Impressions from BETT 2014

I’ve been coming to BETT for the past five years and this is my first year representing Panopto. I thought I’d just take a few moments to share with you some of the key themes that people have been talking about with us during the course of the show.

A big trend that has been getting a lot of mentions is flipping the classroom. Obviously flipping has been a hot topic for some time now, but the people we’ve been speaking to are more actively implementing this into their teaching and learning practice than I’ve seen in previous years. Some are even considering rethinking their entire teaching and learning approach to prioritise flipped over traditional teaching methods. We’ve seen this trend growing with our own users as well, with many moving beyond lecture capture or classroom recording to use video to help them flip.

Another topic that has come up again and again is using video to improve teacher training, where teachers are starting to explore the advantages of filming their lessons to watch back and hone their teaching approach. This is a much more emergent use of video than flipping so it will be interesting how this develops over the coming years.

The last subject that has been of particular interest to the people we’ve been speaking to is enhancing student feedback through video content. This is probably at an even earlier stage than teaching training via video. Some of our university customers are starting to do this, with really interesting results so far. I predict that in the coming year we’ll be speaking to more and more schools and colleges about this use of video as they try to address the issues around how to offer meaningful feedback to their students in a way that engages them.

So those are some of my impressions at BETT 2014 – if any of that resonates with you, please feel free to drop me a message on [email protected] if you’d like to discuss further.