Launch Pad
Please visit our OER: https://sites.google.com/view/wearables-in-education/introduction
Wearable Technology in K-12 Education Opportunity Forecast
What to wear, what to wear. No, we aren’t talking about the hottest new fashion trends in this opportunity, but rather wearables technology in the form of smart devices. Wearable devices are developed to detect and analyze data and transmit information to the user or the implementor of technology. This data can be tracked, assessed and used to help the user make informed decisions about personalized health goals and healthy lifestyles.
Some examples of wearable technology include:
- Bracelets
- Watches
- Sweatbands
- Heart monitors
- VR headsets
- Glasses
Some examples of data collected can include:
- Exercise duration
- Heart rate
- Steps
- Distance
- Exertion levels
- Calories burned
This Opportunity Forecast looks at wearables through the lens of Educational Technology and some of the exciting applications it can have on the motivation of students in Physical Health Education (PHE) including improvements in personalized health goal setting and improved lifelong physical activity habits.
So what might this look like in education?
By the end of the week please provide one of the following in the discussion below:
- An experience you have had with wearables in education. This can be something you have implemented yourself or witnessed in an educational framework. Briefly explain the activity or experience and comment on your thoughts about benefits or potential issues.
- Does implementing wearables in education bring inspiration or exciting ideas of application? What can you imagine the future looking like with access to wearables? Briefly explain your ideas if you had the budget and access – dream big! Again, feel free to also comment on concerns in the industry and if you see this as an opportunity worth investing in.
We appreciate your participation in the wearable technology opportunity forecast!
Thank you,
Carlo, Paul & Sarah
I really enjoyed reading through your Wearables Opportunity Forecast, team! The site was professional and was separated in several parts, making it easy to find specific areas of interest.
I’d like to address your second question and look towards the future to answer it. Building on what you provided in the ‘AI & Wearable Technology’ page, I see the wearables moving away from the basic health monitoring devices and more towards diagnostic tools for administrators and educators to better understand a student. Here are a few ways in which I could see wearables becoming an integral part of the classroom.
1. HEART RATE STRESS:
With mental health consciousness on the rise, I wouldn’t be surprised if we begin seeing heart rate monitors used during exams to better understand stressors. Post-test surveys could provide us with these answers, but a student could lie about their levels of stress, whereas it’s hard to fake a heart rate!
2. GLASSWARE:
Although Google Glass was a renowned flop, I could see us returning to glassware that allows the student to use a computer without the keyboard or screen. Apple just released their glasses, which does just this, albeit at an absurdly high price point!
3. ACCOMMODATIONS:
Wearables can assist students with special needs by providing personalized support and accommodations. For instance, devices equipped with speech recognition capabilities can aid students with speech or language difficulties. Wearables can also integrate with assistive technologies, providing access to educational resources and adaptive learning materials.
4. SAFETY:
This one might be a bit ‘out there’ but wearables equipped with location tracking and emergency alert features can enhance student safety at school. In case of emergencies or incidents, schools can quickly locate and communicate with students wearing these devices, ensuring their well-being. Wearables can also monitor environmental factors like air quality or noise levels to create healthier and safer learning environments. This could be used in primary schools to track the little ones or on campuses for students walking home late at night.
There are obviously privacy and data concerns with these devices being used in these ways, but I don’t think it’s far-fetched to see wearables becoming useful tools in a classroom.
Thanks for your ideas, Simon!
We looked at wearables with the lens of application for Physical Health Education, so I appreciate your contributions addressing student needs in other areas with wearables. Wearables supporting ESL learners is an interesting idea – thinking of live translations to better understand a teacher or classmate.
I can also relate to your ideas on safety. I work in the high school department at my international school but every day when I am leaving work, I walk through the elementary side and almost all the students have wearable watches and are yelling at their wrists to their parents. The watches are set up with only their parent’s number programmed so they can call them or receive a call but nothing else. It also allows parents to track them. Neat option for younger students rather than having the need for them to have a phone and gives parents peace of mind in case of emergency.
Thanks for your participation.
That is a hilarious image conjured in my head of all of the these little kids yelling at their watches! Interesting to see that wearables are being used for such young children already. The live translation thing would be a game-changer for me in particular. My district has a lot of Persian immigrants, and this would help ease the growing pains of a new language and getting settled in a classroom.
