WOW what an event! Celebrating its 26th birthday, BETT attracted over 30,000 delegates and 700 exhibitors to Olympia last week. Promoted as THE show to attend, to stay at the forefront of educational technology, BETT2010 was the perfect place for us to launch OPENHIVE (Picture Gallery).
Prior to the show, we worked hard to develop our website, brochures and event freebies, hoping that each of them did OPENHIVE justice; but nothing is better than hearing the opinions of those whom we created it for.
The BETT polling station showed that 22% of visitors were interested in learning platforms and this was our chance to show something truly different. In four days we must have demonstrated OPENHIVE to hundreds of people and the feedback has been tremendous. Reactions to our demonstrations ranged from “oh WOW” and “ah ha” to “now that’s impressive”.
So what do people love about OPENHIVE?
* User Interface – described as simple and intuitive yet incredibly powerful too, people love how visually appealing OPENHIVE is. Head Teachers, ICT Managers and Teaching staff recognise that OPENHIVE can engage students in new ways and transform the online learning experience.
* Integration – one environment for all your ICT services. Seamlessly integrating your MIS, portal, VLE, email and online parental reporting, this has been cited as one of the most appealing elements of OPENHIVE. As all modules are provisioned directly from the MIS, this paves the way for far more personalised, tailored ICT services.
* Modular Design – Freedom of choice is important and this was confirmed at BETT. OPENHIVE is modular in design which means that schools and local authorities can pick and choose individual or multiple services. So if you love our parental reporting solution but already have a VLE, you can adopt it and integrate it with your existing ICT services.
In his blog post ‘OPENHIVE – A new contender in the VLE Market?’ Andy Kemp commented “What OPENHIVE have achieved that (in my opinion) no one else has managed to, is to build a tool for use in schools which is simple and visually appealing but retains the power of the SharePoint environment.”
“For me the really appealing thing about OPENHIVE was the integration of MIS data throughout the system. Timetables in Outlook, links to Groups, clear data for Parents, with the addition of Instant Messaging, Shared Whiteboarding etc.”
…it offers the very real potential to integrate the diverse range of tools that we use in school (Citrix, ClickView, Office 2007, Outlook, SIMS, etc) into a complete coherent system which is accessible from anywhere (and anything!). This could really change the way in which our students work online and have a profound effect on their experience of school.”
With many thanks to @daibarnes we have videos of live demonstrations of OPENHIVE.
As we return to our normal daily activities, here is a useful blog post from Terry Freedman titled “7 things to do after the BETT show”. From Synetrix and i2Q, we’d like to say thank you to the BETT team for putting on another great event.
If you missed your chance to see OPENHIVE at BETT or want your colleagues to see it too, register to attend a free webinar or follow us on Twitter to see what all the buzz is about.