Several revolutionary old classroom devices have been launched at the BETT 2010 education trade show, which experts hope will revolutionise teaching methods in the 21st century.
The hit of the show, which is astounding teachers with its user-friendly interface and sheer quantity of information, is a small, hand-held gadget which its manufacturers are calling a 'Book'. Unlike traditional teaching methods such as Wikipedia, a 'Book' only covers one topic - which means that each student may require several Books a year, leading to some concern over costs. Nevertheless, its supporters claim that the Book has a hard-to-quantify feature known as 'depth' built-in, through the inclusion of an unprecedented number of quantum information units known as 'Words'.
It also requires no power source, and is reusable - an attractive extra for head teachers, as they seek to extol their school's green credentials to concerned middle-class parents.
The other radical old technology unveiled at the fair is a pocket-sized unit called a 'Pen'. With its attractive design resembling the stylus supplied with some upmarket mobile phones, this 'Pen' enables students to effectively become their own printer, allowing them to output both text and images onto paper - which can either be stored in 'Files' which cleverly mimic the storage systems found on computers, or written directly to a self-contained ultra-thin portable storage device known to its proud designers as an 'Exercise Book'.
A potential downfall, however, is that users must learn how to hold the 'Pen' in a particular way in order to use it to its full potential.
"I don't know about this old-fangled stuff," admitted one baffled head at the show. "It's going to require a whole old set of skills we never learned in our post-graduate teacher training."
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