Simon,
Taking 512 last semester, I was shocked to see that some people are suggesting the use of EEG to live monitor the attentiveness of students – not as a research project but rather to ensure on task behaviour! Can you imagine going to school where the teacher could get an alarm every time your brainwaves indicated you were “off task?” What other kinds of private information could be gleaned from such an arrangement?
I have concerns that monitoring a student’s heart rate outside of a) ethical research, b) a medical diagnosis that creates a cause for concern or c) the student and family’s knowing and willing cooperation, that the knowledge would be a major invasion of privacy. That said, I could certainly see a use in helping to rule out causes of anxiety: is the stress test related, or social in nature? Does moving the student to a private room increase or decrease the stress? If I had a smartwatch, it would certainly be interesting to see what times of day cause the most stress!
I remember watching a short video from a school in China that uses these monitors to check and see the focus and attention levels of the students. It was crazy! I agree that seems like a bridge too far. Students seem to be at an all time high with stress so finding out what triggers these stressors could greatly benefit the student and the future design of testing.
I agree if it was used as a punishment to keep students it wouldn’t work. But if you had tuned in teachers who realized they were the problem when students attention is fading it could be a sign to give the students a break, stop lecturing or to change up the activity. I think it could be a cool way for the teacher to get feedback about the activities they are running and also a way for a teacher to know when a student just doesn’t have the energy to participate. I agree about the privacy piece for sure but don’t think it has to be negative.
Hi Mike, I agree that if teachers can use the tracking info as feedback to improve their own lessons that would be great. I also think if students want to monitor their own on-task behaviours that should be okay. Sometimes it can be valuable info for students to find out what type of learners they are. But yeah, it definitely shouldn’t be used as a classroom monitoring tool for teachers to check which student is not paying attention for punishment.
Hi Simon,
I find your point about wearables assisting students with special needs super interesting – admittedly, as someone who does not work in the education field, this is not something I would have considered before.
With that said, I do work in the mental health field, and the ways wearables are able to assist individuals requiring help is really interesting to see. I love this side of wearables – not only it is within the innovation field, but how much wearables are able to assist individuals with many needs is amazing!
Carlo, Paul, and Sarah – thank you for your resource! I really loved the many activities which allowed me to see the perspectives of others in the course. I am all for data tracking (in personal and professional lives), as I believe it can really open our eyes to our patterns, our challenges, and our opportunities.
In my work with students at the college level, many with a variety of accessibility related needs, I find wearables to be very interesting and usefull. In a very simple way they can help monitor and encourage many different wellness indicators and help with time management. Sleep and study schedules, encouraging movement and exercise all can have benefits for a variety of learners. The downside is the cost, as it is not a reasonable budget decision for many people.
In response to question “a”, the PHE department at my school just bought a class set of Fitbits this past year, which makes your topic on wearables quite relevant and timely. While part of my teaching load is in PHE, I did not use the Fitbits directly with my classes as my students were quite young (Gr. 1-3). I know that my colleagues used them with Grades 4 and up and specifically within the context of fitness units. The primary goal of incorporating the wearables was to help students monitor and track their heart rate as classes progressed and as a visual aid in helping understand how different types of fitness activities impact individuals and their heart rates differently. From what my colleagues said, they found the Fitbits to be quite effective in helping achieve the above-mentioned goals. In past years, they would attempt to teach students areas on their bodies to to find their own pulses but expressed that this was often challenging for Gr. 4 classes. I do remember one of my colleagues expressing a desire to find more ways to leverage the technology beyond simply a heart rate monitor, so I am interested in digging further into your opportunity forecast.
Thanks Nick. You are lucky your school has access to those resources, thats great! I think the big plus that we uncovered in the opportunity forecast was the ability to personalize education rather than expecting a one size fits all approach to health and active lifestyles. Another use case beyond heart rate used was tracking activity duration and step count. Ideally this is being able to bleed into their every day life, rather than just in the gym. Do you know if the grade 4 students had the opportunity to wear them and take them home for a period of time? Or was it just within the frame of individual classes? Thanks for your comments Nick.
In response to Question B, I am going to try to stay grounded in my approach this time around (I think I already went down the imagination rabbit hole already in the Padlet activity!).
I see a lot of potential for wearables in education. The first thing that jumped out at me when reading a few of the responses above was the transdisciplinary application of different tools. I imagined running a classroom activity where students had health data collected via a Smart Watch during a PE class, took that data to their Math class to analyze the results, then took those results to a Science class where they looked at the biological processes behind what their data is telling them, and then finally took it their English class where they composed a report on the data collected and the implications of certain activities on student health. All that generated from one piece of currently available (and reasonably affordable) wearable technology.
