The Nordic EdTech News Interview - Jamie Poolton, Director of Sales, EMEIA at Showbie
With over 3 million users globally, Canadian EdTech, Showbie, is a significant international player in the classroom tools space. Importantly for the Nordics, the business has recently recruited a Norway-based team (Link) to handle current customers and drive international expansion. Nordic educators are also at the heart of Showbie’s Learning RefinED event, which takes place this week - full details here.
I was delighted therefore to talk to Jamie Poolton, Showbie’s Director of Sales in EMEIA, for this latest Nordic EdTech News interview. Apart from highlighting why the Nordics are of such interest to Showbie, our discussion also emphasised the power of teacher voice and the importance of building community as well as providing some invaluable insights on how to scale EdTech businesses globally.
As previously, the transcript of our conversation (edited to bring you all of the very best bits) follows below.
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Many thanks, Jonathan
Jonathan Viner (JV): Hi Jamie! Thanks for talking to me today. Let’s start with the basics - could you explain what Showbie is and what it does?
Jamie Poolton (JP): Showbie is the hybrid learning platform. We help educators provide richer, deeper, more personalised feedback to all learners in a simple and easy way. We also aim to help schools foster a community of transparency and feedback across all stakeholders.
The team is proud of the fact that we're now supporting over three million users globally, in over 150 countries and in 18 languages, including across the Nordics. We're also celebrating our 10th birthday next year.
JV: Just to be clear, those educators are predominantly in what we would call K-12 education?
JP: Yes, absolutely - the vast majority of our users are K-12 school leaders and teachers in the UK, the Nordics, North America and Australia.
Showbie is now also supporting some vocational colleges in the UK - one of which is an Apple Distinguished School, recognised for its use of technology. So this is an area where we're trying to understand how we can best support them.
JV: You mentioned Apple and there’s a perception that Showbie only works in Apple environments. Is that true or does it work with Google or Microsoft schools too?
JP: This is one of the biggest challenges we have as an organisation - making sure that people are aware that Showbie works across all platforms. We’re certainly not Apple only!
The Showbie product came about because of a challenge we identified when schools started using iPads. Learners were using them to create great content, but there wasn't an easy way for them to send it to their teacher for assessment or feedback. So Showbie was originally developed to address that challenge and we’ve naturally had a close working relationship with Apple.
In addition to the iOS app, we also have a browser based platform, so all schools can use Showbie to support their learners. And we’ve actually seen a significant increase in browser usage over the last year or so.
JV: How different are the two products?
JP: In terms of uploading and distribution of content, things are fairly similar, but there are certain features such as screen recording which are unique to iOS.
We're spending a lot of time as a product development team looking at how we can make a more consistent experience between the iOS app and the web based content. This is particularly important as we’re seeing lots of parents accessing Showbie through the browser at the moment and we obviously want them to have a great experience as well.
JV: The market you’re in is incredibly competitive, so what is it about the Showbie proposition that really resonates with teachers and schools?
JP: You're absolutely right - it is a really competitive space. But I think what’s completely unique about Showbie is that we are a hybrid learning platform and simplicity is our focus and priority.
What we really want to do is make things as easy as possible for teachers - we help them to distribute work to their learners; we help learners to then engage with that content and we then make it easy for teachers to give really rich, personalised feedback and assessment to better support their students.
Most importantly, we don't want technology to be a barrier to teaching and learning. Showbie was developed to help the teacher community solve a specific problem through a simple and reliable solution. That’s how we think about Showbie.
JV: You mentioned community there, Jamie. But how does Showbie use that community to inform product development and growth?
JP: Community is really important to us and we look at it in two different ways. Firstly, we look at the individual school community - that’s parents, educators and students. We want to help foster a closer working relationship between those groups, by giving parents access to information that shows how their child is doing and to help them understand the progress their child making.
The second part of community is our Showbie network of teachers and school leaders. This is vital to help share success and share conversations about the impact Showbie has in supporting teaching and learning globally. We’ve introduced a Showbie Certified Educator programme and have also recently launched the Showbie Superstars programme - this is for students who really help support their peers and teachers to get the most from Showbie! Our first accredited member is a student from the UK who helped train their teachers on the use of Showbie during the pandemic.
JV: What stage is Showbie now at as a business?
JP: We're in a really, really exciting space at the moment. Just over a year ago, we were less than 30 employees with everyone based in Edmonton, Canada. Now we’re a staff of more than 60, with more joining in the coming weeks - this enables us to offer more focused support to localised territories where we're building teams, including the Nordics.
JV: So how has the company been so successfully in growing and scaling internationally? That is always one of the key challenges that I hear when talking to Nordic EdTech businesses. What tips can you share?
JP: The biggest one would be to leverage your community and your most enthusiastic teacher users. We have seen the biggest growth when teachers share Showbie with their communities by saying: “This is a tool that's helping to make amazing things happen in my classroom.”
