Technology is everywhere, and it has also spilled into classrooms now, thanks to the pandemic.
With remote learning as the new norm schools and institutes have been investing in technological devices so that students can continue learning even from home.
BYOD policies, 1-to-1 initiatives, smartphones for students, and with schools buying iPads and Chromebooks to extend to students and teachers, no classroom will ever be the same without such a combination of technology, which was used before lockdown for education purposes.
With technology tiding over the traditional modes of education (i.e, blackboard classroom learning), classroom device management has become an inescapable reality for all: students, teachers, administrators, and school IT administrators.
What is Classroom Device Management?
The situation in a regular classroom has always nearly been chaotic – with students wanting to frequently talk to their peers and get distracted. With online education, there’s no way for school authorities to know whether students are absorbing their lessons or not. The smallest thing to worry about in remote education is students opening YouTube and browsing through it during ongoing lectures.
Therefore, teachers have been constantly struggling to maintain decorum and ensure students are being attentive in online classrooms. Teachers simply want their students to be interested in learning and to see them eager with doubts and hungry for more information.
With a classroom device management tool, educators can easily prevent distractive or disruptive use of mobile devices while students are learning. Mobile device management solutions help the IT administrators or teachers to ensure:
- Students are on the same screen of class
- Remotely access a student’s device
- Share a student’s screen during classroom discussions
Read More: Top Remote Learning Tools To Enable Seamless Education
Benefits of Classroom Device Management for Educators
With a classroom management tool, teachers can effectively monitor student activities as well as provide support and feedback, and progress through the content without any scope of distraction.
Here’s how classroom device management helps teachers to monitor student activities online:
1. Classroom Collaboration
Team building activities and group discussions are essential to boost student development learning; such collaboration activities also encourage students to increase participation in classroom activities.
But in a large classroom setup or remote learning, group discussions are not easy to plan because chances are students may speak up out of turn. The shy introverts of the class may never get the opportunity to put forth their perspective during these sessions or worse, they may feel left out. For teachers, processing all the responses and providing in one go, and maintaining the classroom decorum may also become difficult.
Most classroom management tools offer screen-sharing or a group chat option that provides an easy alternative to promote collaborative learning. With the screen-sharing functionality, teachers can show their screen or any student’s screen to either the whole class or even an individual student. This way teachers can explain concepts effectively and encourage a collaborative attitude in students. By creating chat groups, teachers can create student groups, similar to offline class groups, and assign them collaborative tasks to work on. By conducting such group activities, teachers can train students to effectively use technology and also encourage them to collaborate with each other and come up with a solution.
With the one-to-one chat feature in MDMs, students learning remotely can directly get in touch with their teachers to communicate their queries. The chat feature allows teachers to discreetly reach out to students without disturbing the whole class and gives students appropriate feedback on task completion. An MDM effectively allows teachers to align their instructional strategies as per the different needs of the students, it also allows them to give out individual responses to each student.
Read More: 4 Cs of Learning: Integrating Technology with Classroom Learning
2. Easy Assessments
A classroom management solution allows teachers to create the following different types of tests:
- Multiple-choice questions
- short answer questions
- Essay-type questions
- Objective questions
During the regular online or offline tests, it was difficult for school authorities to ensure students were not cheating on their tests by copying answers from their peers. In offline tests, teachers especially had to walk through the entire class to make sure students do not copy answers or use mobile devices. But with a class control tool, teachers can block incoming messages during school or exam time and disable access to any unauthorized application or website, making sure students aren’t using unfair means to pass the exam.
3. Complete Classroom Visibility
If students have complete access to technology in schools, there are chances they may use devices that may not solely be for an educational setting, such as:
gaming applications, irrelevant web surfing, instant messengers, and social media. These are among the biggest distractions that can put education to a backseat in remote classrooms. Without an MDM for education, teachers may not have any way to monitor how students are using their devices during class.
A classroom management tool allows teachers to monitor every student’s on-screen activity in real-time at the tip of their fingers. If educators catch students engaging in distractions, they can simply disable students’ keyboards and mouse activities, or teachers can even blank out students’ computer screens.
Students will receive notifications immediately about their misconduct, and the program will automatically redirect them to the ongoing lesson, thereby saving teaching time or any extra communication.
With a proper MDM tool, schools can entirely lock devices they hand out to students in kiosk mode to disable students’ access to all the blacklisted applications and websites specified by the teachers.
4. Simplified Grading
When it comes to e-learning and online assessments, teachers can easily grade submitted assessments using online tools. These tools are specially designed to interpret test answers on a mass scale. Several apps also give educators status reports with a bird’s-eye view, which marks each student’s progress throughout the year or in a particular term.
These reports also mark areas that require improvement so that teachers can clearly identify their students’ learning struggles at the start of the year itself. A classroom device management program not only makes grading easier for teachers but also helps students get all the help and attention they need to learn better and develop their skills.
5. Automating Everyday Tasks
The biggest advantage of using technology in the classroom is that it saves a lot of time for teachers, which can instead be used to devise a new instruction strategy or
Several applications are available online that are specially designed for teachers to pass on their daily, tedious workflows. For instance, teachers can use an app that automatically takes daily attendance at the start or end of the day so the task doesn’t take time out of their day. Students can mark their names on documents when they join the classes, and teachers can continue focusing on other important areas, like finishing the portion and ensuring everyone is able to grasp the concepts.
Infographic Case Study: How Scalefusion Can Impact The Education Industry
Discover how Doctor’s Own Prep Academy (DOPA) leveraged Scalefusion’s MDM solutions to gain complete control over student tablets and secure digital learning resulting in improved 70% of students’ productivity. See the below Infographic.
Read More: How to Implement IT Automation for Device Management
Conclusion
Classroom device management makes it easier for teachers to manage students and classes, especially in times of remote learning.
With a good MDM tool like Scalefusion, teachers can organize, plan, create the class curriculum, and control applications that students use for learning. Most importantly, an MDM ensures students remain safe and secure from dangerous or inappropriate content through web filtering. Plus, IT administrators can always simply whitelist or blacklist websites or password-protect content to ensure students are always safe online.
