Day 2 of Bett Asia began with a series of high powered keynotes from across the globe starting with Hon Nikki Kaye, Associate Minister of Education for New Zealand.

Minister Kaye shared the many exciting developments happening throughout New Zealand education. I was particularly impressed with their pond.co.nz initiative, a one-stop portal full of educational resources for all NZ teachers.

Following Minister Kaye’s address, we had the privileged of listening to Veniamin Shaevich Kaganov, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.

It was fascinating to hear about some of the challenges facing education in the Russian Federation.

From Russia to Laos, following the Russian Minister we heard about a whole lot of different challenges from a relatively newly developing country.

LyTou Bouapao, Deputy Minister and Vice-President of National Commission for UNESCO , Ministry of Education and Sports in Laos addressed the audience and shared his challenge of providing technology for schools that are lucky to have electricity.

From Laos we moved to Monah University Melbourne where we heard from Justin Bokor, Director of Innovation at Monash.

I was particularly impressed with the work Monash has been doing with MWORLD, an eLearning resource for Primary Teachers.

Another highlight of Day 2 was a very engaging presentation by Anthony Salcito, Vice President – Worldwide Education, Microsoft.

I particularly liked his thoughts around education now needed to focus 6 C’s …

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Critical Thinking
• Creativity
• Curiosity, and
• Computational Thinking

The afternoon highlight was listening to my colleague Rajesh Patil, Adobe Senior Solution Consultant for Southeast Asia.

Rajesh shared the value of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Solution (DPS) to enable the development of iOS, Android & Windows tablet apps without the need for coding.

Special thank you to the Adobe APAC sales and marketing teams for all the work they put into Bett Asia for 2015. It was a pleasure to be involved.

Singapore is such a dynamic and beautiful city, I’m looking forward to returning again in April.