Did you miss BETT 2010?
Just in case you missed BETT 2010 and the chance to see our first venture in to the world of exhibiting, here’s a glimpse of the stand and us demonstrating Digital Telephony, Silent Racks, Secure Computer Suites, Virtualisation, Classroom AV control and Digital Signage. Oh, and Kahu… more to come on that soon!
A thank you to everyone who made BETT such a great show
Wow, what a show! We’d like to thank all involved for making BETT 2010 the success that it was. We had some great conversations about our AV, IT and Foundation Services and made some new friends along the way.
BETT was especially rewarding on two levels. Firstly, it allowed us to engage face-to-face with a great many end users. We were able to discuss our business, receive feedback and gather lots of new ideas. We really enjoyed talking to you all. Secondly, it was a great opportunity for us to meet suppliers who share our passion for developing innovative solutions to the issues faced daily by schools. We spoke with many creative people expressing ideas and exhibiting tools we wish we had thought of ourselves!
We particularly enjoyed meeting the Firefly team, who were also exhibiting for the first time. Firefly helps schools develop and maintain their websites, wikis and intranets through a very smart in-line content management system. We are really keen to see whether their Firefly.NET Content Management System can help some of the schools that we work with and save them time in developing and maintaining their websites.
We were also impressed with the new Creston classroom kit. We’ve been looking for a good value kit that is reasonable quality for times when budgets are really tight. The Creston kit is the first we’ve seen to come close to our own installation in terms of staff ease of use and equipment management as well as reducing our time to install (and therefore our cost to clients).
See you next year for BETT 2011…
EduGeek.net and RTS Technology Solutions launch new partnership at BETT 2010
Edugeek.net is the prominent online destination for school technical staff to discuss the unique issues faced in education environments. Since June 2005 the site has been serving the IT community, offering a forum for those in the sector to share knowledge and experience.
In November of last year EduGeek reached the 20,000 user milestone, which according to the site’s creator Chris Byers means they should have “pretty much have every single UK secondary on board, and a large chunk of the primarys”. The site is fast “becoming one of the most popular tech sites in the world” with many US schools and districts joining up.
In recognition of EduGeek’s important role in the education sector RTS have begun sponsoring the service. We hope that sponsorship such as ours will help many others benefit from the advice and support of the EduGeek community.
We are launching our partnership at this week’s BETT show, where both companies will be engaging with the community face-to-face. Although this is our first year exhibiting at the show it will be the fourth time Chris has operated EduGeek’s Technical Help Point. “In addition to helping visitors match their technical needs with exhibitors at BETT and answering their technical questions, we will also have a wide range of information and best practices for technical support staff, such as Green IT and Virtualisation”.
Find out how the partnership between EduGeek and RTS can help solve technical issues within your school. Visit the Technical Help Point (stand G89) and RTS Technology Solutions (stand W45).
A New Year’s Resolution
I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions but as I tweeted shortly after the bongs struck to welcome 2010 – writing more is something I’m going to stick to this year. Not only that, I’m going to encourage everyone here to do the same. We do some amazing work through RTS but all too often we don’t shout enough about it (and although we cherish thank you notes from our clients, they shouldn’t be the only impetus for us talking about our project work).
New Year is always a time for reflection and the last 12 months have been incredibly busy at RTS (and saw my first anniversary with the company in November). There have been times where I’ve felt we’ve been a little too ‘heads-down’ rather than participating in the wider education-technology community. We’re addressing this directly with our appearance at BETT and an additional announcement just ahead of the show – watch this space…
In 2009 we moved our entire company ‘in to the cloud’ (or for those who don’t like jargon – ‘on to the internet’). Making the move has afforded us a far more flexible approach to working with access to all of the same data and applications on client sites as if we were sat next to a server in the office. Our telephones are also cloud-based and we can connect in to the system to make and receive calls wherever we have an internet connection, a bit like Skype. All of this means we now spend more time on-site with our clients and less time cooped up in the office.
We did some great proof of concept work too; showing why virtualisation and shared storage were so important for schools, built our take on what exemplary education digital signage looks like, refined our classroom AV offering and looked at how digital telephony could be used by educational institutions to improve both internal and external communication. We also took part in our first joint venture to develop resource management software specifically for schools, which we’ll be launching at BETT.
2010 is going to be an exciting year in education technology with many schools stabilising their virtual learning platforms, seeing the increasing demand for and effects of off-site / mobile computing and looking for ways to spend wisely with maximum return for their students in light of budget constraints.
The move to the virtual world will continue to increase and a real requirement for identity federation will emerge to enable seamless user transition and reduce administrative overhead between systems. Microsoft’s Live@edu is looking promising and their move to make SharePoint 2010 available will be revolutionary. Consolidation of internal servers using virtualisation technologies will become the norm now early adopters have experienced the initial pain.
There also needs to be an end put to suppliers who continue to trail wires across learning spaces, site amplifiers on teaching desks and install projectors badly. Expect to see even more from us on the model classroom and larger, completely immersive learning environments.
Look forward to seeing you at BETT, stand W45…
Mike
