Some lessons the ELT industry can learn from BETT
Last week’s trip to BETT “the world’s largest educational technology event” marked ten years, more or less since I first went. Almost all of those visits were motivated by professional interest in ICT in English Language Teaching (ELT) or EFL so I wondered when I left this time, if i couldn’t summarise some of the lessons I think BETT has to offer the ELT industry from an ICT perspective.
Check out life as a grown up
ICT in ELT has often been seen as either a necessary gimic, a sop to the marketers or as a nice-to-have which sucks up too many resources. To be fair, not nearly enough activity has been properly business or problem focussed but this is changing. What strikes you walking round the enormous range of vendors in BETT is the sense of an evolved, complex marketplace which fulfills real needs: platforms underpinning school information systems; the hardware; furniture and physical infrastructure; training organisations; software; authentic media adapted for education; special needs and more. It feels like necessary stuff.
Marketing: talk the right talk
Unsurprisingly for an industry created by government policy, its marketing reflects the highest levels of policy language and is pretty nuanced. The ELT staples of interactivity and multimedia are rare, even from the software vendors. The closest to it would be the much more substantial engagement. There is a strong aspirational message underlying the messaging of “we’re here to help you help the children”. There is the recognition of societal change – 21st century was mentioned a lot. There was the complicit approach – a sort of “like you, we understand the kids are different and need new tools and approaches”. There was the implication that, naturally, education has multiple stakeholders and these need to be involved so it was important to allow for sharing, engaging with the family. As it becomes more integrated, technology comes with obligations as well as opportunities so we were reassured that ICT was available for contacting parents about student lateness and absenteeism.
Interactive whiteboards (IWB)…go beyond bespoke content and reach outside the classroom
Increasingly whiteboard content is trackable and publishable to content management systems or just to plain old school websites. Fancy content alone won’t make a business or even a pedagogic case for IWBs in ELT. Of course offering multi-disciplinary support is an essential part of the rationale for IWBs in a secondary school but it is also clear that these systems are an integrated part of school infrastructure and do more than content delivery.
Check out the ‘boring’ stuff
.. like sms integration with a school ’s information systems to provide alerts about closures, student absence or accidents. It’s not very exciting but clearly useful. Even the systems which offer face recognition for school security may have a role in reducing impersonation for high stakes testing such as IELTS.
Software: try different things with less emphasis on appearance
Because of the way the market place works, there are lots of relatively small companies making a living in this sector. This leads to overlap and some of it has a here’s-one-I-made-earlier appearance. But.. it also leads to a lot of variety, a lot of competition, an understanding of the importance of meeting real needs as otherwise someone else will get the business. How much of what goes into the obligatory DVD, website support of ELT digital wraparound is meeting real, measurable needs? ELT puts a lot of emphasis on things looking not just good but finished to a very high level. Where does this come from? I’ve never met a teacher who valued design over function (Though the ‘font police’ mentality in some quarters of British Council when I worked there, did trickle down a bit). In BETT there is a lot of stuff which is appreciated and used (read ‘paid for’) while being far from polished in appearance.
Software: check out other subjects
And not just the usual Modern Foreign Language (MFL) suspects. Look at maths. Look at material related to life skills – what is language, after all, if not for talking about life?
Software – authoring and standards
Teacher authoring is important and is well catered for. Many practice software suites seem to offer an authoring package which helps people create good-looking, fun content. These packages are sometimes completely web based, output to Flash and are SCORM compliant i.e. they can be dropped into a learning environment where they will be trackable. So far so good. This year there was an attempt to foreground the authoring capabilities as part of showing how we recognise the importance of student creativity and, wait for it … “gaming”. The gaming virus was visible if not rampant with many claiming to be happily infected. More hype than substance but there were some interesting bits and pieces which I’ll try to come back to in another post.
Software – literacy and special needs
Look at special needs and early years software. Not by any means the same thing but both highly visible and obviously having lots to offer ELT, EFL. For people who think the jury is still out on text to speech software, well, I think they are wrong. The gain from the ability of some of the dyslexia support software to read out a web or user authored text and highlight it for playback karaoke-style accompanied by a very reasonable machine generated audio, far outweighs any concern it might fluff some of the words. Certainly if it did, I didn’t notice. The ‘female, middle aged Australian’ voice is convincing – plenty of nationalities and accents to choose from. This was particularly effective in another scenario where a child friendly story authoring package offered the ability to read the text back using text to speech. In the example I tried out, miss-spelled words were highlighted positively by the text to speech as the audio didn’t correspond which what the learner would expect to hear, prompting them to look at it again.
Authoring & e-books
If you want to know where to start with e-books in ELT, you could do a lot worse than children’s stories. Children’s stories are begging to be enlivened by the potential of multimedia e-book treatment. As anyone who has ever read a story to a young child knows, they need to be acted out, emphasised, repeated as well as offering built-in distraction potential because children aren’t contented linear thinkers or listeners. Again there were some suppliers which seemed to offer this. Usefully the result could be packaged up and then downloaded or emailed to appreciative parents.
