Terry Freedman's ICT & Computing in Education blog — ICT & Computing in Education

Terry Freedman's Bett 2020 Supplement

January 20, 2020

Here is my list of interesting-looking seminars at the Bett Show. It’s divided into days, from Wednesday to Saturday. I hope you find it useful.

8 questions to ask educational technology suppliers

January 20, 2020

If you’re in the market to buy a product or service to enhance the educational technology in your school, what are the questions you should be asking potential suppliers? Definitely not “What is your response time?”. Here are 8 suggestions for questions you should ask instead, and why the response time one is not very useful.

Listen up! The audio side of Bett 2020 -- UPDATED

January 19, 2020

UPDATED and CORRECTED! News about Bett Radio and the EdTech podcast at Bett2020.

Coming soon: my seminar recommendations for Bett 2020

January 18, 2020

I’ve gone through the Bett seminar programme, and highlighted the ones that I’d go to if (a) I could be in several places at once (I’m working on that) and (b) needed to know about a much wider range of issues than any person does.

27 Things to do before Bett 2020

January 17, 2020

As a Bett veteran, I’ve learnt quite a bit over the last 30 or so years about how to make the visit to Bett as useful as possible. Here are 27 tips you may find useful.

Bett 2020

January 16, 2020

A heads-up about a pdf guide to Bett. Three articles in particular are worth perusing.

Recent book reviews

Review: Social Media for Academics

This book is very readable, and if I sound surprised that is because it’s not always true of academics!

Quick looks: VIBE Coding by Example

For the time being, this book is free in Kindle format.

Review: The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too

Despite the relative paucity of immediately obvious National Curriculum links, teachers will find several of sections of this book to be highly engaging.

Review: The Dictators: 64 Dictators, 64 Authors, 64 Warnings from History

In some respects one could view this book as a single warning repeated 64 times.

Review: The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street

Taking readers from the Middle Ages to (more or less) the present day, Gray charts how the places where we do our shopping and what we buy have changed over the centuries.

Review: Extraordinary Learning For All

As a source of potential ideas and inspiration, the book could be very useful indeed.

Review: Bad Education: Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them

One has the impression that the main role of the university these days is to maximise profit, while that of the majority of teaching staff is to ensure the ‘correct’ views are passed on to students. All the while, students’ main concern seems to be to seek protection from anything that might make them feel unsafe.

Review: Next Practices - An Executive Guide for Education Decision Makers

Is a 2014 book on managing the computing provision in a school still worth buying?

Still relevant (sadly): How to lie with statistics, by Darrell Huff

Although this book is over 60 years old, it is remarkably apposite for our times -- and especially in the fields of educational research and assessing pupils' understanding and progress.

Quick looks: Bad Education: Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them

It was a great source of pride to me, getting hundreds of students through their A levels and encouraging them to go to university. But for some time I have asked myself a question: would I recommend this route now?