Shibaji Roychoudhury speaks with experts and principals about the latest technologies for smart learning
Technology in education is at its all-time high with students becoming digital natives. Gone are the days when students would open their textbooks to read or use their pads to take down notes. The traditional concept of teaching with a chalk and blackboard too is slowly becoming extinct and is being replaced with interactive white boards, lCD screens, projectors and various other audio-visual systems to assist the teachers. As for the students, they get to use laptops and tablets instead of notepads! Sounds unbelievableIJ Welcome to gen-next classrooms where technology has overpowered age-old systems.
“It doesn’t end there, newer and smarter features like our Screen Share feature, which is part of our smart classroom solutions, allows a teacher to share screen and write with students through synchronising material in real time. Teachers can administer quizzes and polls and solution supports documents in pptx, docx and pdf formats. Images in jpeg, png, gif and bmp layouts can also be viewed. The solution also facilitates a classroom with Wi-Fi and works on the intranet,” Aloknath De, software operations CTO at Samsung India says.
The electronic giant have recently tied-up with Modern School, Barakhamba, to set-up smart classrooms that include a complete digital education package consisting of Samsung devices (42 Samsung GAlAXY Note 10.1 devices and a 65-inch interactive whiteboard), software and other complimentary components that enable teachers to make lessons more dynamic by incorporating interactivity and multimedia content.
“It’ll enable instant sharing of what’s on the screen of a teacher’s device to his/her students’ personal devices and vice-versa. It gives teachers greater control over their classroom, increases student engagement and ensures a more efficient transfer of materials to students,” De says.
There are several additional features in these smart classrooms. For instance, a student when asked to solve a maths problem, doesn’t have to walk to the front of the class and do it on the blackboard, rather he can just do it on his tablet and share it with his teacher and other students with just a swipe!
Several schools in the NCR like Bloom Public School, Vasant Kunj, Apeejay School Pritampura, Springdales Dhaula Kuan and more have already resorted to smart classrooms. “Smart classes help teachers to use edu-tech resources such as graphics, animation, 3-D graphic images and video clips to supplement teaching. Our recent results have shown that audio-visual teaching has been more effective for students as opposed to the traditional methods. For instance, teaching diagrams, pictures and lessons are all taught in 3-D visual formats which not only gets students curious about the topic being taught in class but also helps in help him understand the concept better,” Ashutosh Batta, principal, Bloom Public School tells you.
Genesis Global School in Noida too has imbibed the concept of smart classrooms. “From Nursery to Class XII, we have equipped our classrooms with digital resources. There is a wall-mount projector in all rooms which can easily be connected to a laptop or other computing devices which in turn projects everything on the smart board. Our teachers usually use PDF and PPT presentations to teach in class. In case a student fails to come on a given day, these files are emailed to those students to keep them up to speed. We also use various external internet-based programmes wherein students, with the help of the Internet can get into the programme for practicing and completing mathematics and other assignments. Also, we have a tied-up UK-based company and are using ERP solutions for student assessments and remedial work. Teachers are finding it really convenient to work the weaknesses of individual students and work on them using the ERP assessment solutions,” Promod Sharma, principal, Genesis Global School.