Smart classroom: Design of a gateway for ubiquitous classroom

In educational environment, the use of new pedagogies such as collaborative learning requires an evolution from a traditional classroom model to active classroom. The students should be able to share resources to collaborate with each other through computers, tablets, or other devices. The design of smart classroom should enable the control of audiovisual equipments, projectors, interactive whiteboards, in order to facilitate interaction among teachers and students. Ubiquitous computing or pervasive computing is a concept where processors and sensors are embedded in various physical objects to form a network and communicate information. Applying the pervasive computing can facilitate the collaborative learning by creating a smart learning environment. The ubiquitous classroom should be able to support interaction of heterogeneous devices connected through wireless links to a gateway. This paper presents a model of classroom that makes several smart devices such as laptops, tablets, projectors connected through a gateway in order to encourage communication of information between learners and the smart environment. Also, the gateway manages classroom smart devices by automatic detection and connectivity and it serves as application execution platform. Finally the gateway allows the classroom to be remote managed as well as the remote integration of application.