BETT 09 education show lifts spirits with Second Life school and sign language software
January 16th, 2009 by Tim Greenhalgh
BETT – everyone’s favourite education technology show – rolls to a close at London Olympia this weekend.
Still recognised as the biggest and most influential event of its kind, BETT delivers a combination of jaw-dropping developments, together with rock solid applications and kit that deliver genuine advances to education practitioners.
Highlights for me (watching from a busy distance this year) include the use of Second Life to show off a Middlesbrough School that is still being built. The idea is to let parents, pupils and staff to “test drive” the school and flag problems in good time. Construction work on Acklam Grange School has only just got underway, but developers at Middlesbrough City Learning Centre have created an exact representation of what it will look like in Second Life.
The idea is for teachers, pupils, and governors to see exactly what the new school will look like, familiarising themselves with the layout and spotting any potential problems before the building goes up.
There’s a good video on the virtual school on You Tube.
Second highlight of the week – support for the UK’s fourth official language – BSL (British Sign Language) in the stunning form of Phoneme Machine 6 software.
The Phoneme Machine uses human lips to pronounce the sounds (phonemes) in hundreds of frequently used English words and in the Cued Speech option, which can be turned on and off, the shapes, positions and movements of the hands are displayed alongside the moving human lips, with the cueing for each of the 500 basewords of English demonstrated in a video box. Utterly brilliant! It was launched at BETT by Malcolm Bruce MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Deafness.
So, there we are… right in the midst of a Winter of Dismal Downturn, uplifting evidence that at least part of the future is in safe hands.
Tags: Acklam Grange Schoo, BETT, British Sign Language, Phonem Machine 6, second life
