By Dave McCarron, Director, Education EMEA, Intel
This year at BETT we saw more variety than ever before. On show was a huge breadth of technology and ideas spanning education-specific solutions for laptops, tablets or 2 in 1’s, coding programs for students; to plans for a new computer science curriculum in schools across England. What became apparent at the event is that learning and teaching - in 2014 and beyond - could look very different from today’s typical classroom.
There is certainly demand for this change: children in the western world are bringing their own devices to schools and most of them are using multiple gadgets before they even enter the classroom. As a result, teachers need to find ways to engage this new generation of tech-savvy young learners; and this is exactly where our education solutions come in.
At the event we unveiled innovative education-focused reference devices for the 21st century learning environment. These included the new Intel® Education Tablet and the Intel® classmate PC, all part of Intel® Education Solutions, which aim to transform learning and teaching to boost student engagement and life-long learning.
Our solutions offer both teachers and students the power to create media-rich content and easily work with devices, such as digital microscopes, for hands-on and interactive learning. At the event, we showcased these capabilities with 10 teachers teaching live lessons in the Intel Classroom. These lessons demonstrated how technology can provide gripping content; for example, one lesson asked the students to determine the forces affecting the orbit of a satellite using SPARKvue software, which tracks movement with the built in motion sensor in the 10in Intel Education Tablet. The technology allowed the student to see and feel the effects of forces whilst seeing the results in real time.
Not only is this method of teaching engaging for tech-hungry young people, but it also offers the possibility of extracting live feedback on the lesson and receiving results on a child’s performance in real-time – ultimately creating a more personalised experience for the learner. In the future, with the help of perceptual computing, such as 3D cameras or sensors embedded in state-of the art technology, drops in productivity and concentration could be picked up with the learning content adjusted in real-time to help motivate the student. Analysed on a larger scale via advanced analytics tools, this data could reveal common learning and performance trends, giving teachers contextual insight from which to build education programmes.
The next step is to make sure technology-enabled learning is really helping to transform education. This is exactly why we were also involved in the Education World Forumprior to BETT, to join the discussion with educators and governments from around the globe on making this a reality. The event looked at how the true potential for learning can be realised through new pedagogies in our technology-rich society.
We’re at an extremely important point in the evolution of the classroom. The possibility of a truly interactive and technology-enabled learning experience being made ever more possible by the fast pace of innovation in this hugely important sector, and we’re excited to be a part of this transformation.
