03/21/2022
As the pandemic continues, improving student wellness has increasingly become an area of focus. To help schools accomplish this purpose via an EdTech solution, ViewSonic has partnered with the Smestow Academy in Wolverhampton, England, to improve the educational outcomes and experience of its students in classrooms. Smestow Academy is the first school in the UK to implement the innovative myViewBoard Sens, an AI-powered analysis tool that addresses wellness challenges by ensuring student health and safety in the class while also fostering a highly engaged learning environment.
The academy had already integrated more than 100 ViewSonic’s ViewBoard interactive displays in its classrooms and wanted to take that solution to the next level. myViewBoard Sens brings various components to the table to help gauge student engagement, as well in-class wellness, including social distancing protocols. In addition, it allows teachers to access this data in real time, as well as offline later at their convenience, to assess their classes’ mental and physical wellbeing and to adjust lesson plans, social distancing, and more, to improve students’ in-class experience.
”ViewSonic has been working closely with the teachers to develop innovative EdTech solutions to provide the best possible learning outcome” said Peter Claxton, Senior Director of EdTech Solutions, ViewSonic. “We are incredibly pleased to be working with Smestow Academy to implement myViewBoard Sens in a real-world setting, helping the schools to adapt to the new era, and creating a highly engaged and safe learning environment.”
myViewBoard Sens are installed on top of the ViewBoards in the classrooms, monitoring the class engagement and wellness with the help of AI to create a real-time dashboard. The embedded sensor detects and evaluates the airborne transmission risk according to five indicators – temperature, humidity, occupancy rate, audience masked, and close contacts between students. If the wellness compliance rating decreases, the myViewBoard Sens suggests actionable insights on the dashboard in real-time for the school and teachers to make adjustments. This ensures that social distancing in the classroom follows the government’s protocol, reducing the risk of viral spread.
In addition to its wellness benefits, myViewBoard Sens gives teachers immediate feedback on whether their lessons need changes to keep students more engaged based on the device’s insights. After each class, teachers can review students’ engagement data, from sensing the room’s temperature, color temperature, ambient lighting, to analyzing students’ attentiveness through articulated human pose estimation, to see which activities and lessons engaged them more and tailor lessons where possible to boost student interest levels. myViewBoard Sens itself has also piqued their curiosity.
“myViewBoard Sens offers students and teachers reassurance of a safe and engaging learning environment so we can deliver the best education possible,” says Jonathan Stokes, Assistant Headteacher at Smestow Academy. “It is an exciting piece of EdTech innovation that we are proud to be trialing and rolling out in our classrooms.”
Stokes said that myViewBoard Sens doesn’t capture students’ faces or identities. In fact, all the data that Sens uses to create its analytics is processed locally without using individual profiles and is not sent to the cloud, ensuring the highest levels of security and anonymity.
Through real-time insights generated by the intelligent sensor in each Sens device, the school can ensure that classrooms follow wellness compliance, increase students’ engagement, and facilitate a safe and active learning environment. The myViewBoard Sens is meant to offer a future-proof educational solution as well. Through this pioneering project, we plan to introduce this next-gen technology to more schools around the world, opening new learning opportunities for students, teachers, and schools alike.
