There's no institutional definition for a smart classroom, but essentially, it's a space that has been enriched with technological learning aids. In the photo above, students test networked laptops at Microsoft's "Digital Classroom" exhibition at the CeBIT Technology Fair in 2010. Read on for more photos of technologically enhanced classrooms.
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Several researchers have suggested that most people are visual learners. However, in many schools, the only major visual aid in the classroom is the dependable but somewhat drab chalk board (or, in some cases, the dry erase board). Some schools with smart classrooms have addressed this by installing interactive digital white boards, which rely on computers to augment notes and illustrations in front of the class. Next, you'll see an early example of computers in the classroom.
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In the picture above, taken at an English primary school in 1963, several students experiment with early computers during their math class. The administrators of the school instituted these adding machines in response to evidence that mechanical aids could help the children acquire a more complete understanding of basic arithmetic. Click ahead to see some cutting edge classroom technology.
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Here, children at the CeBIT Technology Fair in 2010 interact with a touch-screen digital learning table from Microsoft's exhibition. These tables can be installed in classrooms to provide students with colorful, exciting and stimulating educational games. On the next page, you'll see the digital table in play.
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The CeBIT demonstration of Microsoft's digital learning table appears to be a hit. Multiple students can interact with the touch-sensitive surface at once, allowing brain-stimulating group activities and collaborative learning. Next, you'll see how some students already rely on computers in their schools.
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Above, students at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley-on-Klip, South Africa, take advantage of computer stations at their school. Individual computer use can help students conduct independent research and learn subject matter with educational software; it can also teach students computer literacy, which is itself an important skill in today's highly digitized global economy. Click ahead to see how even some traditional classrooms require technological enhancement.
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Chemistry professor and recent Nobel Prize winner Ei-ichi Negishi instructs his chemistry class at Purdue University in 2010. Often, popular classes with hundreds of students cannot function without technological aids, such as the dual document camera and digital projector that displays notes in the picture above.
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Professor Negishi also relies on a wireless microphone, seen clipped to his shirt in the picture, to amplify his voice so that all of the students in the large lecture hall can hear. Without this basic classroom sound system, many large classes would not be possible. Next, you'll see a technological tool used to help keep students out of danger.
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Most smart classroom technologies are designed to enable or enhance learning, but some are designed to promote safety. This facial recognition camera, mounted at the Royal Palms Middle School in Phoenix, Ariz., helps school safety officials recognize registered sex offenders who trespass upon school grounds.
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While the traditional subjects studied in antiquity required only the materials one needed to read and write, new curricula in the 20th century brought on the need for technologically enhanced classrooms, like this academic chemistry lab, photographed in 1910. While it's possible to study chemistry from a book, to really get a hands-on feel for the science requires experimentation with laboratory technology.
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Photographed around 1930, this German classroom at Bielefeld was designed to facilitate study of the sewing machine and its mechanics. Obviously, specialized trade schools for mechanics and engineers need working models with which students can interact. Next, you'll see a familiar classroom aid in its earlier years.
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Ever have that teacher who just shows filmstrips all the time? If so, you know this tactic can feel tedious and time-wasting. But when educational filmstrips were new, they must have seemed the vanguard of new era of dynamic and captivating education materials. This photo from 1948 shows an early use of film in the elementary school classroom.
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Pictured in a classroom in 1948, these are students at the Lutterworth Gas Turbine College, where the British engineer Frank Whittle laid the groundwork for this turbojet airplane engine. Whittle's design went on to blaze a path in the field of jet propulsion, giving us the powerful high-speed aircraft we know today. Next you'll see a primitive educational computer.
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Limited as they were, even early computers offered a world-changing paradigm for children who need interactive games and educational activities to sharpen their cognitive skills. This English boy solves a software-generated puzzle in a classroom at the Moons Moat First School in Worcestershire.
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While we all know that computers are necessary to do much of the schoolwork students are assigned in high school and college, there are many reasons that computers are useful in elementary schools as well. Experience using computers gives children an intuitive familiarity with the technology that will help them adapt to computer-based tasks later in life. Computers also allow large groups of young students to engage in one-on-one interactive challenges that a single teacher couldn't provide for every student in the class by him- or herself.
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Just as experience with computers helps acclimate students to the computer-based projects they'll be exploring in college and in their careers, students can prepare themselves for careers in the sciences by taking laboratory-based courses in which they familiarize themselves with powerful microscopes and other equipment they probably don't have at home. These students examine slides under magnification in Houston, Texas, in 1993.
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As the American workplace became more and more computer-oriented in the 1990s, leaders around the world saw closing the technology gap as one of the best ways to cultivate a competitive economy. In the photo above, Compaq Computer Corporation President and CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer watches a boy experiment with one of Pfeiffer's products at the recently opened Compaq Youth Internet Center in Beijing in 1999.
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This is the Unrwa school, Feb. 6, 2003, of the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. In the photo, the school has just unveiled its first computer department. Click ahead to see how technology education might be a struggle here, despite this step forward.
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Technology-enhanced classrooms are limited by space and by what they can afford. In the case of the Unrwa school in the Rafah camp, these 10 computers are to be shared between the 1,500 boys who attended the school at the time. Next, you'll see technology in the continuing education classroom.
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For those who graduated before the days of the computerized classroom, never fear -- it's not too late to ride the wave of technology. Many continuing education programs offer computer training for adults and seniors, such as in the "Introduction to Microsoft Word" class shown above in Des Plaines, Ill., in 2003. Read on to see a smart classroom of a higher order.
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When the Pope launches a Twitter account (no, really -- he seriously did), you know times have changed. Even the Roman Catholic Church has to adapt to the new world of technology and computing. These students rise to occasion in a computer-equipped classroom at the Opus Dei Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, 2005.
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As part of an effort to modernize China's agricultural economy, a government-hired computer teacher shows farmers at the Liangdong Township of Zhanjiang how to use computers and access the Internet to market their products and crops. Next, you'll see a U.S. president promoting technology in the classroom.
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Most of the technology you can find in classroom was already there before the students arrived -- but what about the stuff the students build themselves? Here, President Barack Obama appears with students Meghan Clark and Nathan Hughes, who demonstrate the FIRST Robotics Competition entry from their school's robotics lab.
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In most wealthy countries, schools equipped with computers have become commonplace. At this Turkish-German education institute in Berlin, girls use a colorful computer program to finish their lesson. Click ahead to the last slide to see what might be the future of the American classroom.
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At the School of the Future in Philadelphia, Pa., each student is issued a personal laptop computer for class work. With support from Microsoft, the school promotes an educational model that is technology-driven and essentially paperless.
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