Title: Life in Links: BETT 2016

I spend a couple of days at BETT this year and saw some interesting things, here are my bookmarks for johnjohnston tagged ‘bett2016’Of course I missed far too much stuff and too many people.

I did meet Oliver Quinlan and got a couple of Raspberry Pi tips. Seems it should be possible to set up a pi to scan for several WiFi networks and auto join a suitable one. You can also run a pi from a usb drive as opposed to an SD card (as I understand it you still need to start from the SD but point to a system on the USB). There was another tip from Oliver that is just out of memory at the moment hovering round the tip of my tongue. I hope Oliver will be a guest on Radio Edutalk this year.

I saw the pi-topCEED and ordered one. there are 2 pi-tops. One a laptop and the other a ‘desktop’. I was going to buy another pi and always struggle for a screen to attach so this looked like an interesting idea. They were pretty flimsy but I think I’d mostly use them to set up a pi which then I would shell onto from an iPad or computer.

Alan O’Donohoe was running a pretty wacky stand for Exa Education I watched his highly mobile presentation teaching 2 + 2 in python. An extremely rigorous approach to teaching hidden in an entertainment sandwich. I learned a lot more than the answer (4 mostly).

I had a quick chat to Leon on the Exa stall too, as usual he is involved in fascinating stuff.

One of the big things everyone was talking about was Microsoft acquiring MinecraftEdu. Microsoft are pretty upbeat about this. Other reports mention some possible problems. My immediate thoughts were that this might become part of Glow since a fair slice of Glow is made up of O365.

Today I read a few posts by Dean Groom, pushing back against this minecraft development:

As I said yesterday, I believe at this point, this is nothing more than another attempt by a technology giant to use ‘teacher frontage’ to mask it’s commercial agenda and make money. It’s also disgusting to think that the sell out of Minecraft Edu, which has used the IP and social capital of the broader community as well as teachers is being reaped in this way — and brazenly makes several claims and thin associations about ‘game changing’ learning, without any evidence whatsoever.

from: Buy me: I’m great for learning | Playable and associated posts (Put down the bat Dean sums it up). I’ve not got any real experience of Minecraft, but have seen nice stuff carried out in the classroom and talked with Derek Robertson about MinecraftOTW on Radio EDUtalk. It will be interesting to see which way this goes. Some interesting, robust commentary on the Sorry, kids. Microsoft is turning Minecraft into an ‘educational tool’ • The Register Forums

I think Do it Kits | Make it, learn it, do it. was my favourite thing at BETT, the site is not really doing much of a job at describing the kit yet, but on on display used a Raspberry Pi to monitor a small mushroom farm.

I did think of staying an extra day to go to TeachMeet at BETT, but had been put off by, expense and the reports I’d read about some folk skipping the draw to present at previous editions. This tweet suggests things have improved:

.@ewanmcintosh on the Rules of the first #teachmeets – no PowerPoint, no selling, current classroom practice, 7 minutes, #tmbett16

— Miles Berry (@mberry) January 22, 2016

Hopefully these were followed on the night.

Bonus link the CC0 image at the top of this post is from FindA.Photo which looks like a useful service that searches across a few other sites. Fré Sonneveld
viaUnsplash