global digital creativity research & workshops

For the sixth year it was nice to be invited back to be a part of ‘Create at BETT’, the creativity feature at the BETT Show held at London Olympia between the 10th and 13th of January. Create at BETT continues to be the only stand staffed by young people, not selling anything specific.

The feature stand exists to simply demonstrate creative use of technology within learning. Last year BETT attracted 27,000 visitors from all over the world to its two thousand stands.Students from King Harold School were on hand to help visitors make podcasts, using the latest chroma key technology from our friends at Reflecmedia.

Visitors were able to stand in front of a chroma wall with selected moving image being rendered live behind them straight into Apple’s iMovie software.

Click the right hand news article image to read what reporter Stephen Manning from the TES had to say about the young people working on the Create at BETT stand:

The young people working on the stand worked with the show visitors to film their ideas and then upload the newly created podcast file to the Digital Teacher Network (DTN). DTN remains as a free space for creative teachers to manage their projects online.

All the podcasts created on the ‘Create at BETT’ stand can be viewed on the ‘Create at BETT DTN Project‘.

All DTN project media files work with iTunes, and are therefore available to download as podcasts onto iPod technology.At the other end of the stand young people worked to demonstrate the brilliant iStopMotion animation software and the potential for using creative technology in the classroom. iStopMotion is so simple and easy to use, yet so powerful too. A wonderful piece of innovative software.

Cleveratom was represented on the stand working closely with the team from BBC Blast, Learning Central, Apple, eMap and the BCS. All these partners believe in creative use of new and emerging technology in learning and we’re proud to work along side them.

I’ve enjoyed the past six years on the stand, clicking here will take you back to the stand in 2002 where we explored web broadcasting technologies.

We’ve done something new and experimental on the stand every year since, it has always been staffed by young people. Here is last years article on BETT 2006.

Cleveratom’s Alex Blanc and Jamie Harris were on hand to support visitors wanting to learn more about the potential of enabling technologies. Alex built Digital Teacher Network from Open Source Software and spent a lot of time explaining to visitors how it worked and what they could do with it. Maureen Gurr was on hand to look after the young people, Fiona from Impact also did an amazing logistical job to make it all happen.

Cleveratom staff have also worked closely with David Baugh and BBC Blast to support the young people prior to coming to the show. The training session held before Christmas in the BBC’s 21CC (21st Century Classroom) were a huge success. Creativity and School Learning Space Design Consultant, Hal MacLean reflects on the performance of the young people:

As ever, King Harold School pupils were brilliant! Their enthusiasm, infectious energy and determination to succeed meant that the stand never had a dull moment. Many thanks to Malcolm Burnett for organising the group and being there with them.

Read more of what Hal has to say here.

View Hal’s Best Pictures from BETT 2007

View Matthew’s Pictures from BETT 2007

View even more of Hal’s Pictures from BETT 2007

Check out some of the podcasts below, also available on the Create at BETT DTN Project site:

Hal MacLean, Shirley Pickford and myself headed to Manchester’s G-Mex arena for the first ever ‘Exciting Minds’ conference and arena by Creative Partnerships.

Shirley and myself represented the ‘Digital Teacher Network‘ which is a free online portal for teachers to manage projects online. 51 other exhibitors shared the arena with us, all based out of inflatable pods, it was really quite remarkable. To our right were Channel Four Learning, over the walkway opposite were the British Council.

Shirley and myself manned the pod all day talking to the other exhibitors, visitors and delegates of the show, which is really quite important. It still amazes me how creativity is not a core part of the British Education system curriculum, it was refreshing to read the words of Tessa Jowell after her keynote speech (See here).

Professor Stephen Heppell, founder of Ultralab and Director of Heppell.net also spoke on the future of creativity in education. In the sessions Hal MacLean from our team spoke to an audience on the future of school design, reflecting on his extensive experience in the field, relating the national and international case studies on what is good and indeed needs work where learning space design is concerned. On his return to the arena Hal spent the afternoon at the Digital Teacher Network pod speaking with the delegates that followed him back from his talk.

It was great to once again spend the day working with Shirley who delighted the audiences with examples of creativity use within education, reflecting on her experiences which date back to the Tesco School Net 2000 project, Shirley was the Millennium Dome based representative for that creativity central project.

It was also nice to see so many friends turning up and exploring the arena.

View the pictures of the event taken by the Creative Partnerships team.