Sealan Cronin

I had a pass to BETT this year but wasn’t able to get down to Olympia for it. I caught a lot of it on teachers.tv and BBC though. I’m really interested in e-learning platforms, personalised learning and virtual environments. Generally, anything to do with web I’m interested in! From looking at BETT, we’ve got a lot of vendors producing some really exciting products. Mimio are producing devices that transform ordinary whiteboards into interactive teaching tools. I like this for many reasons, but mainly could its something that might get adopted nationwide.

Personally, I don’t think we’re going to meet the technology demands of younger children set out by the government in Harnessing Technology. From reading Becta’s December ‘progress report’, it seems the government is more concerned about meeting targets than actually getting technology adopted and used by younger children and their parents. The primary school teachers I’ve talked to seem to agree that the technology pushed onto them isn’t that useful, and the evaluation methods are something along the lines of ‘going on the Becta website and filling out pointless questionnaires’.

Designing for young children is challenging. It seems that vendors are not investing the money in doing proper UCD. If I’m wrong, please let me know about a good product that is well adopted in primary schools across the UK with documentation of its evaluation. I still think there is a place for a killer e-learning product, specifically for primary school children (key stage 1 and 2). If I had the time and money, I would love to venture in making this killer product a reality.