The Smart Space has many uses in the classroom. During this time of trying to figure out how to reopen schools were thrilled to offer an innovative solution!. The Smart Space keeps kids social distanced in the building while also providing consistency and safety when remote learning is a necessary part of the plan.
Higher Education: Study Space for Online Student Success, Anywhere!
The Smart Space creates a distraction free learning zone in any living situation. Whether it’s a student returning to school who has a busy household with family all around or a young college student living in a small apartment with multiple roommates, the Smart Space creates distraction free learning zone for the student.
This creates a boundary around the student, letting everyone in the household know that the student has committed to academics when inside the space.
It shuts out all home distractions from the view of the student allowing them to focus fully on the academic learning task.
When joining a live class via video, it allows them to join without distractions in their background and also maintaining privacy.
Visible Online Learning-Safety Risks Solved
I will be sharing my unique perspective based on my professional and personal experience as an online educator. Keeping student safety as a priority when moving to visible virtual learning is my priority.
In a brick and mortar school building,administrators go to great lengths to ensure their schools are secure and students are safe. Teachers and volunteers undergo background checks and every guest must check in and out at the office. Parents can trust that every adult who has access to their child during the day has been cleared of any alarming behaviors or convictions.
When a student attends an online class where the teacher either requests or requires his students to turn on their webcam to join, without first solving for student safety, all involved are unknowingly vulnerable to potential risks.
Risk #1. Typically, when students join a video classroom space such as Zoom, they can see all the other students on the screen as well. Without advance planning, the school has no control over individual student home environments.—students are no longer equal. As a school administrator, in conducting necessary home visits, I realized that asking students to create their own safe space to join a video call was an unrealistic expectation..
Risk #2. Similarly, the home environment can be a wild card where anything can and might will happen. Inside the privacy of their homes, people can choose to be dressed anyway they choose. They are not subject to a school dress code, for example. Being visible to a webcam creates the possibility for some extraordinary scenarios. Accidental viewings range from humorous to distracting to potentially damaging. Accidents can and will happen if safety is not planned for.
Risk #3.We have no control over who has access to view students in a visible virtual learning setting. If we are going through great lengths to protect students in brick and mortar schools, why then are we opening the digital doors wide to any and all? When a student is visible on the screen, anyone within viewing distance in the student's home environment is also able to see what the students sees-their classmates. In trying to create a comfortable environment, a teacher may instruct students they have a choice to keep their cameras off. This effectively "blinds" the teacher to who may be participating-undetected. We protect students from individuals that may have harmful intentions in our brick and mortar settings and we can do that for visible virtual learning environment also.
As an online school administrator,the greatest desire of online teachers was to have the missing visible element to their instructional sessions, all while responsibly planning for student safety. but we knew we couldn’t responsibly do that without first solving for safety. Successfully implementing the visible element to the virtual instruction required a willingness for parents to turn on the webcams-trusting we had put the security and safety measures in place.
Visible online learning is absolutely the best possible way to go! Research has shown that facial expressions of students are significantly correlated to their emotions, which can help teachers recognize their comprehension. Responsibly making student safety our number one priority is easy!
Seven of the ten years I have spent in administration of an online school was spent dedicated to solving this issue. I have the tools, skill set and knowledge to move us all forward into safe visible online learning. I’d love to draw on my unique and specific experience to help you move quickly, safely, and successfully into the arena of visible virtual learning! Click on the link in my profile for more information and for my contact information.
Security and Equality
The security and equality of your students is always important. The Smart Space ensures that every students security is protected when going visible. The Smart Space also ensures that every student has an equal learning environment and establishes the most effective and positive learning environment in online learning.
Protection
The protection of your students should always be the #1 goal when going visible. The ONLY way to be completely sure your students are protected is by purchasing each of them a Smart Space. Check out this video based on a real life situation that explains why you need the Smart Space.
What are the problems the Smart Space solves?
Safety - Security - Equality
This program of pairing Zoom with SMART Spaces will enrich the learning experience for students attending virtually by making them visible to the teachers and classmates. It is an effort to increase academic engagement, foster a more positive relationship to peers, teachers and self, as well as to hold students accountable to themselves and others at a higher level during learning time. The use of SMART Spaces by each of your students will also protect the class from distractions that happen in a home environment and keep the student focused and engaged in learning.
Why Smart Space?
There are simply no other variations on a SMART Space that can be purchased to place in each of your students’ homes. This is an innovative product that we are on the forefront of implementing in a school setting. We know that people will be spending a lot of time in these spaces. Students spend hours everyday in live class.
