The Blippar Education team reflect on the Education Reform Summit

Things to consider when attending events and conferences:

1) Taking perhaps the most important element of a conference, the content of the sessions you’ve organised, and letting other people control where it goes over the course of the day.

2) Trusting the speakers you’ve chosen to say intelligent things, to pick up on ‘themes of the day’ of their own accord, to be knowledgeable and open and interesting.

3) Trusting your audience to cope with more thought-provoking ideas than they have time to count, to accept controversial arguments and to challenge them at the same time.

These are brave policies for an event to adopt, but our good friends at the Education Foundation have taken up that challenge once again for their Reform Summit in London, and it was a pleasure for Blippar to support them as a lead sponsor this year.

From Schools Minister Nick Gibb’s commitment to fundamental knowledge acquisition; the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher’s perspective on comparative international data; a fascinating panel discussion with brilliant head teachers to another with union leaders and charitable organisations... the Education Reform Summit relies on an intense schedule with experienced influencers.

The Blippar team took a particular interest in a presentation from Richard Culatta, who runs the Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education. Richard spoke enthusiastically about the power of technology to enable personalised learning and visualisation in the classroom- two features that are close to our heart here. We have more faith in the continued relevance of print content providers, whose material we believe can be kept relevant, up-to-date and engaging by technology the likes of which we offer; but it was inspiring to hear the lengths to which the Obama administration have gone to improve the quality of infrastructure and connectivity at public schools in the United States, and encouraging to hear Richard speak of technology as a basic requirement for educational institutions, rather than as a “nice-to-have” luxury.

The Summit is a deliberately intimate event, focusing on policy, leadership and research, and sourcing most of its speakers and attendees from those fields. Blippar’s participation says a lot about how we are approaching the education space. Our focus on classroom empowerment, collaboration, personalisation and interactive learning puts us right at the forefront of the next wave of transformative educational technology. We are committed to advancing the use of technology in the classroom,helping to improve its implementation, and we are participating in debate and thought leadership. To back up that commitment, we released the first of our Education White Papers (on the use of the tablet in the classroom) alongside the Summit - don’t forget to get in touch with us to request a copy at education@blippar.com.