AutoConnect

classroom

Introduction

AutoConnects is a unique feature of ClassroomAPP, whereby members of a Course or Group automatically connect to the teacher as soon as they are online and active.

Seamless Digital Classroom

The whole point of this technology is to make it seamless to the teacher. With large classrooms, each disruption to manage a student problem with hardware results in loss of teaching time and often frustration by all stakeholders.

AutoConnets is complete set-it-and-forget-it approach to classroom technology.

Use Cases

AutoConnects takes away the technical burden of managing your classroom. In fact, you may not even need to contact your IT department to launch your digital classrom.

The teacher can focus solely on teaching; as students power up and go online, they get connected automatically to the teacher's session. Furthermore, any shared applications or content gets automatically sent to all new students.

Active vs Online

A student can be online but not active.

For Chromebooks, active means the App is running properly (i.e. takes full screen to have student's full attention).
For tablet and mobile apps, active means the application is currently running in the background (Android allows applications to run in the background, while iOS allows applications to run in low-power mode)
For iOS, the split screen mode is disabled to prevent students from running other apps in parallel (we need their undivided attention).

Bandwidth Usage

Another article covers this in more detail. For the purposes of AutoConnects and reporting, the Application is bandwidth optimized:

Report information is sent directly to the teacher
Screenshots are compressed and sent at controlled frequencies
In Force / Follow modes the target application or location is sent (which is only a few bytes) and the application loads it itself, benefiting from network-wide cashing

Network Issues

Each school network is different (bandwidth, latency, firewall, whitelist etc.). ClassroomAPP was designed to be extremely resilient to network issues.

For instance, during network intermittent connections, the application continues to run and updates itself automatically at the next connection.
Students can even start the application while being offline and it keeps trying to connect.
Offline content remains on the device and gets updated automatically upon connections.

Conclusion

AutoConnects is a key innovation for the digital classroom. ClassroomAPP takes on the burden of making sure students are properly connected, informing you only when students connect or disconnect. Device issues could easily become a thing of the past!