Okay, first things first: that headline is a little white lie. Education is never easy. It never was and it never will be. It doesn’t matter what level of schooling we’re talking about. From kindergarten on up through college, the quest to acquire knowledge is one fraught with pitfalls and setbacks and sometimes insurmountable challenges. That’s just the nature of learning and of teaching. The difficulty is itself a part of learning, right? If we all stopped learning when things got hard, well, we’d all be crawling around dad’s ankles still.
But there are definitely ways to make teaching more effective and learning more enjoyable. From field trips to lab experiments, computer games to reading contests, schooling has always been about more than desks and chalkboards. And with the ready availability of video conferencing technology, the nature of teaching and learning has expanded to include even more of the world at large.
But blended learning, which mixes face-to-face learning with digital technology (video conferencing, the internet, chat rooms, etc.), still has room to evolve and grow and change. The latest leap forward comes in the form of Cisco Spark and Cisco Spark Board, which together can create a more versatile and robust form of tech-assisted education.
Cisco Spark, which allows participants to video conference from any mobile device, computer or web browser at any time and from any location, is an intuitive and versatile solution that allows for content sharing, group messaging, video calling and and desktop sharing. It’s a perfect classroom solution for teachers who would like to stay connected to their students outside of the classroom and who might like to bring outside learning opportunities into the classroom.
It is with the addition of the recently released Cisco Spark Board that blended learning ascends to another level. An all-in-one solution that offers wireless presentation, digital whiteboarding, and video conferencing capabilities, Cisco Spark Board combines the best of video conferencing and collaboration technologies. With Cisco Spark Board, educators can create virtual spaces in which students can communicate, brainstorm, whiteboard and share files. It’s like a mobile classroom that anyone can enter anytime and from anywhere.
And since anything created on a Cisco Spark Board can be stored in the cloud, students with mobile devices or home computers can access work done in the classroom whenever and wherever they want. This creates a wonderful continuity between work done at school and work done at home, and it can mitigate some of the difficulties involved in getting students to work together in groups, since students can gather together in the virtual realm and get right down to it.
The root challenges of wrestling with new concepts might not (and should not) disappear, but the barriers to accessing those challenges just got a little bit less forbidding.
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