Additionally, I see wearables as having a powerful potential impact on retention and storage of information. Current education practices are limited in their ability to invoke responses from our different senses and there is plenty of research to suggest that optimal information retention happens when more than one of our senses are stimulated. Wearables could present an opportunity to touch on different senses to optimize learning. Imagine a device that could transmit the sensory experience of touch, smell, and taste (without ingesting anything!) of different objects. Students would gain a far better understanding than simply seeing an object and listening to information about it.
Thanks Benjamin! I really like the idea of a connected ecosystem based on data collected from one wearable. It certainly makes it feel like there is strong continuity between the classes, which hopefully will further motivate our learners (see: https://sites.google.com/view/wearables-in-education/wearables-and-motivation?authuser=0).
As for your second point on engaging/recruiting other senses, this is a very intriguing idea, especially since wearables can be many things. For most current case use, we focus mainly on smartwatches. But with smart rings, necklaces, google glass, and apple vision pro, you can easily envision a fully “geared-up” student, similar to what you posted on the padlet discussion on how the physical classroom might change (like the mention of the movie ‘Ready Player One’ btw). And who knows what is next in store? Could “implantables” be the next “wearables”? A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me that the pacemaker (a Canadian invention, ca 1950) is the first wearable. I say keep exploring that imagination rabbit hole!
But with any technology introduced in the classroom, how to keep the focus on learning needs to be balanced with the technology being too distracting. And so, in my limited imagination, I think the simpler the device (ie a watch), the better. But the device will have to be way smarter or at least the supporting ecosystem (maybe IoT?) will have to be better implemented, to really leverage the power of wearables.
Hi Carla, Paul and Sarah,
Thanks for putting together your wearables site! Really well organized and I like all the activities linked into each page. I enjoyed being able to summarize my thoughts on the various topics around wearables. What a massive industry it has become. I have a good friend who works with Facebook and Rayban on their glasses and the things I hear that are being built are just incredible.
I will answer your first question. I have taught both Physical Education and Biology at the Senior level. I used to run an open ended lab in my Senior Bi class that I am sharing below. The students absolutely loved it. We were fortunate enough to have a few fitbits that the students could use as well as a few HR monitors (the ones that strap across the chest). It was so much more meaningful when we had the actual HR monitors as opposed to having the students try and measure their HR on their own. The most challenging thing for me was getting the students to design meaningful experiments and to understand how the body reacts to exercise. It was also important to talk to them about ethics as most just wanted to choose a classmate and put them through athletic pain to see what would happen to their HR.
Theme: Investigate a factor (exercise, rest, diet, history) that affects one of the following: heart rate, ventilation, reaction time, muscle fatigue, blood pressure.
General topics include: Transport system
Gas exchange
Homeostasis
Nervous control
Skeletal muscle
The subjects of the investigation will be your Grade 12 classmates. The sample number should be a minimum of ten students and must be controlled for gender.
Your investigation will be scheduled for one specific class day. Please be ready to begin your investigation promptly at the beginning of class on ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Your investigation may also be carried out when the biology lab is open at lunch and afterschool and there is a teacher present.
All investigations must adhere to rigid safety and ethical standards. Students are required to check whether any of their subjects have medical conditions that may preclude them from participating in the experiment. They must also return the Par-Q and you form.
Data loggers are available for collecting data. The use of Excel spreadsheets to record and present your data is strongly recommended.
Hi wearables team,
Addressing the second question on ideas of future application, I’ll use my context of workplace learning. I think it’s a fine balance between equipping employees with wearables that benefit them and the learning that contributes to their work and addressing the concern that this becomes a rather invasive implementation to “assess” their work.
First, the benefits. I love the idea of an office in the near future using VR or AR. Wearables that can augment employee’s perception and awareness when it comes to approaching problem solving whether it’s in a training session or completing a task I think would be a welcome introduction. It also would offer a virtual setting to experiment before actually completing the tasks, a kind of augmented simulation to identify the impacts of their decision making. Additionally in terms of accessibility and productivity, there are lots of practical applications I can see. One of the areas that I’ve found difficult in facilitating in my work is fostering a collaborative learning environment. I think making collaboration more accessible, such as having hands free wearables that offer live translation when collaborating with colleagues from around the world would go a long way in helping to facilitate that environment. I also like the application idea of a headset that delivers instructions when performing a task. Explaining what to do and why it is important while they perform the task I think directly affects intrinsic motivation.
