BETT 2011– a roundup of my first experiences

Wow! After months of planning the Microsoft stand, finding presenters  and schools to share their  success stories, hunting down staff to work on the demo pods and theatre stand and even down to the colour of the Microsoft Education polo shirts, my first BETT (and my first BETT experience)  is now done and dusted. And what a successful year it was – if I may say so myself! 

Microsoft gave 66 presentations in total broken down to 16 presentations per day from Wednesday through to Friday and 12 presentations on Saturday.  On average 1200  customers each day stopped at our theatre stand to watch our presenters from schools and Microsoft and giving insight on how we are positioning our technology for the education market. According to BESA a total of 27000 customers passed through both the theatre stand and the demo pod stand over four days.

Presentations included -

• Office 2010 & One Note 2010, covering use of Office & One note presented by Monkseaton High School
• Innovative curriculum delivery covering the use of Technology in an innovative way giving the example of New Line Learning Academy
• Classroom innovation for free covering Mouse Mischief, Mathematics add-on’s presented by Saltash Community College
• Collaborative learning covering Live@edu, sky drive, office web apps from Lodge Park
• Cost saving covering virtulisation, Cloud computing, Printing, presented by West Hatch School
• Office 2010 & I.T Academy covering Office 2010 and the Microsoft accreditation, story told by Sawtry Community College
• Office 365 presented by Twynham School
• Futures covering new technology to be used in the future such as web apps presented by our very own Mark Stewart and Ray Fleming
• Multipoint Server covering, saving money with the new Microsoft multipoint server presented by our guest school Gymnazium Litomerice
• New EES volume licensing video, played approximately 60 times during the week between each presentation.

Key announcements at BETT

We also had a number of key announcements made at BETT this year which caused quite a buzz among our partners and customers:

• Future Workforce research: The Microsoft Education Future Workforce research has found that ‘Generation Five’ (16 to 18-year-olds currently in education) question the approach taken by schools in teaching them about technology and are becoming self-taught on home computers.
• Office 365 for Education: The next generation cloud services, Office 365 for education. We announced our pricing for this new service
• EES Licensing: Enrolment for Education Solutions (EES) works on a single annual subscription payment, based on a school’s Full-Time Equivalent (FTE).
• ITL Research: The Microsoft Innovative Teaching and Learning research just concluded its pilot year and shows that innovative teaching helps students acquire the skills that employers say they need.  This year, three additional countries are joining the project: Australia, England and the United States. 
• PiL Mentor programme: Ten schools will take part in the UK Innovative Schools Programme. The schools selected will spend the next year working with Microsoft and a group of mentor schools to transform teaching, learning and technology integration for students.

Goodbye Ray Fleming

It was also with great sadness (well for the majority) that this was also Ray Fleming’s final BETT as on Saturday afternoon, Ray jetted off to join Microsoft Australia to work in the Education team, taking his family with him.

Ray has been part of the Public Sector team for the past 4 years however has been involved with 25 BETTS from his days at RM and Capita. Ray has played a huge part in the Education team, bringing about the cost saving and innovation for free stories with schools, as well as regularly blogging on both the education blog pages as well as his own. Ray will be missed however I’m pretty sure this won’t be the last we hear from him.