Categorised into time-to adoption – when they are expected to enter the classroom – these technologies will look to enhance learning experiences, engage the learner, introduce new means of communication and change the delivery of education.

• Within one year (near term) or less Mobile Apps and Tablet Computing will be in the classroom:  Mobile Apps can be used for numerous activities such as annotations, social networking, training and support. Tablets offer the same with increased capability of sharing content, videos etc. The added benefit of these devices is that the offering of one-to-one learning.
• Two to three years (mid-term) Game Based learning and Learning Analytics will be introduced:  Growing interest in gaming will aim at bringing more engaging learning to students which will increase confidence, improve skills and critical thinking, collaboration and creativity. Using these skills and the data gathered learning analytics will provide data that can be used to change the structure of education making it more effective
• Four to five years’ time Gesture based computing and the Internet of things will become part of education: Learning by doing is how we learn. Gesture based simulations will make our learning more intuitive and immerse learners into the topic particularly when merged with the internet of things, where objects can be used to enhance communication methods and data passing.

In conjunction with emerging technologies within Higher Education (HE) the Horizon report identifies four key trends that have been ranked in significance of importance for driving technology adoptions.

1. People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to: Time is of an essence and therefore balancing work, home and school presents challenges, with many people needing a combination of learning and work through having information easily accessible or ‘just in time learning’.
2. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized: The internet is our source to everything. Having cloud-based models we are growing more independent of browser based software as they can be a cost saving – even with current concerns around privacy settings.
3. The world of work is increasingly collaborative driving changes in the way student projects are structured: A number of collaborative tasks we do have tools to make it such as Google Docs, Skype and Wikis. These are now entering the workplace and school environment.
4. The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators: Identifying and helping a student identify skills that can be transferred into the real world is crucial. Preparing a student for the world of work needs to become a factor in education.
5. Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models: Students already spend a lot of free time on the internet whether that’s learning, exploring or sharing information. They collaborate without knowing and developing more advanced skills. Combining a host of online applications, hybrid learning and collaboration model will future proof education.
6. There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning: Active learning experiences allow a student to take control of their learning, it becomes decision based and challenging, they connect with the learning by learning by doing through immersive experiences.

These technologies identified may not have been impacting learning and teaching to their full potential on a global scale so far however we believe that some of these technologies are already in the classroom and being embraced as tools for learning. Games-based learning in particular, has already entered the classroom and is seen to be changing the way students learn in the selected schools that we have witnessed.

Report produced in conjunction with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The full report can be found here

My journey to PIXELearning has had many twists and turns, has spanned the globe and the breadth of emotion, from dismal lows to euphoric highs.

The result of this winding road means that it’s tricky to know quite where to start but I’ll give it a shot! My need for creative outlet led me to take an art and design foundation course followed by a degree in studio crafts in glorious Brighton.

Somehow there wasn’t too much call for my strangely bovine, anatomical, silicon rubber creations, so I took a job designing mousepads featuring the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and South Park…(from high-brow to how-low-can-you-go-brow!). Then to London approving products that featured Noddy (or Oui-Oui as he’s known in France- snigger) – thus began my career in branding/ licensed merchandise.

I worked for a few years for Warner Bros. (DC Comics, Scooby Doo, Harry Potter ++) and then headed up Product Development at Entertainment Rights (Postman Pat, Rupert Bear, He-man, Trap Door+) These were fun times; concept design for pre-sales, lots of collaboration, perks like visiting Diagon Alley or Cosgrave Hall the stop-frame animation studios. It wasn’t all frivolity though, licensed merchandise brought in huge revenues and was sometimes the only reason the program existed. We jumped on the bandwagon of educational toys to widen our market and increase sales, “Edutainment” it was called (bingo). This planted the seed of an interest in education – particularly through play/ games.

Gradually I realised that I was peddling toxic, plastic ‘one-liners’ destined for the landfill, at children. I saw The Story of Stuff and I knew I needed to move on. So after a year working and travelling I fell in love with Western Australia – the laidback lifestyle and space was the antithesis of my previous London existence. They needed teachers so I decided to undertake a Post-Grad teaching qualification and emigrate there!

The teaching course at Murdoch University was fantastic, I relished the challenge and the joy of learning in its own right, but the subject fascinated me – how people learn best, how to motivate and engage students.

Then life threw a curve ball! Australia decided it didn’t need teachers after all – so I wouldn’t be able to get a visa to live or work there.

