Innovate My School has partnered with the Bett Show to back the third Bett Futures. Launched in 2015, Futures brings Bett delegates the most exciting and inspiring edtech startups from across the world. Innovate My School joins BESA, Naace, Edspace Hoxton, The EdTech Exchange and WORLDbytes in getting involved with the future of educational technology. The Bett Show will take place at ExCeL London on 25th-28th January 2017.

At the Bett 2016 conference earlier this month in London, Promethean demonstrated to thousands of teachers how their ‘Modern Classroom’ solutions can be used to support a wide range of teaching and learning strategies. The organisation’s head of Education Consultancy, Dr John Collick, also took to the Bett Arena stage with his informative (and often humorous) presentation ‘Future education technology - the real challenges’.

Appearing at the Bett Show this week is SchoolsBuddy, an innovative, intuitive and wide-reaching activities management system to benefit all levels of teaching. Uniquely app-driven, SchoolsBuddy is a mobile solution for communicating among parents, pupils and staff, organising activities, running after-school clubs and helping to safeguard pupils all in one revolutionary system. Full of features to assist both teachers and school leaders, the SchoolsBuddy team will be hosting Bett Stand G310.

With Bett taking place this week, schools across the country are once more turning their attention to the opportunities offered by education technology (edtech), looking for the newest innovations in classroom resources to support teaching in the digital age. But behind the excitement of new developments, what are the crucial factors that schools need to consider moving forward with their edtech provisions?

A major presence at this year’s Bett conference will be Show My Homework, where the online homework software will be announcing publicly, for the first time, their new partnership. Visiting teachers will be able to meet the Show My Homework team at Stand C449 from 20th - 23rd January at the ExCeL London. The company has been shortlisted for three Bett awards: ICT Leadership and Management Solutions, Secondary Digital Content and ICT Innovator of the Year.

As an SEN teacher ICT plays an important part in our day to day activities. Think how many ICT based solutions are used every day – many of our students arrive by taxi which is all arranged by your School Management System. You may use an electronic attendance register and monitor your premises by CCTV. Your SEN pupils will have behaviour plans and IEPs generated with a click of the mouse. Your pupils will learn Numeracy and Literacy skills, even at P Levels, using a PC adapted with alternate pointing devices and viewing devices. Where does all this stuff come from? Many teachers inherit a classroom with all these things that have quite obviously been in place for years.

Imagine just how much one aspect of IT has developed in the time that your resources have been used. It’s probably fair to say some of that kit entered your classroom when the Internet was in it’s infancy used by a select few whereas now it’s in every home and most of us use it every day for all manner of life's tasks.