Better Classroom Communication with AV Solutions

Education isn't possible without communication. The better an educator is at conveying important lesson content, the more their students will learn. However, modern classrooms and schools are filled with communication disruptors that interfere with the learning experience.Whether it's poor audio, distracting noises, or a group of low-engagement students, it's critical for educators to get any communication obstacles out of the way. AV systems can help teachers in this mission, with solutions that offer additional communication tools or just make existing tools work better. Here, we'll detail a few of the most popular and easy solutions to set up, so your school can meet the communication needs of its student body.

In the Typical Classroom, Students Face Several Communication Challenges

From the teacher's perspective, poor audio or engagement may not be immediately obvious. If you ask teachers if they believe their classroom is set up well for learning, most will likely say "yes." However, communication obstacles are frequently invisible and difficult to pinpoint. If any of the following are present, your students may have difficulty engaging during class:

• Classrooms that are larger in size than normal
• Classrooms that have a lot of windows or cinder block walls
• Classrooms that border high traffic areas in your school
• Classrooms close to carpool or bus staging areas
• Classrooms that don't feature technology for visual learning reinforcement

In spaces like these, excessive noise and lecture-only pedagogy can limit the effectiveness of teaching. In fact, this is exactly what multiple educational studies have shown. One, published in the November 2021 edition of Frontiers in Built Environment showed that higher sound levels in classrooms were correlated with lower math test scores.

Three Ways AV Technology Can Improve Communication Between Teachers and Students

Schools face a variety of communication-disrupting problems, but there are also a variety of audio and video technologies that can solve those problems. Three of the easiest to set up and most effective include:

• Audience response systems (clickers)
• Audio enhancement technology
• Multimodal learning solutions

Here's a closer look at each of them:

Give Students an Alternative to Raising Their Hand

Audience response systems, also termed clickers, are already popular on college campuses. They're gaining traction in K-12 classrooms as well. In K-12 classes, audience response solutions allow students to respond to the teacher's questions without putting their hand up and speaking in front of the class.We've all been in a class where one or a few students always raised their hand with confidence. Most students, though, are less enthusiastic about the idea. That's a shame, because answering questions correctly and getting positive feedback is a good way to keep students engaged.Clickers give students a low-stress way of providing answers, so they're more likely to provide them. This can be done anonymously, so if students answer wrong, they aren't put on the spot in front of the class. Even better, teachers can use clickers with a variety of question types. This could be classical multiple choice, fill in the blank, polls, or even short written answers. Educators can use these responses as a guide to direct the discussion or even factor them in as part of a student's grade.An audience response solution can be tied to student or classroom devices as well, so teachers can track each student's answers over the school year. If there are students having trouble keeping up with the rest of the class, clickers alert the teacher to this early on, so steps can be taken before engagement is lost.

Improve Information Reception and Recall with Better Audio

In some classrooms, the problem isn't confidence - it's audio. Whether the room is too big or the instructor too softly spoken, it's common for students in the back to have trouble picking up on everything being said. According to multiple classroom studies, students in the back rows may miss up to 40 percent of everything the teacher is saying. That's a lot of information not reaching its intended target.Audio enhancement solutions, like those provided by Audio Enhancement (the manufacturer) and FrontRow, are designed to fix this. Audio enhancement systems consist of a microphone and speakers. Most of the time, this microphone is worn, but it may be mounted elsewhere in the room.Both Audio Enhancement and FrontRow offer several audio-boosting solutions. These solutions blanket classrooms with crisp sound and can be integrated with the school's paging system for two-way communication. With improved audio, the teacher can be clearly heard by every student in the classroom, no matter where they're sitting. And they can do this without having to raise their voice - which strains the speaker and can intimidate students into not participating.

Engage Students with Multimodal Learning Strategies

Most people learn better when multiple lesson delivery methods are utilized at once. This pedagogical approach is known as multimodal learning and it's designed to engage every type of learning, whether visual, aural, or tactile. The results speak for themselves, according to a study published by Cisco. It found that students experienced a 10 percent increase in performance when multimodal strategies were used in the classroom, compared to unimodal teaching techniques. For more complex, higher order skills, improvements were even better.Multimodal learning can be delivered using high quality digital displays, including interactive displays. Digital displays are excellent visual reinforcers, but interactive displays like the Clevertouch are even better. That's because students can use touch, sight, and sound to answer quiz questions, solve math equations, create art, write notes and much more.The Clevertouch is particularly effective for educational purposes, as its interface and method of control are designed after the devices that students are already familiar with. The learning curve is gentle, in other words, so students focus on understanding the lesson, and not on the technology.

Classroom AV Solutions Power More Effective Communication and More Effective Learning

Learning is easier when teachers and students can easily communicate with each other. Unfortunately, that connection can be elusive in classrooms where distractions are present and where ineffective lesson delivery is a problem.AV equipment and solutions can solve these problems in many classrooms, giving teachers and students more flexibility in how they pose, or answer questions. In this way, AV solutions support the classical conception of education - one that's driven by communication between educator and student.