Let’s take a look at these 10 innovative uses for Google Glass in the world of education.
Google Glass & Athletics:
Even though this might sound odd at first, Google Glass can play a unique role in making college athletics more interactive. Football, basketball and baseball players for instance, can wear this gadget during practice and get real-time instructions from their coach. Players can view recordings and understand better the major concerns before going into a game. The audience can also be made a part of this to allow them to see the preparations from the team’s perspective.
Scheduling and Organizing:
These two are frequent activities in all kinds of educational institutes. Teachers can use Google Glass to their benefit by creating schedules that are shareable with their colleagues and students. This would ensure that everyone is well-informed about any upcoming submissions and exams and would also help avoid any miscommunication.
Remembering Names:
With teachers taking classes of 40-50 students each, names of this many students can be hard to memorize sometimes. Google Glass takes care of this problem with its facial recognition feature. Even though remembering names sounds like a simple concern, it helps out a lot in the daily school life.
Remote Teaching:
For those students interested in distance learning, Google Glass is the perfect gadget to own. Using this device, instructors can make first-person video guides in real time that will pretty much be like a classroom learning experience. They can also share lessons, especially the ones that have practical demonstrations. All of this helps in creating a highly interactive environment among the students and teachers and establishes the ideal distance learning dynamic. With online education becoming a dominant force in the education world, Google Glass can certainly be a very welcomed innovation.
Real-Time Interactive Field Trips:
Learning work best when combined with actual physical activities. Field trips are one of the best teachers, especially for students of history, politics, archaeology, paleontology, etc. And the best part about Google Glass here is that, not only can it help students reach typical field trip locations, it can also take them into areas that are otherwise hard to get to – like the Oval Office, a war zone and Mount Everest, etc. Such experiences can truly open up a whole new world of learning and understanding for students and make education all the more fun.
Assisting Foreign Students:
Universities and colleges in the US are no stranger to foreign students, either on an exchange semester or completing a whole degree in the US. Even though universities do their best to help ensure everyone adjusts easily into the system, Google Glass can be of great assistance here. It can provide real-time language translation for students coming in from different parts of the world and help ensure that no one has trouble keeping up due to the language barrier. In addition to helping international students, Google Glass can also help attract prospective students from all over the world by helping them visit campus without actually visiting it. Before travelling across continents to get to a particular college in the US, students can actually experience life on campus through the lens of Google Glass. This will not only help them make a well-informed decision, but it will also help ease any anxieties they have about moving abroad for education.
Collaborating With Parents:
Google Glass also helps establish a line of communication between parents and teachers. With this technology, teachers can send the report cards directly to parents and involve them more in the learning processes that are employed for their children. By establishing a direct and easy line of communication with the parents, Google Glass enables a better learning environment for students, both, at school and at home.
Receiving Questions from Students:
There are always students in every class who have questions but do not ask them due to shyness or other such factors. Google Glass gives students like these a chance to ask questions during the lecture that will help them understand concepts better. It is even possible for instructors to poll the student audience to see if they are getting the difficult concepts or if they feel the need for an alternative explanation. This will ensure that there is actual learning in the classroom and instead of just getting by, students are truly grasping the difficult concepts being taught.
Alumni Participation:
Alumni can prove to be really good teachers. Since they have been in the exact same spot as the current students and have gone through the same processes, their experiences can be good learning opportunities. Alumni who are in the field in various respects can give a very realistic view to current students about what to expect from life after graduation.
Taking Notes in Class:
Google Glass can help students make quick notes of what they need to remember. This technology can also help to bookmark important passages from various texts so that they can go through them again, or at times of assessments. This will help students focus more on what is being taught in the class rather than focusing on writing everything down. By listening more intently and understanding matters on the spot, students can not only grasp concept much quicker, but also in a much more effective manner.
Google Glass is certainly a very intelligent invention. Even though it can have plenty of applications in a wide array of fields, the field of education stands to benefit greatly from its presence. With advancing technology, internet speeds becoming higher than ever and distance learning becoming increasingly popular, it is only a matter of time before Google Glass becomes a classroom staple in colleges and universities all across the United States.
