Bett 2017: Our day two recap

Innovate My School empowers educators to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead proactively and, most importantly, feel inspired. It now entertains an audience of 50,000 educators through its weekly content, with 1,300 guest bloggers and over 2,500 articles published to date.

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Today saw even bigger crowds flood the ExCeL London. From our stand at G80, we were thrilled to meet so many passionate teachers, school leaders, suppliers, consultants and innovators - UK and international. We also got to film even more videos for our new YouTube series, Innovation Bursts.

Michael (Forshaw, our founder and MD) was part of not one but two sessions at BETT today. At the BETT Arena he sat down with Sophie Bailey of the Edtech Podcast, Kate Robinson from HundrED and Oliver Beach of Rocket Fund to discuss the 'The Changing Education Landscape'. The group covered Poundland Pedagogy (some for, some against), using goats to bring a school together (see recent article about Varndean school), the advantages of social media, working with charities to get edtech for schools, parental involvement and fake news.

Michael then headed straight to the BETT Futures stage to talk about 'Advancing Innovation Ecosystems' with Bobbi Kurshan, Rose Luckin, Colin Hegarty and Charles McIntyre. The group covered how teachers are able to discover great resources via the likes of social media, TeachMeets and education suppliers, many of whom are former teachers themselves. Michael spoke passionately about the sheer hard work and perseverence required to succeed as an entrepreneur, and the need to stay agile to follow the latest education community trends. Rose admitted that academics really need to get their findings out to the teaching community more efficiently, while Bobbi discussed how going against the grain when you’re an innovator is great; you just need to be able to back your findings up.

We also got to sit down with some interesting companies. For example, Zaprendo are looking to meet each individual pupil’s needs by way of kindness and understanding. They want parents not to ask “How’s my child doing?”, but “What did my child learn today?” They recommend that you check out greenschool.org to see their work in action. Meanwhile, Ruckus stopped by to share how they’re innovating cyber security in schools (each pupil requires a lot of recorded information, after all), while emphasising the importance of a stable, efficient, powerful Wi-Fi network.

At the end of the day, we finally managed to get some VR action in, ripping apart the valves of the human heart through Microsoft's new HoloLens. It’s clear many companies see VR as a game changer for teaching and learning this year, with a plethora exhibiting their own virtual reality experience in addition to their usual product catalogue.

Are you at Bett for the Friday? Swing by Stand G80 and say hi!