With the active development of the Internet of Things technologies, they are being gradually implemented in different spheres of our life. Today it can be rather challenging to find a business domain or industry that still doesn’t have any IoT use cases. In this article, we’d like to focus on one precise sphere. We are going to analyze what new opportunities are opened in the sphere of education thanks to IoT.
The times when students and teachers had only textbooks and blackboards are already in the past as today they have many more tools that can make the learning process much more interesting, engaging, and efficient.
Of course, the introduction of IoT systems has helped schools to change a lot of administrative processes. Now it has become simple to increase the level of security at schools and to monitor key resources and assets. But IoT software development has also impacted the way teachers can organize lessons and provide information to students.
Below you can find some of the most popular cases that demonstrate how IoT solutions can influence the sphere of education, including schools, colleges, and universities.
Personalized, student-oriented programs
Personalization is one of the most important trends in education that we can observe today. Especially, its rise became obvious after the first wave, often the coronavirus pandemic, when it was clearly revealed that “one-size-fits-all” approaches simply didn’t work. Now schools are looking for new ways to ensure the necessary level of education for all their students regardless of any conditions. Smart sensors can help teachers to get valuable insights into their students’ progress in order to plan lessons in a proper way.
Though these solutions still haven’t been widely adopted, there are already such devices that can be used for this purpose. For example, there are smart robots that are able to personalize educational materials and lesson plans in accordance with the percentage of correctly answered questions that each student has.
When teachers have a good understanding of the result of each student, it is much easier for them to see which approaches work better than others and which of them are not effective at all.
Immersive foreign language learning
In the majority of schools all over the world, children have the possibility to learn at least one foreign language. Nevertheless, the process may seem quite boring and challenging even when teachers try to add some gamification elements. Moreover, very often young children and teenagers just do not have enough motivation to learn foreign languages as they have almost no possibility to practice their skills. However, IoT devices in combination with VR tools can change the game. Thanks to VR goggles, children can fully immerse into the world of the language that they are trying to learn. When they find themselves in a completely new virtual world they can communicate with different animated characters, fulfill various tasks and interact with different elements. They even have the possibility to make virtual trips around the world, visit the countries where their targeted languages are used and learn a lot of interesting things about the culture of these regions.
Automated attendance monitoring
Maybe this use case doesn’t have a direct impact on the educational process but it definitely facilitates some tasks for teachers and helps them to avoid losing their time trying to record attendance at every lesson. IoT can automate this manual process and quickly provide all the necessary reports and statistics.
Attendance can be tracked with the help of biometric tools or ID cards with barcodes that every student will have. And as soon as a person enters the room, the system will get this information.
Smart boards
Modern smart boards for classrooms s are real game-changers, and they have a lot in common with traditional blackboards (yes, these boards are still used by teachers and students for writing something that the whole class will see). But smart boards are interactive and provide a lot of new opportunities. Now everything that is written on the smartboards can be shown on the students’ tablets and can be stored on cloud platforms which means that data won’t be lost. Moreover, when you want to show an image, you do not need to print it out and attach it to the board, it will be enough to upload it to a special app that will demonstrate the desired picture on the board. The same can be done with videos.
Conclusion
At the moment, it is quite difficult to speak about the mass adoption of IoT solutions in the sphere of education. Nevertheless, step-by-step this technology is being introduced in the educational process. And given the benefits that it can provide to this sphere, it is sensible to suppose that one day we will see much more IoT-powered solutions in classrooms all over the world.