By contrast, I think the discussion around how wearables are implemented in the workplace requires nuance. Privacy has been addressed in previous posts but I think a nuance in workplace learning is how wearables would be used for assessment. Generally, employees would like to assessed for their quality of work, and the added dimension of metrics collected via wearables in workplace learning would certainly bring up questions about how that data would be utilized. Interesting content in the OER this week!
Your team did a wonderful job creating a useful OER on wearables. It is something that I am not very familiar with at all and I really appreciate the depth of information that you provided.
For the second discussion question, I do think that there is potential for bringing wearable devices into classrooms, especially for boosting student motivation and engagement. I am also intrigued by the idea of using wearables to help teachers differentiate learning materials for students. I think once the technology of AI-powered wearables grows more mature, it would provide our students with some sort of personal learning assistant to guide their learning and provide feedback. In that way, I think that there is immense potential in how wearables can shape our future education. However, I do wonder, what that would look like if we provide wearables for every student in the class. We haven’t been able to provide each student with a more functional device(e.g. IPad, laptop) to work on their school work, so it is hard to imagine how long it would take for all students to have their own wearables. Maybe a BYOW (bring-your-own-wearable) approach? I would like to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic.
Great website with valuable information about the application of wearables in education.
I don’t have an extensive amount of experience with using wearables in the classrooms, I was intrigued to read about the different ways other educators have made use of this technology.
I primarily teach grade 4 and 5, with about a 1/3 of our classes having access to wearables (mostly fit bits) on average. As a school we did encourage students to wear their fit bits for the Terry Fox run as a fun way for students to track their distance. It was also interesting for students to compare their fit bit recorded distance when they ran the same number of loops around the field, a few were shocked at how much farther they ran by weaving around compared to in a straight line.
When I coached the grade 6 cross country running team a few students wanted to use their fit bits to track their runs as well. This is was interesting because we could use their heart rate data to teach them about managing their pace during longer runs. We also had runners compare spikes in their heart rate on sprint practices vs. our longer runs.
It would be interesting to also use sleep data collected from wearables, to use as learning opportunities with students about how sleep can effect their daily functioning. I also really like the ideas mentioned this week around using wearable technology for language learning. I see a lot of potential for wearables in the classroom for supporting ELL students.
Amazing work on the website, Team Wearables! You opened my eyes to how many types of wearables there are and how many uses there are that I had never encountered.
I find the idea of accurate, instant language translation wearables very intriguing. Every school year I have international students from South Korea who arrive in my 4th-grade classroom with very little spoken English knowledge. It is a struggle for them to communicate their needs for the first few months and it breaks my heart to see them looking so lost. Though I understand the idea behind learning through immersion, being the only child in the whole class who doesn’t know what’s going on overwhelms these children. I ended up using Google Translate this year so that my little guy with little English beyond “No” could at least ask questions and I could understand him and offer support. While the parents would likely not want these children to use wearables for translation as they may feel it defeats the purpose of immersion, I think teacher use of such a wearable as needed would be extremely helpful. It does not take long for children to learn a new language with their amazing young minds, a translation wearable could make the first days and months easier for both English language learner and their teachers.
One experience that I had with a wearable was several years ago when one of my students who has diabetes received his new CGM (continuous glucose monitor). He was so excited to be able to easily monitor his glucose levels without having to jab his finger before each mealtime or whenever he felt “low”. I was amazed by how much this little wearable improved my student’s quality of life and attitude toward having diabetes. He felt that his diabetes was so much more manageable and that he was much more aware of the state of his own health at any point in the day. The wearable allowed this nine-year-old boy to feel so much more in control when months before he felt his diagnosis was the end of the world (or at least the end of his passion and goal in life, hockey). He would check his monitor at points throughout the school day, such as before going out to recess and before eating, and know whether his glucose levels were stable, dropping/rising, and how fast they were changing. This allowed him to make the necessary changes in his activity levels, glucose levels, or caloric intake, then go about his school day as any other child. Here is a link to more information on CGM wearables, if anyone is interested in learning more: bit.ly/3XxQQ08 .
Hi Team Wearables, my apologies for joining the party a little late.
Mind-blowing:
Wow! The concept of leveraging wearable technology in the education sector is truly awe-inspiring. Through your presentation, it’s evident that the fusion of education and wearable devices opens up a world of possibilities for enhancing student engagement, motivation, and participation.
