It’s a splendid time to celebrate the UK’s education technology success. Why?
Well, the country has every reason to celebrate their exceptional growth of edtech industry: leading it to being the #No.1 destinations in Europe for Venture capital and angel investments to size up the sector and account for not less than 34% of total investment in this market. There is a huge demand for technology use in the classroom with schools across UK spending close to £900 million on edtech every year to leverage learning.
To further harp on this fact, we had like to quote the words of RT Hon Damian Hinds MP, secretary of State for Education. He said, “There are so many reasons to be optimistic about the possibilities for technology across education. EdTech is increasingly supporting improved outcomes across England and internationally…”
Quite similar are the views of Ian Fordham, the former Edtech UK CEO who sees a booming ecosystem. “It’s an incredibly busy and diverse space. Most people just see apps for school but our definition of edtech incorporates the whole diverse range of education.”
UK’s edtech market is very strong which is why, it has helped many big firms such like Pearson and well over thousand start-ups to grow up to a level that most edtech businesses today look up to.
So, without further ado, let’s quickly check out top products and projects that are helping to shape UK’s edtech sector.
Premier EdTech Products
1. Minecraft Edu– One of the best collaborative and versatile platform used by educators across subjects to encourage 21’st century skills. The product helps in assessment, reflection, immersive learning and classroom collaboration.With Minecraft Edu, students can be immersed into scientific research or discovery of cross disciplinary lessons.
2. Mindful Education– A premium EdTech provider, Mindful Education works in close knit with their partners to create media-rich further and Higher Education courses. All its courses are innovative and media-rich professional courses such like Apprenticeships in Accounting & Management, law and human resource.The courses are delivered through blended learning and offers online teaching and learning experience to the students and college partners.
3. Night Zookeeper– Another amazing and inspiring online writing tool, class blog and interactive lessons for primary K-8 students. This tool makes children better writers, readers and creative thinkers. It expands the imagination power of the children and develops their written communication skills.
4.SAM Labs STEAM Kit– A power packed platform that provides everything to its users in order to deliver the most engaging STEAM learning experience in the classroom- be it with hardware, software or interactive lesson plans. Here in this platform, students get the full leverage to discover the fun in coding and creating.
5. Now>Press>Play– An innovative and immersive audio resource that keeps the primary school children hooked in the curriculum through emotion, imagination and movement. It is a platform that can be used as a whole class activity or with smaller groups for intervention work.It includes in it fun and inclusive ways to engage children in the curriculum.
The platform can be used as a whole class activity or with smaller groups for intervention work, helping them to have fun and inclusive way to engage children in the curriculum.
6.FutureLearn– An innovative digital learning platform that offers courses from Universities all over the world and allowing students to seek guidance from the best of educators from tp universities and cultural institutions. The courses here have a wide variety of subject matters, ranging from programming to health & psychology from various institutions such like The University of Reading. The reason why this platform has gained much acclaim is because it has helped students learn new skills, pursue their interest and advance their career through sound knowledge and sharpened soft skills.
7.Pobble– A recipient of the European Business Plan competition, this platform inspires young writers to publish their work and offer them to a worldwide audience. The platform is one of the best places for the young writers because, it allows children to connect with the world through writing and offer peer-to-peer feedback which develops the critical thinking skills of the students.Students not only get a positive impact on their educational journey through this platform but helps the students to feel encouraged to come up with good work and inspire them to excel in their endeavor.
8.Zzish– A classy virtual teaching assistant for the educators, Zzish helps teachers to easily personalize their teaching as per student’s need and interest. It is a data driven technology platform that assesses students to identify their area of struggle, their learning progress and based on it recommends resources to the teachers that are crowd sourced from around the world to help them master learning objectives.
9.Curiscope– An edtech solution that brings learning to life and makes magical experiences with tech making learning Science & STEM subjects’ fun using AR & VR.
10. Clicker7 Crick Software– An award winning reading and writing software which supports students with learning difficulties, autism, physical disabilities, special educational needs and others.
The reason why edtech products in UK is such a big hit is because they have managed to set a standard in the edtech market. Predictions are that UK with its range of superbly developed edtech products and project inititives is all set to become the leading Country of Europe in the uptake of edtech creating a vibrant scene for startups in this sector.
After giving you an insight into some of the leading edtech products that is helping shape up the UK edtech market, let us give you an insight on some of the leading edtech projects that has also helped to shape the dynamic education technology sector of UK.
Coding for the Future: 5 Top Coding Projects
As an initiative to get kids to code and teach children programming skills as a long-term solution to the skill gap between the number of jobs and the people qualified to fill them, a project called Coding for the future is turning out to be really successful in the UK. This project encapsulates 5 top coding projects which are mentioned below
- Code Kingdoms– A project that assists children between the age of 8-14 years to learn how to code in their own Minecraft mods and Roblox Games.
- Code Club– This Code Club Project is aimed at building up programming skills in children through challenge based learning and making them work on projects that introduce key programming concepts.
- Project Torino, Microsoft– This project helps visually impaired children of age learn computational thinking skills and basic programming through its unique physical programming language.
- Teaching London Computing– Run by the same people who run the famous cs4fn project, teaching London computing is a project that assists teachers with fun resources on Computer Science.
- The cs4fn project– this project known as Computer Science for fun is basically a public engagement project aiming to arouse interest and approval in children for inter-disciplinary computer science research.
Flipped Learning/Online Resource, HELM Open– This project offers high quality open learning and teaching resources that not only excels in quality but are interactive peer-reviewed resources developed by University experts. The resources are basically engaging multimedia bite-sized learning for one to use in learning and teaching.
Blended Learning Consortium– This project caters shared content for the FE sector and the resources too are developed for the Further Education curriculum. This motive behind the creation of this consortium is to support colleges in moving forward to meet accredited guidelines and allow members to benefit from the creation and sharing of further education specific resources.
BAFTA Young Game Designers– This project is a free initiative that inspires young people to create, develop and present new gaming ideas to the world. it mainly inspires 10-18 year old students to try out their imagination power to design a new game and in this process allows these students to gather more information about the game industry.
Have we missed out any other important project that is really working as a catalyst for UK edtech market?
In all the developed and developing world, the growth of edtech sectors has helped in giving a major boost to the economy and this is the same with UK too. We hope, they continue to become the hotbed of edtech innovation in the future too.
What are your views on the growing prospects of edtech sector in UK? Do not forget to write to us your views on it by dropping a comment in the comment box below.
