Guest post – DigiLearn: BETT show – a digital journey continues

Author: Nick Bohannon – Senior Lecturer (School of Nursing)

I hadn’t heard of BETT until two months ago. Apparently, it stands for British Education and Training Technology, and it is huge! Approximately 35,000 people attend it over the three days, and we were invited to speak there by Microsoft. Amazing but true! Chris Melia, Andy Sprake, and I went on a field trip to London and spoke in the Post 16 Education Theatre at the conference.

It was exciting, scary, and fun all at the same time, but what made it ok was working with Chris and Andy. Here’s a pic of us with Chris Rothwell (Director of Microsoft Education) taken at BETT 2019.

He was great and it was really clear that Microsoft are impressed with what we are all doing here at UCLan in terms of our technology infrastructure and our work using Microsoft Teams. Chris, Andy and I have been working hard to incorporate Teams into our work with students and it is really paying off now. My particular interest was in using Teams to increase the connections between students and extend the learning environment to wherever the students were at any time. The result has been brilliant. In one group of Post Graduate Mental Health Nursing students we have over one thousand posts from 25 students in 3 months on Teams. Andy has developed Teams to enable students to select content for their course, and Chris is constantly working away to make sure that it all happens smoothly and to foster the energy and commitment. I find that the more I know about digital learning and technology, the more I want to learn. The further I go with it, the more opportunities I find for me to use it. My digital journey is up and running!