Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

Remote sensing and control technologies, delivered over the ever-present network, will enable real-time access to laboratories, sophisticated equipment, and experiments directly from the classroom. Advanced video conferencing and collaboration tools combined with real-time language translation tools will allow the creation of global learning communities. Real-time recording and indexing tools will allow lectures to be captured and made searchable in a single pass.

Using a wide variety of emerging technologies, smarter classrooms will bring the outside world into the class space, affording students the opportunity to participate in increasingly active, hands-on learning activities. Simultaneously, as learning technology becomes more mobile, the smart "classroom" will extend beyond the physical space of a given room, going along with learners wherever they happen to be.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• facilitates e-learning, collaboration among different institutions, and other distributed educational opportunities
• enables centralized access to a variety of reference data and multimedia assets to use in discussion, presentation, or experimentation
• allows multiple means of introducing material, supporting different learning styles of students and highlighting particular aspects of a single concept
• encourages interactive learning

Examples

• An entirely new type of classroom is enabled by the GooBall PDA. Each student gets one of these devices, consisting of a PDA, a backpack-cum-power supply, and a thin, touch-sensitive, gooseneck LCD screen. The teacher is placed in the center of the room, which is divided into three work areas using noise-cancellation barriers. In one area, the teacher lectures; the other areas are for group work and individual work. Students move between the spaces as necessary. http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,51518,00.html

• Tsinghua University has developed a smart classroom that incorporates pervasive computing technologies to sense where learners are in the physical space, what they are doing, and what they may need. The lecturer controls the display with voice and gesture.

• Rutgers University's C.O.O.L. Classroom (Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory) brings an oceanography lab right into the middle- and high-school classroom. The C.O.O.L. Classroom allows students to access real-time data collected off the coast of New Jersey and includes lesson plans and a rich array of resources to help teachers use the data in their classrooms. http://www.coolclassroom.org/home.html

For Further Reading

Technology-enabled Classrooms: Simplicity and Uniformity of Tools Make Them Truly 'Smart.'
(Dan Gordon, TLtC Contributor, February 2005.) Discusses the use of smart classrooms at UC Berkeley and pedagogical and technical issues. http://www.uctltc.org/news/2005/02/feature.php

Remote Labs on the Internet Around the World
This list, maintained by the Telelabs Project at the University of Western Australia, links to schools around the world that have remote laboratories for a variety of disciplines accessible over the Internet. http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au/links.html