Abstract |
Technology has already permeated education at all levels, ranging from pre-school to higher
education. When used appropriately, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can
transform learning into an engaging and interactive process and enhance teaching with the use
of educator-oriented tools. Nowadays, Interactive Whiteboards (IWbs) stand out as a widespread
technological equipment that has already permeated classrooms, with their usage extending from
pre-school to university. Many advantages exist in integrating IWBs into the classroom
environment. They are considered as a great tool to improve the educational process, while their
acceptance is constantly growing; that is because they enable educators to express their
creativity, but equally important, because they encourage students’ active participation.
This work presents the CognitOS Classboard, an educator- and student- oriented framework,
employed on the “Intelligent Classroom Board” - a wall-to-wall projected Interactive board - which
takes advantage of the facilities offered by the intelligent environment and the amenities
stemming from its large dimensions (wall-size), in order to enhance educational activities and
provide new educator- and student- oriented experiences.
From the students’ perspective, the CognitOS Classboard, apart from offering access to useful
educational applications, provides mechanisms capable of transforming the classroom into an
immersive environment on demand. Such a facility can enable interaction with the real world in
ways that were not possible before (e.g. immerse students into a rainforest). Additionally, taking
advantage of its multi-touch functionality, the proposed system supports student collaboration in
order to enhance the learning process.
From the educators’ perspective, the CognitOS Classboard aims to support lecturing. In particular,
the main goal is to provide a unified working environment for the large interactive board, offering
a straightforward ‘natural’ interaction paradigm, which allows educators to orchestrate their
teaching assets in an optimal way (e.g. use different workspaces to place different types of
applications) and present information-rich material to the students. Additionally, it aims to
support course preparation before class, by equipping educators with user-friendly tools that
allow them to initialize the contents of the board with the appropriate material in advance.
Aiming to blend seamlessly in the classroom environment and in keeping with the already existing
standards and processes of teaching / lecturing, the CognitOS Classboard enhances wellestablished interaction metaphors (e.g. writing on the digital board is similar to writing on a plain
whiteboard) and supports multimodal interaction through: i) touch on the wall surface with the
finger or a special marker, ii) a remote presenter, iii) voice commands, iv) sophisticated techniques
that take advantage of the Intelligent Classroom’s Ambient Intelligence facilities (e.g. through user
position tracking, an application window can tail the educator while moving around), and v) the
controller application for handheld devices (tablet).
This thesis presents the CognitOS Classboard, describes the design process and its functionality,
elaborates on the implementation details and discusses the results of a user-based evaluation
study in the context of an Intelligent (University) Classroom.
|