We also know that teachers and parents will access SMART Spaces for face-to-face meetings, conversations, IEP meetings, etc. We want everyone to feel comfortable during the time spent in the Smart Space and not feel like the walls are closing in on them.
The SMART Space is wide enough for two people to be in at the same time. If a parent wants to be involved in the class connect, or two employees need to be looking at the same computer, two people fit comfortably in the space, side-by-side.
The SMART Space is tall enough for a lot of head room and so that most people can stand up in the space for any reason. We want your students to stand up and stretch, use movement to help support learning, and feel that their SMART Space is an extension of the classroom. The SMART Space is only three feet by three feet by five feet, which is all the room needed to set up a private, personal space in any home setting
Significant Advantages to Using a Smart Space in Your Virtual Environment
Real-time test proctoring in a distraction free, controlled, secure environment, ensuring students are showing what they know, validating assessment data.
Equalizes the learning environment, solving for differing living situations and creates similar learning environments for all as would occur when students entered a traditional school setting.
Provides visibility to teacher and classmates only. This will ensure that our students are only visible and exposed to their teacher and classmates.
Eliminates potential church vs. state issues by not showing religious decorations in students’ homes.
Allows for safe social interaction and collaboration between students that is difficult at best in a blackboard class setting; strengthens relationships student-to-teacher and student-to-student with whom they have the opportunity to develop friendships with through seeing each other in class and interacting visually with the security of the space keeping only those interacting in view.
Why Not Just a Blank Background?
Protection of our students is our number one concern when it comes to being visible on webcam in a virtual classroom. When students are visible in this way they are projecting to all the other home learning environments in which their classmates reside. This can be unsettling as we are concerned about who can view our students. If we had used simply a background this would have left it open for others in the home to be sitting near the student and view all the students in the classroom. If you think about it like a brick and mortar classroom, all visitors check in at the main office and announce themselves as to who they are and why they are there. It’s similar with the space. An adult who chooses to enter the space with their child is checked in as their learning coach and the classmates in the room know they are there to help their student.
Distraction in the home environment is a big driving force to want the student to be INSIDE a learning space and not simply have a background behind them. The SMART Space will eliminate as many distractions as possible, such as televisions that may be on, other siblings attending their classes, dogs running around, and any number of other thing naturally happening in home environments.
Without the protection of the sides it is still open to have people that are not enrolled in the class to walk into view of the webcam. These people not involved in UTVA or not in this particular class are not held to the same standards (ie: appropriate dress code) as the students and pose risk to the learning environment. It also is easily accessible for pets to enter the field of view and become a distraction. The four-sides keep what we want in the view of the webcam and what we don’t want (distractions and things that could possibly be inappropriate) out of it.
Social/Emotional Human Needs Not Currently Being Met
Invisibility
To address the “invisibility” of students attending virtual schools a commitment is needed to replace your current non-video capable platform like Blackboard with one that is video friendly like Zoom for class instruction which allows 300+ participants to use their web cams, speak on the microphone, and comment in a chat box in real time. In conjunction, you will need to ensure safety, security, privacy, distraction free work space and an equalized environment for teachers and students by pairing it with the Smart Space.
Academic Advantages of Using Smart Space
If you are administering all diagnostic, interim, quizzes, unit assessments etc… un-monitored with no active proctor, is your data valid?
If every assessment you give is potentially open book, open neighbor/parent, open google with zero way to ensure that it is not, how are you confidently accepting that data as the child’s ability level and making instructional decisions based off it?
Teaching reading
without seeing them repeat the sounds that you are asking them to.
Asking them to write sight words and never really knowing if they actually did.
Modeling finger stretching and assuming they are doing it along with you.
Reading the story after requesting that they follow along with no way to see if they are or if they are looking everywhere and anywhere but at the book or screen where the story is displayed.
Culture/Engagement Advantages of Using Smart Space
Establishing and maintaining relationships between teacher-to-student and student-to-student
Our teachers do not have eyes on the students, as the Blackboard platform only allows one person on the web cam at a time, and our school policy does not allow students to appear on the webcam due to privacy, security, safety and other concerns. Zoom allows all of the students in a class to be visible on their webcams, interacting with each other and the teacher, showing their work in real time, and providing the essential non-verbal communication which is lacking in platforms such as Blackboard or Canvas. The essential partner to the use a video capable platform such as Zoom is the use of a physical visual barrier that protects our students, teachers, and families.