What’s a Smart Classroom and Why Do You Need It?

Digital Learning Enabled SMART Classrooms

What do you think of when you hear the word classroom? Yes, you think of wooden tables, benches, your teacher’s face, a faded blackboard, a dusty duster and pieces of chalk strewn around. As you look around there are handmade charts explaining important concepts dotting the walls. This nostalgic image, in this era, is changing. Educators and administrators of schools and institutions are moving towards smart classrooms and today’s students will have a very different image when they recall the concept of their classrooms.

What is a Smart Classroom ?

A smart classroom is where the concept of blended learning is blooming. Smart classrooms are technologically enhanced that enable teaching and learning opportunities like never before! Learning is fun when subjects are interesting, and smart classes are doing exactly that by making the student’s most boring subject palatable. By placing a digital learning technology, equipped with a specialised software, assistive listening devices and audio/visual capabilities in a classroom, one is opening up a Pandora box of infinite methods of teaching, learning and growing together as a unit.

Quality education has become essential in today’s world as the skill set of every individual is updating as the years, in terms of technology, passes by. The competitive environment is cut-throat, and one needs to keep up! Technology has entered every aspect of our lives and preventing students and teachers to make the most of such developments is a crime. A smart classroom is a ramped-up mode of education which, instead of taking away from education or the attention span of students, adds opportunities to the existing traditional classroom setup. The opportunity to provide students with quality education by helping them understand concepts better, improve their reading and comprehension skills, and achieve academic excellence.

The traditional lecture-and-note-taking ritual has begun to lose its effectiveness. However, it is quite impossible to quit cold turkey, as books and notes are an integral part of learning in a classroom. Efforts to grow academically is necessary to implement deeper levels of growth and conceptual development. It’s thus the education system’s responsibility to employ various technological opportunities for students’ gains. eins has successfully turned an interactive technology to a curriculum creating and collaborative learning system for teachers and pupils, respectively. It’s emphasises blended learning, the traditional and novel methods of teaching, as a tool to learn basic and complex concepts for an enhanced academic foundation with the help of visuals and activities. With such a view in mind, smart learning was introduced to classrooms. The aforementioned new methods of teaching have been introduced to what is now known as a smart classroom.

Why Do You Need a Smart Classroom?

The following are features which a smart classroom is made of:

Interactive Display: Interactive displays are used to showcase dynamic interactive multi-media content on any LCD screen, plasma screen or glass storefront window. Using EyeRIS, a camera-based device which has gesture recognition technology, the system can adapt to any flat surface and make it interactive.

Collaborative Learning: In a smart classroom, with products such as Spark devices powered by Eins.ai technology, collaboration within a class becomes very easy. Teachers and pupils can come and collaborate on the interactive display, which has multitouch feature, or from their dedicated devices to push their thoughts and doubts on to the display for everyone in class to see.

Curated Educational Material: Teachers, school adminstrators and parents do not have to hesitate about using the internet of teaching content as the Eins.ai line of products already come with curated educational material. The internet content is always updated and filters out anything irrelevant material for classroom purposes.

A Teacher’s Assistant App: It is not uncommon to find a teaching assistant in a traditional classroom. Just like any other assistant, the teachers will find a confidant in AskEins. AskEins is an in-built learning assistant in Spark devices that helps teachers prepare for lessons and teach concepts effectively.

Remote Classroom Access: Absence in class is a common incident; be it the flu, fever or a holiday. Now students in a smart classroom won’t miss a day of learning, thanks to the Eins.ai technology which enables remote access to an ongoing class.  With the permission of the teacher the student can attend the class from wherever he or she is at.

Lesson-Plan Creation: With the help of AskEins, a teacher can take a break from the painstaking process of lesson planning. He or she can make lesson plans on the go! One needs to only login and ask the assistant to populate information pertaining to the topic from the curriculum and Voila! A lesson plan for the particular session is ready. Teacher can now focus on teaching.

Save Class Option: If a teacher feels that the class is worth saving for future reference or to pass on to students for revision, he or she can do so. The entire session can be saved in MyCloud and can be revived anytime it is necessary.

Animated Modules and Videos: In today’s classrooms children are smarter than the methods of teaching, as they have access to alternative source of information like the Internet. So, a smart classroom, in order to keep up with these tech-savvy children, attracts attention by displaying animated media, such as videos, pictures and audios pertaining to the lesson in hand. This not only enhances the aesthetics of teaching but also helps students remember and visualise concepts in their mind, making them easier to learn.

Both students and teachers, are growing enthusiastic about Smart Classrooms and are thrilled about these new innovative and interactive learning sessions, around the globe. The smart classroom approach enables utilisation of the computer, projector, internet and multimedia devices to maintain pace with the modern education scenario.