BETT 2011

I had a brilliant and an awful day at the BETT exhibition at Olympia yesterday.

The brilliant part was the exhibition itself. Wow! Every year I'm just stunned by the size of this exibition. I went prepared - I had my personal plan of which stands I wanted to visit and had worked out a route. That plan went out of the window as soon as I started walking down the first aisle. At each stand there were people who started talking to me as I walked past. Just trying to read the names of the companies they represented was invitation enough - and I was too poilite, at least at the start of the day, to say "no thanks".

Besides, the promise of winning something is always way too tempting. I'm now waiting until Monday to find out that I must have won at least one "Smart table", 4 Kindles, 1 iPod, 3 iPads and about a million free one year subscriptions to various pieces of software. Lucky me, hmm?

Of course, once the inevitable phone calls start coming through from the company reps, reminding me that I said I was interested in their products, I shall remember why I told myself NOT to enter any competitions this year! At least I also came away with enough pens to last until next year and enough chocolates and sweets to expand my ever-increasing waistline by another 20 inches! Thank goodness for the Sunflower Learning stand which offered free fruit to visitors, the apple was most welcome!

Anyway, I spent most of the day (productive part, see later for the awful side) seeing something exciting on one stand and thinking "This is fantastic, it's new and exciting, a good price and my students would love it - we MUST buy this" and then walking to the next stand and repeating that process over and over again.

I was struck by how many apps there are this year for use with students' mobile technology - revision software, educational games, educational software in general. This is an area that had definitely expanded over the past 12 months and one I need to think seriously about. I must buy myself a smartphone too - I need to keep up - my excuse at least.

I love the idea of using games to enhance students' learning as anyone who has read my previos blogs may remember. Playstation are currently developing Physics games for use on their PS3s which could be mindblowing.

There really was far too much of interest for me to even begin to do justice to it here. I've come away exhausted but invigorated by some of the ideas and material out there now and in the development process.

Ok, so now I have to explain the awful part. Olympia is not the easiest of venues to reach. Getting to Earl's Court is fine, but there are just not enough trains from there to Olympia, or back again. Consequently, the thousands of visitors to BETT are crammed in so tightly, we almost had to take turns to breathe. Very uncomfortable and claustrophobic.

Once at Olympia, the organisation this year left much to be desired, in my opinion. The cloakroom facilities are inadequate for the number of people visiting. I queued for 30 minutes to leave my coat and about 90 minutes to retrieve it at the end of the day, by which time many of the tickets that had been pinned to coats etc, were on the floor and staff were unable to find some coats, including mine. I found my own, by searching through all of the coats myself, but this is hardly a good way to run a cloakroom.

In addition, eating is always difficult at BETT due to the number of visitors. After a wait of over 20 minutes to reach the food counter and a further 15 minutes trying to find an empty place at a table, I ended up sitting on the floor to eat. Not great when you are tired and really want a break for a few minutes. I think that I should at least have been able to sit on a chair after paying the high cost of exhibition food.

That said, I still think it was well worth going to BETT.