Last week Inspired Selection hit the Excel Centre where the much awaited BETT show was in full flow; we went to really build on our current knowledge of the education sector but also see what new and innovative ideas publishers, content providers, platform developers and other software companies are coming up with and bringing into schools to inspire our future generation.
It is such a fantastic time to be in Educational publishing and a common theme of the BETT show was how publishers are adapting and creating new products to align with the changes in curriculum; for example, within primary there was a huge focus on the new IT curriculum where children will be learning how to code from an early age. A challenge for schools is to find and support IT teachers and there have been some fantastic resources developed to do this including the launch of the computing MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) based on OCR curriculum and created by OCR, Cambridge University Press and the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Homework is another aspect of education that has been revolutionised through using software which allows teachers to set and assess assignments online. This also means schools can create a data footprint for each student and use this in their future assessment.
We saw a lot of interactive resources from SMART boards to tablets meant to engage their users and capture their attention whilst learning at the same time. Games have been absolutely revolutionary for learning allowing students to work their way through a task in order to reach an attainable goal, some great examples of this could be learning to read or practicing maths.
The Education sector is a hugely exciting place to be at the moment; publishers are constantly coming up with new great ideas for content; platform providers are coming up with new ways to interact with that content; software companies are coming up with great ideas to display content and teachers are using all these different mediums to inspire our students.
In the afternoon, we made our way to the Learn Live Theatre 2 to hear Alistair Smith, Director of Learning at Frog, and Billy Downie, Headteacher at The Streetly Academy, give an engaging talk on “Big Data: school perspectives on what, how and why?” Alistair spoke about how big data allows society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights and is a way of doing this on a large scale.
From a school’s point of view, several interesting and informative questions can be asked – At what point in a lesson do learners switch off? Who will be bullied and when? How do friendship networks impact on exam performance? Big data is essential in determining best practice and for monitoring changes and issues. We need it in today’s world; as Alistair put it, “This is the world we are in, this is the world our children are inheriting” – we need to make it a good one and the use of big data in schools is the best way forward.
We would like to congratulate all the amazing winners at this year’s BETT Awards for their contribution to the education industry.
Here at Inspired Selection, we are passionate about the publishing industry; we talk about publishing, read about publishing and attend all major publishing events like the one you’ve just read about. We would love to meet you at events so do feel free to come up and introduce yourselves! If you’re interested in opportunities within publishing do keep in touch and register for our Vacancy Update Service as well as keeping up to date with us on Twitter
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