* The National Council for Educational Technology will liaise with English local authorities to organise the multimedia computers which schools get through the Pounds 3 million extension to the Government’s project to put CD-Roms in primaries. They must be bought by the end of the financial year.
It is understood that schools will be more clearly informed about the range of new CD-Rom software available. Half of the Pounds 4 million for the first phase was spent on systems which could not play the CDs which are being created for the world CD market - Multimedia PC and Apple Macintosh.
Announcing the funding at BETT ‘95, Education Secretary Gillian Shephard said the Government has spent Pounds 8 million on CD-Rom since 1992. Last year’s Pounds 4.5 million provided 2,300 primary schools with multimedia CD systems, plus 31,000 discs.
NCET, Milburn Hill Road, Science Park, Coventry CV4 7JJ. Telephone 0203 416994. Fax 0203 411418.
*Northwest Semerc special needs centre in Oldham scooped two of the annual Educational Computing and Technology awards at the BETT ‘95 technology show - bronze for My World 2+2 and silver (jointly with the Concept Keyboard Company) for the Informatrix overlay keyboard. The gold award went to Crick Computing for its literacy development programs, Clicker and Switch Clicker.
Primary awards went to: Time Detectives - Victorians (Sherston Software), bronze; MicroWorlds Project Builder (Valiant TechnologyTAG Developments), silver; Music Box (Topologika), gold. Secondary went to: Geometry Inventor (LogalTAG), bronze; HyperStudio (Roger WagnerTAG, silver; Risc PC computer (Acorn) gold.
*It was Glasnost all over again when Gillian Shephard asked for consultation with education for the superhighway project, and the trend was also evident on the stands of the three main hardware suppliers to education, Acorn, Apple and Research Machines - all of them on one network.
The most dramatic example was on the RM stand where PCs, a Mac and an Acorn were all working effortlessly away in their own distinctive styles on the same RM network. Acorn was demonstrating Omniclient. which allows Acorn machines to go rooting around on other platform networks and access datafiles. Such collaboration would have been unthinkable even a year ago. But there was a fly in the ointment for RM. Just a few stands away, former employees now with Computer Systems for Education (CSE) were offering Novell networking tailored for schools, claiming savings of up to 30 per cent on RM prices. CSE:01235 555444 *The Integrated Learning Systems currently being evaluated by the National Council for Educational Technology in UK schools were on show at BETT ‘95. Research Machines was showing the latest modules for CCC’s SuccessMaker system from the US, while Systems Integrated Research and ICL were showing the latest offerings from the UK alternative put up by Open Integrated Learning Systems (OILS).
The OILS project raises nagging doubts, however, that UK developers - funded by Pounds 100,000 of government cash and advised by a former civil servant who helped to set up the evaluation, Philip Lewis - are trying to re-invent the wheel in a misguided attempt to keep out American competition. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether the OILS consortium’s definition of its own planned product actually conforms to most observers’ views of what is constituted by an ILS - a programme of learning in which the computer system establishes children’s individual performance levels and tailors their tasks accordingly.
OILS appears to leave adjustment of the levels and the tasks to the teachers. This may be preferred by some educationists as giving teachers more control, but whether it makes it an ILS is a moot point.
Another cloud on the OILS horizon is the withdrawal of the consortium’s showpiece school, Selly Park, in Birmingham, from the second phase of the NCET evaluation.
ICL: 0800 252674 RM: 0235 826000 SIR 0773 820011.