Back in the UK, I discovered that my Aussi teaching qualification was useless for long term employment. I felt pretty lost.

But then I began to make connections – how could I bring together my experience in the entertainment industry, with my new found passion for learning and development?

My dad introduced me to David Wortley who formerly headed up the Serious Games Industry in Coventry, before setting up his own business and is a mine of information. He introduced me to some of his contacts for which I will be eternally grateful.

I began by working as an Intern for PlayMob at Tech Hub back in London. They’re doing some amazing work with ‘GiverBoard’ which facilitates charitable giving through in-game virtual goods.

I came to Coventry and met the team at PIXELearning, did a couple of days work with them and went through some interviews, and when a job came up assisting Helen Routledge in Instructional Design I jumped at the chance.

I’m in my third month now and I can honestly say that I have never felt happier in my work and life. There is so much variety, from brainstorming learning opportunities in games, to programming dialogue, and decorating virtual worlds (!) to creating artwork and meeting clients.

In the end my work is creative and conscious, education is about empowerment – and I’m living in the countryside with three pet pigs.

As part of the games design course we also have the opportunity to work within teams to produce a working game. At the end of the year our game Overtime won the ‘Best game award’. Since then I have worked on different modules within the course and produced some really interesting work.

The computer games design course has the option to do a placement year and through it I came across PIXELearning. Not only does it tackle training and learning through games but it does it in a really intelligent and innovative way. I immediately emailed them showing my interest in doing my placement year with them. To my delight they agreed to take me on as a graphical artist.

Although I have only been with PIXELearning for 6 months I have already learnt so much. I have had a chance to really apply my skills to games within such a great team. I have seen into the industry and my enthusiasm for the serious games industry has grown vastly. I work on many different areas from graphics to animations. I have also done some3D textures and drawn concepts’ for characters and environments. Nowhere else could I have such a diverse and interesting work load. I get to work on various projects and interact with many different clients.

This opportunity has fuelled my passion for the games industry and I’m really looking forward to the rest of my time at PIXELearning.

Learning without frontiers showed me how things are changing within the classroom due to Leading Innovators within the field.

In my experience teachers have a reluctance to teach using technology. This is often because the children in the classroom know more than the teacher. But after attending Learning without frontiers there seems to be a lot of progress within the class room concerning technology. Innovative teachers have now started to develop ways to get around this problem. Many of the Teachers at Conference have embraced the idea of digital leaders. These are children within the school that go around and help teachers with technology and also help out with other students. They teach fellow students how to use the technology and also help teachers. This means that both teachers and students become more confident in their knowledge about modern technology.

Lessons now seem to be moving towards being more practical. This comes as the government are moving the curriculum towards computer science in order to appeal to the growing need for experts within the industry. This was also apparent within the BBC learning pod. There, the BBC were show casing many practical ways to teach subjects to children. This included practical lesson’s from the programme Bang goes the Theory and also showed how programming can be used within the class room. This could be where games really can come into their own in regards to teaching. It would give teachers a chance to teach children in an interactive way and give them a chance to apply what they have learnt. It would also mean that children explore subjects that would be closed off to them for many different reasons. This could help to engage disinterested children and could also help to encourage those who already have an interest.

Teachers are now using games and other similar methods to encourage challenging students. One example was a programme which helped to build text adventures. These were very popular in the 80’s and meant people could make their own stories and share them with others or could follow a story and pick out which path they wanted to follow. This is now being adapted within the classroom. With some children struggling to engage with books, this gives a chance for them to create their own story. They can use the interest such as football or history and then use the programme to develop their text based adventure. The teacher found that the students were much more engaged and enthusiastic about English. This was also used by other teachers in different areas. In this instance the teacher would make the adventure and then the students would have to go through and pick up the items and solve the problems using science. He found that the students were much more engaged. This could then be developed into games and could help children, especially those who struggle to engage with the subject, to learn more and be captivated.

Another interesting use of technology was the use of an IPad within a P.E lesson. The teacher used an app to take footage of a professional basketball player putting the ball through the hoop. He then used the app to slow down the footage and then mark out how the player took off and landed. The students then used this information and tried to apply it when putting the ball through the hoop themselves. The teacher then filmed them scoring and showed them the video and how they could improve. This example of how technology and apps can work together to really improve teaching quality. This shows the potential that there is currently within schools for learning applications and games.

