From Smart Home to Smart Classroom: There’s a New Kid in School!
There is nothing more important than teaching children, and with all the advancements that we have today kids everywhere are getting smarter. Teachers care about the students in their classroom, which is why many of them are searching for alternatives to traditional learning. The students today are nothing like the students that have been seen in the past because of recent advancements in technology. While some digital products, like the unwanted use of smartphones disrupting the lesson, could cause an issue for teachers, there are many smart products that are designed to make the classroom more conductive for learning in general.
How Smart Classrooms Benefit Students
In recent years, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education has been on the rise in school, and it has enabled the use of many IoT products as the children explore these fields. With more jobs in the marketplace concerning technology and the use of technology, STEM education has been able to connect children with smart devices. Some of these devices include electronic whiteboards, which enable teachers to teach in an advanced manner, tablets, which allow children to download books or electronically answer questions the teacher presents, and even IoT lights, allowing the teachers to dim or turn on and off the lights with their voice. There are even schools that have integrated notifications so that when a student walks past a classroom they attend, they’ll receive the notification that an assignment needs to be finished soon.
Outside of the classroom, students use smartphones, smart watches, and laptops, so their exposure to smart products is not limited just to the classroom. However, having smart products in the classroom can really improve engagement because it is similar to what the students are used to doing when outside of school. It can also help the short attention spans that many younger students have. The ability to set reminders or get notifications about homework could help students to complete the assignments when they were unlikely to before. Both teachers and students benefit from these products by increasing engagement and immersing the students in a better learning experience. The new students today also require different levels of comfort than students in the past. Smart products can help make the environment more comfortable so that they are better prepared to learn.
Optimizing Comfort for Better Learning
Students are not limited in their technological knowledge. With so many different products out on the market today, they are exposed to many different interfaces and can pick up on new ones easily. While teachers may be hesitant to add smart products into their lessons because they fear it will be hard to learn or distracting to the lesson, research continually proves that it increases engagement for both teachers and students, which leads to better learning. This could be due to the fact that students are more comfortable in this environment. Humans naturally like to stay in their comfort zone, and the rising generations’ comfort zones include technology. They have grown up with technology from the time they were born, so it only makes sense to implement it into the classroom so they are comfortable.
A comfortable classroom is extremely important for learning. According to research, when a person feels more relaxed they are more apt to learn. Comfort was the most necessary element in a classroom according to a study with 775 students. But because comfort looks different to every person, it can be hard to find a happy medium where the students and teacher feel most “at home” and comfortable. This is something that smart products can help with as well. Because smart and IoT products have the ability to track information, there is one upcoming smart product that could revolutionize classroom comfort. GreenMe’s cube has the ability to track environmental factors, like noise, air quality, temperature, and the lighting quality. This small cube won’t take up much space in the classroom, but it will optimize comfort levels by giving teachers reports on what is going on in the classroom. These analytics can help an educator decide whether they should keep doing what they are doing or if they should change something in the environment to allow for better learning. If the classroom is too hot or cold, students may feel uneasy and won’t be able to concentrate on the material being presented to them. Or if the classroom is too loud from outside noise, the cube can relay that information and the teacher can come up with ideas to minimize the sound being heard.
Everyone likes to be comfortable, and students are most comfortable when surrounded by the things they know. While plenty of smart products can be added to the classroom to engage them in learning, there are also products out there, like GreenMe’s cube, which will make the environment better for the students.
Add comment