The Classroom of the Future is a project promoted by the European Union (known by its English name, Future Classroom Lab), which consists of a physical space for teaching and learning, fully equipped with the latest communication technologies, where students are taught teachers to visualize the way in which current classrooms can be modified in a simple way to promote substantial changes in the ways of teaching students.
What the Ministries of Education of the countries of the European Union want is for the students of the immediate future to learn by “doing” and not just by memorizing content. In the Classroom of the future, whose first course has been developed in the “pilot classroom” located in the INTEF facilities, in Madrid, between September 6 and October 20, the aim is to learn how to develop the student’s skills, as they have been marked by Europe since 2006, when “digital competence” was set as one of the skills to be developed among students.
Samsung, the Ally
As recognized by those responsible for the Classroom of the future, the collaboration agreements between INTEF and Samsung have been essential for the provision of all these technological elements. “With them we launched this ‘pilot classroom’ and from there we are going to generate one in each community and autonomous city, because what has to be close to the educational communities”. This is the first of a network of twenty classrooms that will be implemented” in the near future.
INTEF has been collaborating with Samsung since 2014, with an experimental project called Samsung Smart School, aimed at primary schools (two for each community and autonomous city), to measure the impact on student learning and on the ways of teaching with technology through the solutions provided by Samsung (screens, tablets, charging carts, management systems, etc.).
After that first step, in 2017 the European Future Classroom Lab project began to be developed and the possibility arose of creating a first space at the INTEF headquarters, much smaller and more modest, to see if it generated interest in the Spanish educational community or not. . “And we saw that, indeed, the response from all the autonomous communities and educational centers that wanted to come and see it was quite impressive”, confirms Fernández.
With these precedents, in 2020 the first call for courses in the Classroom of the Future was put out to tender, which has had just over a hundred teachers who have passed through it, between September 6 and October 20. There they have addressed topics such as artificial intelligence and augmented reality, personalized learning or formative evaluation with digital media. But not the theory, but the direct practice of how to personalize learning, for example, with virtual and augmented reality activities in the classroom. The goal is for students to interact, investigate, develop, create and that helps them develop their skills.