An augmented reality app was also showcased which showed how a snake injects venom into a mouse. This cut away showed how it all worked and means that children can understand something more deeply than if they were shown on a real snake. This shows how much potential there is for apps like this in the learning marketplace. This could be teamed with other educational games to make a truly interactive experience.

It was also very encouraging to see many people now using Prezi. This included many of the children helping to present as well as the adults. This way of presenting is much more appealing and interesting and (to my delight) it finally seems to be catching on.

With Teachers now using technologies from IPads to the Nintendo 3Ds within their classrooms, it’s opening up a whole new world of learning for students. This development needs to be encouraged and explored though the use of games and other applications and could really improve the quality of teaching that students receive.

With 2012 drawing a record breaking crowd for Learning Technologies, almost 7000 registered attendees visited interacted and engaged with 100’s of exhibitors,…combined with the many free seminars and there weren’t enough hours in the two days to fit everything in, but what we did see and hear gave us a great boost and got the adrenaline pumping!

We wanted to take a few moments to share with you a few trends we saw coming through and what we learnt from our experience.

1.       L&D is looking for innovation, but in general the marketplace is not offering innovation

The first thing numerous attendees said to us when they came up to our stand was that they had been looking for something innovative all day and we were the first they had found. Yes this was lovely to hear, but without trying to fluff our feathers or pump egos, I also find this concerning. Learning Technologies should be show casing best in practice technologies that can be used for learning, not the same old technologies that have been around for 10 years.

2.       People are selling old tricks in new shiny wrappers but L&D is starting to see the tarnish

Amongst these old technologies there were many who had had a makeover. Yes they may look shiny and new, but they were the same, just delivered on an ipad or other tablet device.

3.       Six Sigma is making a comeback

I had the pleasure of presenting at Learning Technologies with Kate Smith of Capella Associates. We were talking about innovation in learning and Six Sigma. What became very clear after we had finished was a great level of interest in this area – time to dust off the old six sigma manual or better yet replace it with our new serious game coming Q2 2012!

4.       Education is storming ahead in terms of innovation and training

 For those of the PIXEL crew who attended Learning without Frontiers and Learning Technologies they both reported back far more innovation in LwF. Perhaps these two leading conferences should be further merged next year so one group can learn from the other.

5.       Open source was a big pull but no one was talking about it in a practical sense

Open source seemed to be a big buzz word for 2012. However not enough people were talking about the practical applications such as stability, access, sharing what was developed – one thing that we want to do is have a discussion about open source so people can truly understand what it’s all about.

6.       Power point should be banned next year!

Almost all presentations used powerpoint – where are the learning technologies? This was in sharp contrast to LwF where almost all presentations used Prezi.

7.       People are beginning to appreciate that gamification is not deep immersive learning

Yes the buzzword of 2011 continues to haunt us. However the tone around Gamification has changed somewhat, yes it’s still trendy, and as an industry it’s still finding its feat, but people were more weary of it, more questioning. There was definitely a greater distinction between gamification and deep immersive learning.

8.       Everyone is talking about mobile apps but not so many actually doing them yet

Mobile; another buzz word for 2012. To be fair yes this needs to be addressed pretty sharpish. We can’t ignore the mobile revolution, that to be fair happened some time ago, and learning needs to play catch up, but there still seems to be uncertainty and a lack of progress in this area.

9.       The ‘curse’ of rapid development

I call it a curse because it seems to promise the world and deliver something that is far from perfect. Rapid development can now been seen in mobile development to gamification but what we need to ask ourselves is, do we focus on quality or quality. What did the rapid e-learning space do for training previously? It generated a lot of noise and a lot of power point slides which were hosted online. Yes you might have a tool that allows you to development a mobile app in 15 minutes, or apply a gamification layer to your website but is it any good?

10.   Less what’s a serious game? And more ROI focused discussions

 This was a great one for us to hear and brought smiles to all our faces. There was an awful lot of interest in serious games (yey) but less questions over what they are and more serious questions over ROI and best practice (double yey). This highlights to us the sector is growing up, it’s now being taken seriously by the wider L&D community.

Also noted are other schools that use serious games in their teaching practices. We would love to see this list expanded as we’re sure there are many institutions out there who use gaming techniques just waiting to be discovered!

Before we dive right in to 2012 (or at least before we dive too deep) we thought we would provide a round up on what’s been going on in the world of PIXELearning.

