BETT, the educational information & communications technologies event, took place at Olympia, London, from 10-13 January 2007. JANET(UK) hosted a full programme of interactive videoconferencing sessions on the JANET stand. These included:
• Videoconferencing for music education
Rod Franks, Principal Trumpet with the London Symphony Orchestra, demonstrated a trumpet master class with beginner students at Port William and St Teresa’s Primary Schools in Dumfries and Galloway.
Peripatetic instrumental teacher Grant Golding has been working over videoconference with students in four primary schools across Dumfries and Galloway for the last year, in a pilot set up by Dumfries and Galloway council.
• Videoconferencing with The National Archives
The session began with an introduction to the services provided by The National Archives. Visitors were then shown a sample from the ‘WW1 Soldier: All Pals Together’ videoconference workshop for KS3, where a historical interpreter played a WW1 soldier.
The session was jointly led by an education officer and the historical interpreter, and the BETT audience participated by asking the soldier questions based on the documents that students would use during the actual videoconference workshop.
• Rock Idol
Rock Idol is a national competition for student bands, run by WMnet, the West Midlands Regional Broadband Consortium. It uses videoconferencing to allow the bands to perform to a real audience and to get immediate feedback from a panel of experts. Rock Idol has been running for three years, and has grown into a hotly-contested national competition.
The winners of the 2006 Rock Idol competition connected to the JANET stand via videoconference, and were interviewed by Geoff Turrell from ATHENA. He had been part of the expert panel, so this made for some lively interaction.
Visitors to the stand were able to browse JANET documentation as well as dipping in and out of the videoconferencing sessions. JANET(UK) staff were on hand to answer queries and provide information. Visitors had a range of enquiries, from ‘Can my independent school connect to JANET?’ to ‘Can I link together a number of schools in my local area using videoconferencing?’
JANET Training was also represented, with several videoconference sessions covering aspects of the courses on offer this year. Matt Cook from Loughborough University was also on hand to discuss security matters with visitors. Matt currently facilitates the ‘Using Logfiles for Security’ and ‘Firewalls: Planning and Implementation’ courses for JANET Training.
Wendy Salmon
Conference Administrator
W.Salmon@ja.net