FEATURES OF SMART CLASSROOM APPLI ATION PACKAGE

 Features of Smart Classroom Application Package

            The applications which are used in Smart Classroom are specially designed to facilitate collaborative learning process. This smart classroom application package has built in collaborative learning features for learners, instructors and teaching assistants. The package also provides communication features among students, instructors and teaching assistants. The detail of Smart Classroom features are described below.

            The application suite has vigilance capability and generates alarms and message alerts to students for his/her home assignments, schedule of the class in accordance with the current time and location. All the relevant lecture materials are synchronized between PDAs and desktop computer, before and after the class.

            As portable devices are to be synchronized with the desktop computer which contain the original lecture materials, the application package synchronizes the lecture material between the devices of instructor or teaching assistant

            In order to make communication possible the application package is used to exchange and share the documents by drawing and these documents can be synchronized among the PDAs of students.

Communication channel for Teaching Assistant to Students

a) The smart classroom application package provides the facility of sharing educational material i.e. lecture notes, course schedule, grade sheets, survey forms between the instructor and the students. This distribution can be scheduled periodically or at the beginning of a class when the indicator light gone dim.

b) The instructor has also primary concern with preparing and conducting exams for student groups with the provided features of the application.

Student to Instructor communication

a) The application suite facilitates students to record their questions or requirements in text format in their PDAs. As soon as the TA or instructor switches to the classrooms, the answers of the questions being asked by the students are generate and transferred to the TA’s PDA.

b) Students can also submit the requisite progress report using the application suite. At the end of each class session, the reports are automatically submitted to the TA of the relevant class.

c) Appointments can also be made by sending the request to the instructor’s PDAs and acknowledged by receiving confirmation message by the application suite.

d) Students can submit their answers of the questions during the exams and the answers will be automatically available to the TAs.

e) Students are provided with the facility of having their homework displayed on the PDAs and project to the screen.

RCSM for Classroom organization

            The role of Reconfigurable Context – Sensitive Middleware is very important for carrying out the communication between the participants. Devices may have different types of sensors. The PDAs of the students dynamically invokes the features of mobile ad hoc networks consisting on proximity and specific contexts like location of the device, intensity of the light to address any problem collaboratively. The application software is specially designed for cross platform and contain hybrid features for different programming languages, PDAs and mobile ad hoc networking protocols.

1. Application Development Framework

            A special application development framework is proposed in RCSM for the development of situation aware application software. A specially designed situation – aware interface definition language is used to elaborate the properties and characteristics of application object for situation awareness. It separates the application object into a situation aware interface and a situation independent object implementation. For a specific application object, a custom made situation analyzer can be generated as per the specifications of SA – IDL. The role of the situation analyzer is to perform necessary analysis of the situation on behalf of an application object. 

Request Broker Object

Various run time services are facilitated by RCSM Object Request Broker (R-ORB).

i. Data Acquisition according to situation

            Various sources are used to collect run time situation as required by the situation aware applications.  The requisite resources may be retrieved locally or remotely as desired. Accessing these resources remotely, periodic retrieval of situation is essentially required. R-ORB is specially developed for attaining the requisite facility. Various ad hoc group settings and point to point settings are used to exchange information with remote applications as it is the core requirement of situation aware application to perform the required tasks properly.

ii. Communication Management:

            The robust feature of R-ORB is the use of lightweight framework over mobile ad hoc network for connecting distributed and mobile situation aware application objects transparently. The significant feature of R-ORB is to establish connection with devices for a short period of time, falling in the vicinity and senses these devices frequently and analyzing efficiently the situation readiness of specific application object and its relevant communication partners. R-ORB also provides very lightweight client server communication primitive for the application objects to makes communication possible with stationary or enterprise computing resources.

 

CONCLUSIONS

            In this paper I have presented the literature review about the need of the time for a layman and professional of all the trade to become familiar and to user the native and advanced features of pervasive computing. There is no doubt that we are relying on technology as much as we can and technology is becoming intangible or disappeared. But the benefits always remain in our mind and we do prefer to use the technology by using its different application which I have elaborated and just tried to peep into them. We do prefer to perform lots of task while having leisure time at home and due to the applications of ubiquitous computing in all the trades of life and their benefits in terms of saving time, resources, space utilized to accommodate so many person in a small office, withdrawal & deposit of money at ease without disturbing the bank staff to take their attention to individuals during work hours, availability of resources always all the time everywhere we want to have them with use. Things are more clarified and became easy to understand as augmented reality has achieved lots of landmarks. Consequently, everyone is getting familiar with the latest emerging applications of computing devices and getting into the pool of telecommuter.

            More significantly my focus while preparing that term paper is on Smart Classroom, which is benefited with pervasive computing bounties while attaining collaborative learning. The Smart Classroom is a resource, equipped with connectivity, interactivity, share-ability, reliability, monitor-ability, convenience, vigilance, situation awareness for the learners and instructors using that classroom. A specially designed RCSM Object Request Broker(R-ORB) is discussed which facilitates situation data acquisition and situation aware communication. An interactive application development framework in RCSM is defined for the facility of situation aware application software. The successful completion of implementing situation aware ephemeral group communication service (SAEG) and a chat module for group collaborations and student – instructor

interactions while using Smart Classroom has been attained. The future prospective which have been identified during evaluation of the concept and implementation of Smart Classroom are information dissemination services (IDS) and file transferring services for the smart classroom. Security, exam taking, grading tools with the help of RCSM are also the future ideas for comprehensive and universally accepted application. Some other features like scheduling an appointment, question bank, FAQs will be considered.