Innovator of the Year
EduGrowth’s submission is for the vision, design and implementation of the Global Victoria EdTech Innovation Alliance. This program activated international testbeds to trial Australian EdTech products for a six month period, supported by academic researchers to conduct an analysis of the products efficacy.
The program had incredible reach from trialling 9 EdTech solutions, and included 11 research experts, 27 education partners, 165 educators and over 4,110 learners. It ran across K-12 Schools, Higher Education and Workforce education settings in Australia, Canada, China, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, USA and Vanuatu.
This program is particularly innovative because of the focus on efficacy and the inclusion of the research community to help build a shared understanding of EdTech efficacy and research design.
The program resulted in significant commercial benefits for participants, gained the attention of state government bodies, created local and international awareness of Australia’s EdTech sector, and has sparked interest from Australia’s leading education institutions for future collaboration opportunities.
The multi-award winning Global Equality Collective (GEC) – is a global grassroots community of over 15,000 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) change-makers, and a collective of 400+ DEI subject matter experts. The GEC has raised over £300k to create the ‘GEC App’, the “world’s first DEI app for schools and businesses”.
The GEC App for education, led by Nic Ponsford (award winning AST and Harvard author) has been used by 200+ pioneering schools, Trusts and colleges, all getting their D&I together through using the GEC App.
Since its launch in November 2021, the app has already been welcomed across schools in 18 different countries.
The GEC’s mission is to make ordinary classrooms extraordinarily inclusive. Being called the “app of its time”, the GEC App is revolutionising not only how education understands diversity and inclusion, but also how edtech can disrupt the sector to improve outcomes for staff and students alike.
How and why did the Holocaust happen? Imperial War Museums’ new Holocaust Learning Programme supports secondary students to ask this and other questions about one of the most difficult subjects in human history. Created in partnership with the digital agency Friday Sundae Studio, Olivier award winning play-write Stef Smith and in consultation with Jewish theatre maker Rachel Mars, pedagogy in game theory is used to encourage students’ conversations with their peers about this challenging subject. This programme guides students through IWM’s new and award-winning Holocaust Galleries with a specially designed Holocaust Learning App that enables them to critically consider why the Holocaust happened, why we still study it and what it means in our world today.
“Empowering young people to transition successfully from education to the workplace”
Navigate is the market-leading solution for the management, evidencing and reporting of Non-Academic Activity.
Since its inception, the platform has been at the forefront of further education’s shift from a predominantly vocational focus to a more holistic one that encompasses the development of students’ soft and work skills.
The platform empowers young people to contextualise, record and reflect on their skills development and build a permanent record of their progress.
It also provides teachers with information to make better decisions about the skills their students must develop, as well as giving colleges data to maximise funding and meet inspection requirements.
We work closely with the sector and representative bodies to ensure that Navigate continues to be at the cutting edge and fully meets the needs of young people and staff across the further education sector.
Innovation isn’t just for start-ups. The secret to longevity is to keep innovation going – and that’s just what NetSupport has been doing since 1989.
Over the past year, we’ve gone all out: delivering more innovative co-produced tools in our edtech products; offering customers a wealth of quality education-related resources; supporting other edtech vendors by offering them a platform to reach schools; as well as elevating NetSupport’s products and values in the edtech marketplace.
Being engaged at every level of the education community is vital to us – and our customers. They know that we use our innovative powers to go the extra mile to support them, whether with up-to-the-minute product functionality or high-quality supplementary CPD resources. In turn, we also learn from educators as we co-produce our solutions. It’s a balance and a partnership that sees NetSupport embedded in schools across the world.
PG Online ClearRevise / Ludenso
Using Ludenso technology, PG Online are the first UK publisher to launch augmented reality content into its popular ClearRevise guides. Augmented reality offers an inspiring, alternative tool to enrich printed books in a way appeals to students, increasing their interactivity and involvement in learning. AR content includes 3D models that students can interact with through rotate, pinch and zoom gestures; video content that explains topics in more detail; and curated links to further online research.
Using ubiquitous pocket-technology, students can employ their phones or tablets to magically reveal an invisible layer of content layer, immersing themselves in a topic they may previously have dismissed as being incomprehensible. This creates, for example, an opportunity to extend the learning on the circulatory system by opening a beating heart right at your desk, on the bus or at home. Students can watch the valves rhythmically move and study its parts, supported by labels and additional descriptions to boost learning. A chemical formula can now be displayed as a three-dimensional ball and stick model to better understand it beyond a 2D diagram. This deepens the learning and promotes deeper questioning.
Teach Rex and it’s unique and engaging in-school workshops are certain to inspire pupils and support learning across the curriculum.
Each session transports children to a world of dinosaurs and dragons, enabling pupils to experience something truly magical. The newest experience, Gorillas-Our World’, brings the rainforest to school and immerses children in the world around them.
White Light – University of Portsmouth
In May 2022, the University of Portsmouth opened its brand-new £7 million Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Reality (CCIXR). CCIXR is the UK’s first purpose-built facility bringing together a whole suite of the very latest XR technologies under one roof to support innovation in virtual, augmented and extended realities.
Key to CCIXR’s development is an innovation partnership with technical solutions specialist and XR pioneer – White Light (WL). CCIXR is the UK’s first facility equipped with the entire immersive technologies’ toolkit and features WL’s multi-award winning SmartStage® as its centrepiece. As the cornerstone of the immersive pipeline, SmartStage enables staff, students and the University’s wealth of national and global partners, to engage with a diverse range of content in innovative new ways.
The University of Portsmouth, in partnership with WL, has changed the game for learning in the XR and broader immersive technologies sector. Via CCIXR, with SmartStage at its core, users can control all the ways in which data can be created and captured – through to how this can be used. This innovation partnership is critical to combating the widening creative industries’ skills gap and to harnessing the potential of emerging technologies, now and in the future.
