Join us for another great episode recorded from our Digifest 2025 community hub in March. This episode features two amazing professionals from Higher Education libraries: Rosie Jones from Teesside University and Caroline Ball from University of Derby. 

Hosted by Rosie Hare, Community Intelligence and Impact lead at Jisc, this conversation covers a wide variety of topics from leadership, digital and information literacy and the impact of working with communities of practice. 

Join us for another great conversation, and please share with your networks! 

Podcast transcript: https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/10028/1/academic-libraries-leadership-and-impact-with-caroline-ball-and-rosie-jones-transcript.docx


Digifest community hub 2025: Academic libraries, leadership and impact with Rosie Jones and Caroline Ball

More people are getting degrees than ever before, but family background has a big influence on whether people pursue university or another form of tertiary education. That’s one of the key findings of this year’s OECD report Education at a Glance. The report is the authoritative source of information on the state of education worldwide, with data on the structure, financing and performance of education systems across OECD countries and partner economies. In this edition of Top Class, the OECD’s Director for Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher speaks to OECD Editor Duncan Crawford about the main findings.

The state of global education, with OECD’s Andreas Schleicher

R U OK? Day is a national day of action that reminds Australians to check in with others and ask ‘are you OK?’ 

In this special episode, Teacher editor Jo Earp is joined by Dr Hannah Brown to talk about some of the signs that it might be time to have the conversation, how to prepare and the 4 simple steps of ask, listen, encourage action and check in. They also discuss some of the support services and resources available.

Special: R U OK Day – 4 steps for checking in with a colleague, friend or loved one

Carl Hooker brings us a live podcast from the ISTE+ASCD conference in San Antonio, Texas. He connects with conference attendees, friends old and new, asking each to share a problem they're working to solve in their corner of the education world — or, as Carl puts it: “Tell me your idea spark."

Carl sits down with Lexi Daly, Learning Innovation Coordinator and Reading Teacher at Trinity Episcopal School in New Orleans. Find out how this self-proclaimed non-coder creates her own mini-games using AI.

This episode of The Idea Spark is brought to you by EdSurge Solutions Studio.


Live from ASCD + ISTE with Lexi Daly

Carl Hooker brings us a live podcast from the ISTE+ASCD conference in San Antonio, Texas. He connects with conference attendees, friends old and new, asking each to share a problem they're working to solve in their corner of the education world — or, as Carl puts it: “Tell me your idea spark."

In this episode, Carl sits down with Heather Brantley, Events and Community Specialist at Curipod. Listen to find out how Curipod replaces an expected AI bot with a human!

This episode of The Idea Spark is brought to you by EdSurge Solutions Studio.

Live from ISTE+ASCD with Heather Brantley

A new OECD report reveals that nearly 40% of 15-year-olds are uncertain about their future careers. Alarmingly, only one in three students has attended a job fair or completed an internship, and over 20% hold unrealistic job aspirations. These findings come from The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, a comprehensive look at how well young people are being equipped for the world of work. In this episode of Top Class, OECD Editor Duncan Crawford speaks with the report’s lead author, Anthony Mann, to unpack the data and explore what needs to change.

You can read the full report here: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-state-of-global-teenage-career-preparation_d5f8e3f2-en.html

Why student career preparation is going wrong

In today’s episode, Dominique Russell is joined by Chantel Barnes. She’s Principal at Glenora District School in the rural town of Glenora outside Hobart, Tasmania. It’s a small K-12 school, and they’ve made some incredible progress on attendance in the past 12 months. Chantel tells us about how they’ve achieved this, the initiatives that are making a difference in their setting, and her advice for other schools out there. 
Host: Dominique Russell
Guest: Chantel Barnes
Sponsor: Monash University

Focusing on presence, not absence – flipping the script on attendance

It’s well known from the research that high quality teaching and leadership teams learn from each other's practices. Recently on Teacher, the leadership team from Warriapendi Primary School in Perth, Western Australia, wrote 3 articles for us all about the journey they’ve been on to build instructional capacity in literacy to improve student outcomes in the area. 

Today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom will bring you up to date with the insights they shared in those articles, and we’ll also share some of my other recent highlights from our content – which, by the way, is freely accessible at any time over at our website, teachermagazine.com. Don’t forget, like all of our other episodes of Teacher Staffroom, we’ll be posing some questions for you throughout this podcast, so feel free to pause the audio as you go, gather some colleagues, and discuss together how these stories might be relevant to your school context.
Host: Dominique Russell
Sponsor: Monash University's Let's Talk Teaching podcast

Teacher Staffroom: Building instructional capacity

As industries evolve and the skills gap widens, the question remains: How can we better connect education to employment? 


In this episode of The Idea Spark, host Carl Hooker welcomes Jennifer Wilkerson, VP of Innovations and Advancements at NCCER (National Center for Construction Education and Research), and Andy Dunaway, Product Manager, Career Connected Learning at Pearson. Together, they explore how credentialing, industry alignment, and strong partnerships help students move from the classroom to meaningful careers. Using construction as a lens, this conversation highlights scalable strategies for building career-ready pathways across CTE programs and beyond.


This week's episode of The Idea Spark is brought to you by Pearson, NCCER, and the EdSurge Solutions Studio team.

Career Readiness in the Real World

Hear how communities across education and research are bringing people together to share and learn.

We cover learning and teaching, adapting to AI, accessibility, licensing and much more.

Digifest community hub 2025: Academic libraries, leadership and impact with Rosie Jones and Caroline Ball

Jisc community