DIGITAL LIBRARY
INTERNET OF THINGS IN EDUCATION: SMART ENVIRONMENT
Institute of Information and Communication Technologies - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BULGARIA)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2017 Proceedings
Publication year: 2017
Pages: 4679-4685
ISBN: 978-84-697-6957-7
ISSN: 2340-1095
doi: 10.21125/iceri.2017.1256
Conference name: 10th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 16-18 November, 2017
Location: Seville, Spain
Abstract:
Education is an essential sphere of human activity and is closely related to humanity’s progress and sustainable development. Knowledge of the new technical achievements has become rapidly applicable and usable in different fields of the social life. Contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT) are already a vital part of teaching and learning and their standardization has a significant impact on the process of their integration into education. All advantages of the new technologies can be used in a learning environment to make a teaching practice more flexible, attractive, appropriate and efficient.

Internet of things (IoT) has a valuable role in the effort to achieve the aforementioned qualities. Different wired and wireless standards as well as various multimedia and smart technologies shape this field and allow different approaches to be implemented in the learning process not only at school level but also at universities. The main users of these innovative technologies are students and teachers; parents have a key function in this process as well.

This research discusses the integration of IoT in the education and the value that they can add to this field. The paper stresses on the main features of IoT that enable them to support the learning process according to specific requirements and limitations. The first part of this research reviews a variety of requirements for a smart learning environment and its inherent characteristics in general and offers different techniques and IoT solutions for making students more engaged in the study.

Secondly, our work systematises and describes some of the useful IoT technologies and standards that completely benefit studying, teaching, monitoring and managing of the entire educational cycle. Next section scrutinises a multimedia model which is a students’ interface for a smart learning environment. Furthermore, it describes how the synergy of different technologies allows remote physical items to be an integral part of an enhanced teaching-learning process and facilitates the provision of smart educational services. A significant part of the concept is the multimedia module, and its main advantage is the ability to create virtual reality according to the educational material in all learning subjects. This module is suggested to provide an economically efficient way for improving and boosting smart classroom resources; to support remote access to external resources and additional information by using different types of smart devices. Thus smart classroom equipment and learning resources can be supplemented both in physical and virtual aspects so that they can impact the teaching process by enabling various innovative and engaging types of learning interactions.
Keywords:
IoT, innovation, smart classroom, multimedia, standards.