Digital Learning Group visit Bett 2020

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This year the digital learning group attended Bett at ExCel London in January. Bett is the largest EdTech show in the UK, featuring a wide array of education technology to explore and seminars to learn from. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the highlights from Bett.

Using Technology to Support Dyslexic Students

On Friday in the Schools Theatre, Laura (Learning Support Tutor) took part in an expert panel and discussed what technology can and cannot do for young people with dyslexia and what schools should be focusing on to help them make good progress. Laura shared the assistative technology and apps that are making a difference to students at Barton Peveril.

Sharing Barton Peveril’s Google Journey

On Wednesday at the Bett Show, Peter (IT Manager) gave a talk in Google’s Teaching Theatre. He talked about Barton Peveril’s Google journey, sharing how we’re using Chromebooks in the classroom to support learning. You can check out the presentation slide deck here.

Escape Room Challenge

The Escape Room experience was designed to provide the opportunity to engage with classroom technology solutions by solving a series of challenges using education technology. Our digital learning team (Peter, Giles, Laura, Jack, and Nyki) had to navigate a series of rooms containing ‘Crystal Maze’ style challenges and collaborate to solve the puzzles:
Room One: Houston, we have lost communication
Room Two: UK hacking threat
Room Three: Mars Rover Mission
It was a huge amount of fun and we set a possibly record-breaking time. Most importantly, it gave us some hands-on time with technology available for classrooms.

Digital Tools at Bett 2020

The following is a list of tools and other things we learned about and thought would be useful to share. All of the digital tools in this list are fully web-based, which means you can use them on Chromebooks, Windows PCs, and Apple Macs.

Google Updates

Last year, we trialled the beta versions of Originality Reports and Rubrics. At the Bett Show, Google announced that both these features would now be available for everyone in Google Classroom.

Originality Reports enable teachers to check a student’s work for matches across billions of web pages and books. Importantly, students can also use originality reports to check for missed citations.

Rubrics allows teachers to set up a scoring system or mark grid making it easier to score assignments and set expectations for students. New features include the ability to import a rubric from a template, making it easier to share these in departments.

Find ideas and activities on Google’s new Chromebook App Hub. Explore how educators across the globe are using Chromebooks in education. Each app recommendation gives you resources for getting started and examples of how it is being used in the classroom. Apps and ideas can be filtered by category, age range, subject, and language. Read more >>

Canva

Canva is an intuitive, drag-and-drop design tool, that makes it easy to design anything from social media posts, presentations, and posters. Read more >>

Soundtrap

Soundtrap for Education is a cloud-based platform that enables students to create music or podcasts. With Soundtrap, students can collaborate on projects using extensive collection of quality loops, effects, and software instruments.

Adobe Spark

Using Adobe Spark, students can easily create videos, web pages, or graphics. The three tools, Post, Page, and Video, cover most content types, removing the technical barriers and getting you straight to the result. Students will like using this as they can create great looking graphics, pages, and videos without worrying about the tools they are using. Teachers will find this useful for creating presentations, flipped learning videos and eye-catching images for Google Sites, without spending much time on production. Read more >>

TextHelp WriQ

WriQ is a writing achievement Chrome extension used to easily assess and motivate student writing while providing automated meaningful feedback and delivering a standardised benchmark for marking.

ThingLink

ThingLink is an exciting new app that allows you to seamlessly make any photo, video or 360 content into an interactive experience with text, links, sound, images, videos and calls to action. Read more >>

VR and AR

Virtual reality and augmented reality apps were popular at Bett! The augmented reality t-shirt from Curiscope caught our attention. It enables you to learn about the human body by using their app to give a 3D learning experience. The Merge Cube also gives an AR experience enabling you to hold and interact with 3D objects.

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