Global Education

Protect Students With Background Blur in GoReact

A short video clip focused on the importance of Background Blur for teacher training programs

The new GoReact background blur feature gives Jonty Leese and his trainee teachers more confidence as it blurs and protects student identities while keeping trainees in focus.

SEE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jenny Gordon:

What can we do most to protect our students? And so, we recently released a piece of functionality that blurs the background for all of the videos that are being recorded. How did you see that as an advantage for how you would use this piece of software with your schools and student teachers?

Jonty Leese:

I think the key thing that you’ve hit there is that in all of these procedures, it’s about minimizing risk, isn’t it? And demonstrating that due thought has gone into how any piece of software is A, going to enhance the learning, or the ability for the student or the context to learn, and also to make sure that we have thought things through. And I think the example there of the blur technology is great. You know, it’s a thing that probably people are quite used to with sort of their filters and other things like that. But it simply means that you are minimizing and doing what you can to ensure that students aren’t recorded. And I think that’s a really powerful thing.

Because it’s demonstrating that A, it works very well. And B, it’s actually something that is tangible, so you can turn it on or off. You can immediately see the difference in the picture quality. And by doing that, it gives you that confidence that actually there’s an algorithm that’s working very well, keeping the stuff that you don’t want to be recorded out, but keeping the stuff that you do want recorded, which is the student teacher going around that regular daily business of teaching, nice and clear and in focus. So I think if we view it as, it’s a sensible step that just helps us keep our information secure and safe. And I think that’s a really positive step. And certainly, the schools seem to be very happy with the feature and functionality of that.