Ones to Watch: The Most Exciting EdTech from Bett 2017
This was Peergrade’s first time at Bett, and what an event! We had a stand at the back of the gigantic exhibition hall and spent 4 days talking to teachers, friends, competitors, partners and some edtech fanatics.
Luckily we also had some time to walk around the exhibition and check out the other companies there. The majority of exhibitors at Bett have a really large conference budget (e.g. huge companies like Google), while some are selling the really boring and practical stuff like chairs and smart lockers.
In this post we want to shout about the younger, more innovative and creative companies that we bumped into, who all have new and exciting ideas to improve students’ learning. Their work focuses on three key themes: student engagement, enhancing the curriculum and independent learning.
Student engagement
How can we take students’ out-of-school engagement with technology and gaming and bring it to the classroom to improve engagement during lessons?
The team at LessonUp have created an award-winning online platform that makes it easy for teachers to create varied, interactive lessons using video, images, interactive questions and quizzes. Students join with their own device and lessons can be differentiated to their personal needs.
Class123 is a beautiful, free classroom management tool. It helps you encourage students in and out of the classroom, from desktop and mobile. We are totally in love with the amazing graphics and the core focus on motivating pupils in a positive and fun way.
Enhancing the curriculum
A good grounding in the core subjects of numeracy and literacy has a vastly important impact on the opportunities available to students later on in life.
Pobble is a global literacy initiative for sharing primary students’ writing, which also provides free writing resources for teachers to increase attainment. The idea is to turn pupils into published authors! This happens by giving the writers a global community of teachers, pupils, families and authors, providing a real purpose and motivation to write.
When it comes to math, DoodleMaths is all about building children’s confidence. Their app, which is aligned to the UK curriculum, delivers personalized math challenges to kids in a gamified version.
Independent Learning
As students get older, more and more of their learning takes place outside of the classroom. These companies focus on making independent learning as streamlined as possible.
Ref-n-write is a Microsoft Word Add-in. Using the add-in allows users to easily lookup and learn from reference materials, including peer documents. It is a really interesting idea to facilitate better ways of using references and combat simple plagiarism.
ShowMyHomework provides meaningful learning experiences for students, quality homework resources for teachers and powerfully simple homework management for leaders. Basically ShowMyHomework is a full-fledged homework management suite (which looks a lot nicer than your average LMS)
And last but certainly not least, Kokoa Agency is a company which defies simple categorization! They are a digital education agency from Helsinki, Finland, who provide a full, professional service to help EdTech companies. This includes both educational design services, and the Kokoa Education Standard, which is a Finnish certificate for educational products that represent high pedagogical quality.
We had a great time meeting all these companies in London and hearing about what they’re doing. We’ve left London feeling inspired and can’t wait to get back to our Peergrade team in Copenhagen.
