Chief Executive Officer of Teledom Group, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem, has said that smart classroom, if well harnessed, will revolutionise the country’s educational system, using the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools.
Ekuwem, who demonstrated the features of a smart classroom at a press conference in Lagos recently, called on government and the authorities of educational institutions in the country, to adopt smart classroom in today’s digital economy, where technology is virtually driving everything we do.
According to him, a smart classroom will give digital exposure to both the students and the teacher, and encourage them to do more research work in education.
A smart classroom is an (ICT) based migration from a conventional analogue classroom to an intelligent classroom, designed to make student learn faster with minimal assistance from the teachers.
The smart classroom, which is a vision of Teledom Group, will be launched in Abuja this week at the e-Nigeria conference, put together by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).
Highlighting some of the features of a smart classroom, Ekuwem said “it comes with wireless or cable connection with Wi-Fi access. Students come in with their laptops and get connected to the Wi-Fi through wireless connection, or through cable connection. Students without laptops could use the available laptops in the smart classroom.”
He further explained that the smart classroom, consisted of two digital cameras, with one facing the interactive whiteboard to capture all that would appear on the whiteboard during the course of the lecture, while the other digital camera would face the teacher directly and capture all that the teacher says. It has an infra-red sensor for motion detection, capturing and recording. All interactions of the teacher are captured in a server. If during the lecture, the teacher wants to bring in an expert from another university or school, who is an author of a recommended textbook, the expert could be linked to talk to the students by video conferencing, via broadband. The expert could be in Europe, Canada, USA, or far away country or within the country, Ekuwem said.
With a smart classroom, if a student is unable to attend classes, he can through the permission of the lecturer, connect to the smart classroom, via a user name and password, and be part of the lecture from where ever the student may be, outside the smart classroom.
Again the students can ask questions while lecture is going on, without others knowing. What the student does is to ask the question, send it electronically to the teachers’ screen and the teacher is prompted through the flashing on his screen.
The teacher immediately knows the student that asked the question, because each desk is programmed and linked electronically to the teacher’s screen. The teacher will either threat the question generally and sends answer to all the students on their laptops through broadcast, or the teacher may decide to answer the question individually and send to the individual student, while lecture is still on, Ekuwem explained.
