In 10 days time BETT 2016 will open to the thousands of visitors who descend up London in January in order to get up to date with the latest in education technology.

This will be my 10th visit, and for the first time since 2006 I will be there on the Saturday.

Come and see me at 15:00 in the Learn Live: Secondary Theatre where I will be talking about parental engagement with a particular emphasis on using social media.

Find out more about my presentation at the BETT website.

Those of you who know me will know just how passionate I am about bridging the digital divide for children, and ensuring that all of our young people are given the very best start in life and every opportunity to flourish.

I was a big fan of the Becta Home Access programme and wrote about it and home access in general on a number of occasions. See here, here and here.

I am therefore delighted to be attending the e-Learning Foundation autumn conference in London today. There is a great range of speakers lined up and hopefully opportunities to meet with inspirational people.

However, the icing on the cake was being nominated, and subsequently shortlisted, for an award in their Unsung Hero category.

This promises to be an exciting day.

When I read the front page from the TES last Friday, I initially didn’t know which part of the story to take issue with first and would call into question the credibility of the reporting.

"The program, also known as spyware, has been installed on computers in schools up and down the country to keep tabs on what pupils are looking at online."

Really, spyware? This e-safety software is installed to protect the students and spyware is traditionally used to refer to maliciously installed software. Like many others I applaud schools and LAs who take the issue of e-safety seriously.

“A lot of teachers bring their work laptops home, but they have no idea that they are being monitored,” the source said. “More often than not these laptops are being used by the whole family, and a teenage son or daughter could be viewing all sorts of sites that are being monitored.”

Where to begin. On the one hand we have professionalism, as allowing a family member access to equipment that potentially contains data about students is absolutely reprehensible and should not be condoned in any way.

The other angle is that of the economy. In my family we have a number of teachers and associated educators and not one of them uses a school laptop for the social computing needs of their family. Given the tough economic situation that will be facing Directors of Children’s Services over the next few months, the notion of the public purse providing for the home computing needs of teachers is an anachronism.

Whilst NQTs earn less than the national average, a teacher in their third year is in line with the median (average salary source: ONS), therefore it does not seem inappropriate that they might be able to commit a few hundred pounds to purchasing a netbook in order to fulfil their Facebook needs. This would bring them into line with a large chunk of the  rest of society.

There may well be a social networking site growth equivalent of Moore’s law, but if there is I am not aware of it. That said, new sites are popping up with increasing frequency and trying to keep them all in sync is becoming hard work.I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google for things like Wave – probably not untypical of many other people.
The difficulty for me has been keeping this various services up-to-date with the current state of my address book as I gain new contacts.
In order to do this, and keep both my work and home Exchange calendars in sync, I make use of Plaxo, Yahoo and Soocial. The diagram documents the relationship between them, with a Plaxo agent running for each Exchange account I have, and Plaxo ‘cloud’ talking to Yahoo and keeping that in sync.
Yahoo is then simply used as a conduit to feed the other services, as for some reason each of them has really good interoperability with it but not Google. Google is a bit more of a pain and has to go via Soocial to receive updates.
Periodically looking for people in the various services is now much easier with no exporting to CSV. The downside: Plaxo costs money but in my opinion it is worth the annual fee.

As I wrote during in January, I am exited about the Home Access programme and the whole nature of making inroads into closing the digital divide by providing low income families with equipment to support education at home.

Becta announced details of the latest 4 Home Access suppliers yesterday, taking to 10 the number of companies able to supply equipment under the scheme.

Having met with parents at St. Nicholas Priory Junior on Tuesday I know that there is genuine desire to access this equipment to support their child’s learning, and even the most cynical person cannot fail to be moved when hearing some of the success stories from earlier schemes. Back in September, Sprowston High School working of the Local Authority, provided a few EAL and Traveller students with laptops under the Home Access to Targeted Groups scheme (HATG) and they are making excellent use of them.

St. Nicholas has just completed the installation of a school wide wireless system to support the Home Access laptops (possibly up to 130 given Free School Meal indicators), as well as an additional 100 Dell Mini 10v that the Governors have approved the purchase of. Conversations with parents have been based around highlighting the benefit to the child if they use their Home Access money to purchase a laptop, as it can move between home and school.

The Uruguayan modelIn October 2009, the BBC reported that the government of Uruguay was intent on providing every child with a One Laptop per Child (OLPC) device.

“The laptops have an open source Linux operating system with a user interface called Sugar. It has attracted some criticism from detractors for not being mainstream.”

This is perhaps the approach that Becta and UKgov should have taken. Far from scaling back the project as has happened (age range more limited than pilot, FSM eligibility outstrips available money and consequently devices), this would have been an ideal opportunity to work with a provider such as Canonical (Ubuntu) in order to put an Open Source operating system onto every machine. Costs would have reduced and more youngsters would have had access to a machine.

As schools, and UKgov, move to provide more and more services that are browser driven, then choice of operating system will become much less of an issue as the need to install software locally fades into distant memory. In fact, Google Docs can already provide offline access to edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets such provision is maintained at home even in a rural county such as Norfolk.

If you are reading this and interested in how Open Source software fits into education then I recommend looking at the Open Source Schools website.

This photo is the main hall viewed from the gallery, taken on Thursday morning just before the customers were allowed in - the lull before the storm.

One of the most exiting aspects of BETT this year has been the launch of the Home Access programme by Minister of State Vernon Coaker.

Details of the the Minister's speech can be found here, but in essence he talked about the national roll out of the Home Access Programme as helping those students "where deprivation and low attainment are entrenched through generations to realise their potential."

The programme
The Home Access Programme will provide families with children aged 7-14 with a grant to buy a computer with, through an approved supplier. It is anticipated that 270,000 families will benefit by March of 2011.

The Home Access to Targeted Groups programme has been running for a while now offering equipment to those with specific needs such as health issues, family issues or those with English as an Additional Language (EAL).

Where do schools fit in?
Although the scheme can be run entirely independently of schools, we feel that it is vital that schools get involved in order to firmly cement these computers as 'learning devices' in the eyes of the parents.

Schools should also be placed to help parents complete the application form and run parental events to help with training and demonstrating how the devices can be used with the various online systems that schools have.

During the next few months we will be following the developments at St. Nicholas Priory Junior School in Great Yarmouth as they work through the national rollout programme, and also supplement it with devices of their own.

Open Source Software is a fantastic way for schools and parents on a limited budget to gain access to a wide range of high quality resources for free via the OpenDisc project.

As far as UK schools are concerned, Open Source Schools is an organisation that has spearheaded the drive to increase open source adoption across all schools.

They are running an Open Source Cafe at BETT this year, and I will be giving a brief talk on Friday afternoon about the practicalities of running a mixed economy setup.