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75 Benbro Drive
Buffalo, NY 14225
United States
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News from BETT
Posted on Tuesday, January 22, 2008
 
News from BETT

AVRover's Founder, Michael Rodems, recently attended BETT, the international educational technology conference, in London, England. There were over 40,000 attendees from all over the world and exhibitors consisted of many we see here in North America. Educational technology in the UK uses interactive whiteboards just as North America does, but the market in the UK is more saturated and with more options which have driven the cost up. The whiteboard manufacturers are finding ways to improve revenues, capturing more sales by adding projectors and mounts to their product offering.  Both of these items bring significantly more cost to the typical classroom, and revenue to the whiteboard manufacturers, but neither adds much value. Purchasing these costly solutions is putting too much of the investment into one technology. Meanwhile, other technologies have emerged that offer significantly more value for the investment.  Some of these are in the form of cost effective, more flexible and more functional technologies (see ONfinity CM2 Max), while others are software and content related.

Back to Basics - What's in store for the North American Educational Market in the upcoming years  The real tool that will reshape learning is the personal computer (PC), not the interactive whiteboard.  The market has not utilized the PC as much as it could for teaching in North America.  The PC, along with the data projector, brings unlimited access to teaching tools and content to the whole class.  Since content also contains audio, a quality sound system completes the communication to the students.  All other tools (software, document cameras, student response systems and distance learning components) connect to the basic system.  Once the basic system is in place, interactivity and other functions can be added as budgets allow.  

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