All change

It was a rocky start to 2011 but soon all turned around and the busy year started from April with the Acquisition of PIXELearning by Intellego Holdings, an AIM traded regulatory and compliance focused digital learning business.

This acquisition has enabled PIXELearning to increase its bandwidth, bring new skills to the table, and to work closely with Intellego to create blended off the shelf solutions consisting of e-learning, serious games and the beginnings of mobile apps.

Our parent company enables our topic reach to cover business development, diversity, IT Security, Pharmaceuticals and much much more.

Projects

Early in the year PIXELearning were awarded a large virtual world contract by Gloucester Language Immersion Centre ‘GLIC’. This project sees a unique purpose, the centre has been built purely for language learning and PIXELearning have been lucky enough to create the means to teach a selection on languages through the use of virtual worlds and serious games to create a fully immersive experience that ‘places learners in the target country as if they were there’.

Further collaboration with Global Novations led to a new project for one of the ‘Big 4’ accountancy firms. This partnership continues to grow and is becoming a very strong and important business relationship for us.

With acquisition comes great opportunities and one of these opportunities was and continues to be with Pearson. We have been lucky enough to secure work covering critical thinking and look to making this partnership flourish

Other new projects have been with First Data, The Serious Games Institute (Cava), Six Sigma and An Even Better Place to Work

PIXELearning in general

With Richard at the helm it has been a full on year where he has been trotting across the globe gaining new business and getting PIXEL back out there.

All this globetrotting has resulted in a few successful trips to Singapore with the second one involving a few Singapore slings on celebration of PIXELearning Singapore office. Richard has gone above and beyond his role to make sure PIXEL continues to succeed and do the best it can.

Team H (Helen Routledge and Helen ‘chopper’ Axe) attended Learning 2011 and were seen to mix with the elite, WARNING name dropping, President Bill Clinton and John Lithgow. This conference enabled us to see what others are doing with immersive technologies for organisational learning and provide some good evidence that we are at the forefront for providing emerging learning technologies.

With this increase in bandwidth we now have a very full office as we have welcomed

• Julie Aravantinos – 3D Artist
• Sandip ‘sunny’ Thakordas – Flash developer
• Anna Bailey – Concept Artist
• and more recently Vicky Rose – Instructional Designer

For the year ahead

It’s all systems go

• We are kick starting the year with some big deadlines set for the end of January
• PIXEL and Intellego are exhibiting at Learning Technologies 25-26^th Jan (Come and see us at stand 57)
• We look to continue our growth and explore new markets
• Helen R is flying to Istanbul to deliver a presentation in February
• We are exploring HTML5 and other possibilities.
• Some very exciting projects will be announced in collaboration with Intellego
• We are focused on providing the most optimal solutions and therefore looking into the best ways to maintain our effective approach

 2011 was a year where we saw change; 2012 will be a year where we make change..

             … to the way we learn.

Learning Technologies is in its 13^th year and is one of the leading conferences for learning and emerging technologies in Europe. With a growing number of attendees and exhibitors we have taken this opportunity to get our names and skills back out there in the world of workplace learning.

By attending the conference you will have the opportunity to attend a wide selection of free seminars one of which is being delivered by PIXELearning’s very own Helen Routledge and guest speaker Kate Smith, of Capella Associates. This seminar will look at using serious gaming for Six Sigma training.

When: Wednesday 25^th January 2012 at 14.00

Where: Theatre 3

Overview: Our natural tendency when faced with a problem of any description is to try to solve it, leading to changes that either don’t solve the problem or that are not sustainable. Six Sigma helps avoid this by providing a method and a toolset to improve any process in any sector.

What better way is there to raise awareness and capability in Six Sigma to your organisation than by playing an on-line game that engages learners in an exciting case study, reinforces principles, stretches knowledge and provides feedback for CPD planning?

The mechanics and methodology behind the game will be reviewed as we explore this approach for learning and you will hear how this highly effective, low-cost solution for improving performance can be applied in your organisation.

PIXELearning will be at stand 57, showcasing demos and presentations of elearning, serious games and mobile apps.

Together we are building the next generation of digital learning and bring about a step-change in the way organisations and individuals learn, develop and improve.

It would be great to see you there, please drop by the stand for a chat or arrange to meet us there.

You can register to attend the event for free by clicking here: http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/register-now/