This year Lenovo will be attending EduTECH 2016, sharing its insights into how technology is transforming the education sector.
EduTECH 2016 is the largest education event in Asia-Pacific with eight parallel conferences and eight post-event masterclasses. The event provides a forum for educators to exchange and debate ideas about the education industry in Australia and covers the entire life cycle of education, from kindergarten to tertiary.
Lenovo, which is a sponsor of this year’s event, will be exhibiting its latest products and participating in panel discussions on the importance of technology in the classroom of tomorrow, whether it’s primary, secondary or higher education. Here’s a preview of the topics Lenovo will cover.
K-12: Tomorrow’s brilliant minds
Primary and secondary schoolchildren are sitting in their classrooms today learning how to become the great innovators of tomorrow and they’ll need the best resources if we are to foster brilliance in their minds.
One way to encourage children to experiment and learn is to make physical technology available to them as much as possible. A US report from Stanford University and its associates found that properly implemented technology can produce significant gains in student achievement and boost engagement, especially in kids at risk of dropping out. The contributing factors to these benefits were interactive learning, using technology to enhance creativity, exploration over memorisation learning and blending the right teachers with tech.
Accordingly, many different types of technology-led innovations should be introduced to the classroom, such as augmented reality, 3D printing, gamification and cloud computing. As a standard, students should have access to dedicated learning laptops, such as the ThinkPad 11e or ThinkPad Yoga 260, so they can reap the benefits of technology-assisted education. The panel will discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with these types of technology in the classroom.
Scaling to meet demand
As more international and domestic students are enrolling for tertiary education, universities will need better technology infrastructure to cater for the increase in demand, and enable students to have access to complex computing and imaging applications. The rise of massive open online courses (MOOC) demonstrates how digital technology is changing the way university students access and consume learning materials.
Students are also becoming more globally mobile as digital tech removes the strict necessity of a local campus and connects them with the best learning institutions around the world. This will create a need for reliable servers, such as the Lenovo System x, with minimal downtime so students can learn and test themselves in the fast-paced, on-the-go learning environment of tomorrow. The use of these kinds of servers in universities will be one of several topics to be addressed by the panel on the challenge of scale and globalisation.
Technological change will continue to disrupt the education sector. Educators who are embracing new technologies are finding opportunities to create real value in the form of more motivated and engaged students, which is helping to achieve better educational results.
EduTECH 2016 will be held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre from 30 May to 1 June. For more insights into how technology is transforming the education sector visit Lenovo ThinkFWD.
