As I wrote during January on the sch.ools.it site, 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 model

In 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.

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So BETT is over for another year and I will hopefully spend the next couple of days at school taking stock of things that I have seen and working out how best to integrate them into future school developments.

This year BETT was interesting for me as, for the first time, I spent 2 days on the Capita SIMS stand - delivering 3 presentations during that time along with my colleague Stuart Lee. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet with other schools, all of whom are at different stages in their adoption of a school MIS. Many have SIMS already but were simply not aware of basic functionality, such as that it could be used to take the register. Talking with them about what they do and being able to offer advice for improvement was extremely rewarding.

Another first was being invited to the BETT Awards as a guest of Capita. Capita were up for an award in the category of ICT Education Partnership and it was a great privilege to be there when they won - something that was very much unexpected. Some other worthy winners were Childnet International with Know IT All for Parents and Stephen Heppell in the category of Outstanding Achievement in ICT Education. Notable runners up, and companies I can personally recommend, were LJ Create, Promethean and Fronter UK.

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As Ray mentions, Microsoft have a great display of laptop technology at BETT this year in the form of their Wall of Cool. My feeling is that over the next few years we will see small devices becoming ubiquitous and the lead focus for use in school will be learning platforms.

One of the key questions is how we make this kind of technology available in the home, and particularly where parents are maybe not in the financial position to make the purchase themselves.

The e-Learning Foundation is an organisation that aims to bridge this digital divide, and I hope to be able to work with them soon in order to see St. Nicholas Priory Junior School in Great Yarmouth provide laptops to all of year six. The school intake comprises of pupils from the fifth most deprived ward in the country and has a high level of deprivation and we hope to benefit from an eLearning Foundation grant.

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Tomorrow sees the start of the 2009 BETT show, and once again it looks like it is going to be a busy and exciting time for everyone who attends.

If you are going and can drag yourself away from all of the new technology, then please visit the Capita SIMS stand (D20) at 12.30 on Thursday or 14.00 on Friday to see my colleague Stuart Lee and myself talk about how our school has overcome an attendance problem using SIMS.

Presentation synopsis

Putting attendance under the spotlight - Sprowston Community High School

Persistent lateness and absence can disrupt a child’s learning and jeopardise their achievement in school. SIMS plays an important role in enabling teachers to tackle attendance issues effectively at Sprowston Community High School.

ICT Manager, James Wright and Data Manager, Stuart Lee, will reveal how simple it is for teachers to monitor pupils’ lesson by lesson attendance throughout the school day with SIMS. They will also explain how the school looks closely at the behaviour, achievement and pupil information it records and how this can help uncover any underlying attendance issues that might need to be addressed.

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