From there, it’s a natural transition to look at where these teachers are based and what their key networks are. We believe that those networks can then be best engaged through teacher advocates - it’s always way more powerful coming from a school themselves, where a teacher has actually used the product and seen the benefit in their classroom.
JV: What’s the business model for Showbie?
JP: We’re a software as a service or SaaS business, so schools and municipalities pay a subscription to access our platform and tools. Our model is an annual fee per teacher rather than per student. So hopefully that’s easier for schools or municipalities to calculate the total cost.
We spend lots of time thinking about how we can make sure that customers see the value of Showbie throughout the duration of their subscriptions. Our Customer Success and Account Management teams work hard to ensure that customers value the product and are using it. In the Nordics, everyone on our team is an educator and has classroom experience - this helps ensure that all of our customer conversations are about how Showbie can support teaching and learning. Having educators on our local teams is the best way for us to articulate our value and has been fundamental to our commercial success.
JV: Can you tell me a little more about your new Nordic team and in particular, what’s the rationale behind their recruitment?
JP: Well, Norway is currently one of Showbie’s top two global markets (the UK is the other), so we wanted to support and grow our customers in market. We’re also looking to grow our footprint across other Nordic markets, where we see increasing interest in the proposition.
We already have a really good presence in Norway and have been able to hire a team who all are former educators with experience of working with Showbie in previous roles. Our Nordic Education Director (Johnny Gangsøy) is, for example, an ex-Principal and an early adopter of educational technology, who introduced Showbie to his school and municipality. Our Nordic Account Director (Tove Ødegaard) is also a former teacher, who has spent lots of time helping her peers explore how different technologies could support their teaching and learning. We’ve also recently announced two new additions to the team - a learning specialist, and a sales manager.
JV: What is it about Showbie that resonates with Nordic customers in particular?
JP: Simplicity! That's the big thing we constantly hear from customers.
As I said earlier, the solution has been designed and built so that the technology isn’t a barrier for educators or students to use it. We understand that teachers don't have the time to spend 10 to 15 minutes trying to get something to work - it just needs to be simple and work straight away. Showbie does and I think that’s the big reason for our success.
JV: Obviously the sales model for most of the Nordics is through municipalities. What challenges does that present for Showbie?
JP: We know that the people who are in charge of procurement at municipalities are looking at many different factors as part of their decision. But we always try to put teacher voice at the heart of our conversations with them.
JV: That teacher voice is also at the heart of your plan to include a Nordic day at your Learning RefinED virtual event this week. Tell me how that all came about?
JP: Well Learning RedefinED is a week-long celebration of teaching and learning that runs from 17th to 21st May. The aim is that our amazing lineup of educators will present strategies and best practice that help other teachers transform teaching and learning in their institutions.
The Nordic day takes place on Friday 21st and will close out the week. We’ve got a series of interviews with principals from Finland alongside panel discussions featuring educators from Norway and Sweden. We also have educators contributing from Greenland - everyone is sharing their experiences with different technologies to help other educators make informed decisions about what they could be doing.
It’s the first time we've ever done this as a business and we've had hundreds of people register already. We’re all really excited about it. I can't wait!
JV: What are you hoping to hear from the Nordic educators?
JP: We deliberately didn’t give them a list of content to talk to. Our approach was to ask them what they thought was important. And really interestingly, creativity was a core theme for all of the Nordic educators.
But we’ve also seen some specific local priorities emerge as well. A big issue in Sweden seems to be around GDPR and data residency at the moment, so we’ll be addressing that. We’ve also seen lots of interest from Finnish educators about student-led learning so there will be opportunities to have a conversation around that as well.
These are the three big topics that the Nordic educators will be addressing and it’s interesting to see that they’re very different from other countries, particularly the UK.
JV: As the representative of a global EdTech business, I’m interested to understand Showbie’s perspective on Nordic EdTech. What excites and inspires you about it?
JP: A key part of my role as we’ve been hiring the Nordic team has been to try and better understand our Nordic customers. I’ve always looked to the Nordics to follow what they do. The Nordics are seen globally as early adopters of EdTech and look at different technologies to see how they could support teaching and learning.
But one thing that's been consistent over the years, and which I’ve certainly seen in my time at Showbie, is that there doesn’t seem to be the fear of technology that we see elsewhere. There’s more of an openness to explore and try new approaches. If things don't work, that's fine, Nordic educators will quickly move on to something else.
JV: And finally, what your perspective on the EdTech market post-pandemic?
JP: Schools have invested a lot in EdTech tools over the last year to get through what’s obviously been a really difficult time. And schools have seen the value that technology can play in supporting their teaching and learning. EdTech is certainly here to stay.
But we’re now seeing that schools are really beginning to evaluate the impact of the tools they bought and are questioning if they bought / implemented the right ones.
So I suspect that we'll hear more and more school leaders asking those questions over the next year. They are questions that I think Showbie can really powerfully address and this mirrors the open conversations we’ve been having with customers as they integrate and start to use our unique hybrid learning platform.
JV: Thanks very much for your time Jamie. It’s been great talking to you!
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