Bett is a gigantic trade show, with over 30,000 people coming to East London’s ExCel Centre every year, and 600 resource and solution providers exhibiting in its massive halls.  Amongst the new products, innovations, conversations and meetings, however, is the public, with that overriding question: what can I find here?  This week, we invite a teacher, educational technology researcher, and founder and CEO, to answer why they return to the show year after year, and what questions they ask of the technology on display, and the predictions made in the heart of the Bett arenas.

The next Bett is being billed as the best Bett ever.  It’s always an important date on the education calendar, but what will make this one different?  Hear what Bett is doing differently, why it’s important, and what they'll be doing to measure whether or not it works. Here’s a hint: it’s all about the data.  

We examine AI and EdTech penetration in universities and what form that takes, what capacity exists to implement these changes effectively; we'll look at 21st Century HE learner needs, such as personalisation, recommendations, intelligent support, profiling and prompts; try to determine how to provide added value to university experience given the costs involved, and what the future of tech-enhanced HE could look like to help produce the best graduates possible.

Welcome to this episode in our series produced by Professor Rose Luckin's EDUCATE Ventures Research, and hosted on The Edtech Podcast

In this episode, Karine and Rose meet this week to discuss the Online Safety Bill, school absences, and ChatGPT, the latter of which has produced huge public debate, from teacher anxieties to developer felicitations, questions from parents, and columnist think pieces all around the presence of AI in the classroom.  With all of these concerns, however, is it possible that ChatGPT has done education a favour?

OpenAI's ChatGPT is the third and latest version of their text-generating AI technology, and it's been trained on over 45 terabytes of data.  If that seems like a lot, it is: the entirety of English-language Wikipedia accounts for just 1% of that volume in comparison.  The talk of Twitter and intrigued educationalists in schools around the anglosphere, much of the discussion has been around its use as a replacement for human cognition: will students use it to cheat in essays and assessments?  Does its information retrieval dumb-down student opportunities for learning when material is simply parroted, rather than interrogated and the learning then applied in novel contexts?  In this week's episode, Karine and Rose discuss practical uses for this incredibly powerful tool, and explain why human and machine intelligence can work together successfully to improve teaching and learning, and our understanding of AI.

Material discussed in this episode includes:

• • Square Peg's new book by Fran Morgan and Ellie Costello, with Ian Gilbert:
    • Square Pegs: Inclusivity, Compassion, and Fitting In - a Guide for Schools, available here
  • EVR and Cambridge Partnership for Education's Covid-19 report:
    • Shock to the System: Lessons from Covid-19, available here

Welcome to this episode in our series produced by Professor Rose Luckin's EDUCATE Ventures Research, exploring 'Evidence-Based EdTech', and hosted on The Edtech Podcast

This mini-series connects, combines, and highlights leading expertise and opinion from the worlds of EdTech, AI, Research, and Education, helping teachers, learners, and technology developers get to grips with ethical learning tools that are led by the evidence. 

For this episode, Rose and Karine play host to Lord Jim Knight in the EdTech Podcast Zoom studio this week, and try to understand the arguments surrounding the establishment of Oak National Academy as an 'Arm's Length Body'.

They dig into whether Oak Academy - an organisation providing an online classroom and resource hub and set up in the UK during the pandemic -  has shifted substantially from a well-intentioned response to Covid to something more challenging for the Edtech sector and potentially those it serves. 

And finally, shout out to Rose, Karine and Jim for also digging into the world of ChatGPT and how we should start thinking of that within our classrooms and for our young people.

Thank you to Learnosity for sponsoring this episode, and for supporting the Evidence-Based EdTech series on the EdTech Podcast.

Hello everyone and welcome back to The Edtech Podcast, where we aim to improve the dialogue between “ed” and “tech” for better innovation and impact.

In this series, sponsored by WorkTripp, we are looking at all things Future of Work, and how that intersects with learning, leadership, humans, and technology.

In this episode, I'm chatting with author and founder Garry Pratt. We explore:

• The foundations of entrepreneurialism 
• The evolution of edtech (and the internet) 
• The science behind outdoor time, creativity and innovation (for entrepreneurs & educators)

Show Notes and References  

You can find links to any references from the episode in our show notes: https://theedtechpodcast.com/edtechpodcast.

Tell us your story

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Record a quick free voicemail via speakpipe for inclusion in the next episode. Or you can post your thoughts or follow-on links via twitter @podcastedtech or via The Edtech Podcast LinkedIn page or Instagram.

Hello everyone and welcome to The Edtech Podcast and this episode in collaboration with EdSurge. 

This is the second episode in a three-part series to explore the nuances of adult lifelong learners and what sparks their return to University.

A shout out to WorkTripp and Lumina Foundation for supporting this episode, EdSurge for the amazing journalism, and great to have the learner voice front and centre in this mini-series. As always, do let us know what you think. 

Welcome to the second episode in a series produced by Professor Rose Luckin's EDUCATE Ventures Research, exploring 'Evidence-Based EdTech', and hosted on The Edtech Podcast

This mini-series connects, combines, and highlights leading expertise and opinion from the worlds of EdTech, AI, Research, and Education, helping teachers, learners, and technology developers get to grips with ethical learning tools that are led by the evidence. 

For this episode, we examine the state of technology in work, training, and mentorship, and ask what role evidence plays when we are dealing with environments where (usually) productivity is the thing that’s measured. 

Is productivity for the sake of it good?  How do we know the technology that the current and future workforce encounters, benefits them?  As many roles demand a more complex skill set, and fluency in technology, is there a risk we’re leaving people behind?  What do employability, recruitment, and skills look like in the age of the portfolio career?  

We'll be asking:

• Are the skills, the ways of working, ways of thinking, ways of measuring success, that schools teach young people, appropriate for today’s world of work?
• How we balance human intelligence in the workplace with, broadly, ‘machine intelligence’; that is how we work with and support the human learner or worker, with the tech that many workplaces ask us to use
• What do we mean by ‘deep skills/reskilling/upskilling’, and this idea that people aren’t just sticking to one role, one organisation or type of work for 20, 30, 50 years?
• And most importantly, what evidence is there to help us understand what young people need and what can be done to effectively prepare young people for their ever-changing futures?    

Thank you to Learnosity for sponsoring this episode, and for supporting the Evidence-Based EdTech series on the EdTech Podcast.