FULL FABRIC at The Nordic Edtech Conference 2016: our experience

Last week, our team members Tania and Reet attended the inaugural Nordic Edtech Conference in Copenhagen. The event was designed to examine how technology can enhance learning and empower students and featured startups and educators from across the Nordic region and beyond. Read on for Tania and Reet’s personal highlights from the day-long event.

Tania Roquette

The main connecting thread between the talks seemed to be student engagement. Lots of speakers discussed how technology can help to ensure students are as active as possible, motivated to learn new things and engaged by classroom activities.

I felt really inspired by Sahra-Josephine Hjorth’s talk. Sahra-Josephine is co-founder of CanopyLAB, a platform that hosts free online classes for young people and empowers them to tackle real problems in their communities. It was great to hear about how they're helping students become socially concious and inspired to instigate change.

Edtech Foundry’s CEO Kristian Collin Berge explained how his company are developing chatbots which allow universities to provide students with tailored, automated messaging. The chatbots are currently in pilot stage and have achieved an engagement rate five times higher than messaging sent manually by a teacher.

Another standout for me was recommendations for learning by Mads Holmen of Bibblio, a content recommendation platform. Mads showed us how relevant and contextual recommendations can prove genuinely valuable for students eager to find useful learning resources.

Kahoot's keynote presentation Make learning awesome

Reet Sen

For me, the most exciting thing about the conference was to immerse myself in the edtech community and get to know some of the most imaginative and innovative people from the Nordic region.

Both Tania and I really enjoyed the keynote presentation by Kahoot’s UX team. The Norwegian tech company has developed a game-based learning platform which they presented to the audience in a very interactive way. Each of the attending companies competed in a fun and engrossing quiz which became surprisingly competitive.

Student engagement is also key to what Peergrade do. CEO David Kofoed Wind explained how the company allows students to take an active part in the assessment process by anonymously grading their peers’ work. As a result, students develop their critical thinking and subject knowledge, while teachers are given a broad view of assessment performance.