technologies.

At 1.30pm, media savvy pupils from St Peter and St Paul CE Primary School, in Burgh-le-Marsh, led an interactive workshop on the LapSafe® BETT stand to demonstrate how they use electronic games in class to boost their maths and literacy skills.

Alongside their Headteacher, the group of year 6 pupils revealed to visitors how they use the Nintendo DSi to practice daily maths challenges, assess their performance and work in groups. The Year 6 pupils showed visiting teachers how they use gaming devices to communicate with each other through picture messaging, and even gave educators the chance to try out the console for themselves.

The young presenters are part of a group of Digital Media Champions at their school, a team of children who help to inform teachers and pupils, including those in neighbouring schools, about new technologies. The youngsters currently demonstrate a variety of digital media that they make use of in lessons, including film making and visual literacy, with their teachers embracing ICT to support and strengthen learning since 2009.

As part of the event, we were very pleased to welcome Bill Thompson, a technology journalist from the BBC, to the LapSafe® BETT stand. Bill is currently working with pupils at St Peter and St Paul’s CE Primary School as part of the Young Journalist Academy, a program designed to encourage young people to engage with news and current affairs.

The scheme supports pupils in creating their own school newsroom and media literacy projects, and, as part of this venture, the pupils will be reporting on their time on our BETT stand later on in the year. Keep checking the LapSafe® blog for more on this story.

Sarah Smith, Headteacher at St Peter and St Paul’s CE Primary School was also on hand to explain how her school use electronic games to stimulate lessons, group-work, record assessments and measure against targets the new portable. Sarah also explained how she uses the USB Charging Case from LapSafe® Products to charge and store her school’s gaming devices.

For those of you that couldn’t make this workshop, there’s a free downloadable games based learning guide available on the LapSafe® website. They’ll be a new guide free each day throughout BETT, so remember to logon daily to www.lapsafe.com and follow @lapsafe on Twitter.

After the workshop, we headed over to New Worlds of Learning, the central feature of BETT, to join Russell Prue on BETT Radio. Russell interviewed the pupils from St Peter and St Paul’s CE Primary School about the presentation that they had just given and how they use other types of new technologies in their classrooms. Russell is broadcasting live from the show every day and will follow up with a BETT highlight’s show next month.

Today also marked the first day of BETT competition, where we gave teachers the chance to get their hands on some interactive science packs, by playing the ‘Where in the World is Professor Smarty Pots?’ game. This competition will run until Friday, with one winner each day.

Tomorrow we’ll be back with another interactive BETT event, Collabor8 4 Change and much more. We look forward to seeing you on our BETT stand H39 where you can chat to our team, see our new products and enter our competitions. If you’re lucky, you might even get to meet Professor Smarty Pots, our very own LapSafe® scientist and Official Ambassador of the ExplorerLAB™ mobile science cart!