Crave for more:
On the venture page, it would be beneficial to include a section that evaluates the profitability and sustainability of the product.
1. Market Size and Growth: Provide information on the size of the educational wearables market, its growth rate, and potential future trends.
2. Revenue Model: Describe the revenue model that the venture intends to adopt.
3. Venture Analysis. It’s important to discuss the risks and competitors in the educational wearables market.
I would also recommend to evaluate the usability and user experience of the educational wearable product. Is it user friendly? What are some feedback from educators and students? Is it customizable and adaptable to the changing needs of its users?
Excellent questions/suggestions! We can certainly incorporate these additional info on our ventures page. However, the challenge here is identifying which wearable technology we are talking about (we asked the same questions). Certainly we can narrow the field to smartwatches for example and provide information regarding this specific wearable. However, this space seems to be a moving target in terms of what wearables can/might be. In the early part of our brainstorming for example, Apple Vision Pro was revealed and we briefly considered if this can be a specific case-use for a wearable. I’m afraid that we are really only beginning to scratch the surface on the potential for this tech both for the market and for education.
Apologies for the very late reponse but I’ve been in China and couldn’t find a working VPN to access your OER.
Does implementing wearables in education bring inspiration or exciting ideas of application? What can you imagine the future looking like with access to wearables? Briefly explain your ideas if you had the budget and access – dream big! Again, feel free to also comment on concerns in the industry and if you see this as an opportunity worth investing in.
Great job putting together the OER! I thought the technology was a bit too far off into the future in an educational setting when I first briefly read it but you have discussed many practical applications in the classroom. Off the top of my head, here are some applicaitons for wearables in K-12:
– biology: heartrate, movement, biomechanics
– PHE: monitoring health, movement
– physics: measuring distance, velocity, acceleration, etc.
– art: mimicking movements such as brushstrokes
However, after reading some discussions in ETEC 512 about technology and learning, I realized that a significant number of educators are resistant to using technology in teaching or do not see its potential in the long term. I have also learned that many students don’t have access to laptops or devices which I would prioritize over wearables. So realistically, I think wearables will be important in K-12 education in the future, but right now its uses are limited to assistive technologies that help SEN students.
I think you’ve hit on a very important aspect of wearables in education (or any tech for that matter): accessibility. We’ve tried to provide proof-of-concept examples to show that it works. But certainly part of the EVA for this would need to account for who is making these available for the classroom (ie who will be paying and for whom). In an era of limited funds and shrinking budgets, this can be a very tough sell (to a school board or for a provincial ministry of education for example). If we look at tech trends though, one can be hopeful that as technology becomes more ubiquitous and parts become cheaper, schools do eventually catch up (chromebooks for example) in a better-late-than-never type of approach 🙂 Thank you for your insightful comments!
Similarily to what others have replied, I also do not have much experience with wearables in the classroom. Though I have heard of classrooms using VR for scenario-based learning through some of the teachers in the program, it is certainly not something I have ever used in an educational space. I do think the opportunity for wearables in the classroom is super exciting! I am a biggggg wearables fan and I own a smartwatch with a connectable scale so that all my information can be tracked and recorded in one place. I have also been wearing health watches for nearly the past seven years (literally can’t believe it’s been that long), and having access to such an extensive amount of data has really helped me asses how my lifestyle choices have impacted my health. Due to some health issues, I also need to work with a dietitian and physiotherapist, and it’s really great being able to sync my health data to their platforms. I think that wearables can take a lot of the “guessing work” out of the equation when it comes to patterns and habits, which might be helpful for assessing students’ lifestyle patterns and therefore creating attainable goals, for example, if a student is only getting two thousand steps a day, then maybe working to get four thousand steps is an attainable goal that can be measured and tracked using the wearable product. I initially started using a fitness watch to keep track of the kilometers of swimming I was doing, which might be an interesting approach to using it in educational spaces, like gym classes.
The Moki design is very reserved, there are not many bells and whistles. It seems like a very simple and approachable device that can be easily integrated into the classroom. One of the features I like the most about the watch is that it does not have a screen interface, which means that kids are able to collect data from the device without over-fixating on the numbers in real time or getting any notifications (as one would expect with an Apple watch).
Hello Wearables Team
Apologies for the late posting. I have been traveling but just to say thanks for your great work, well designed and clearly identified areas which are easy to follow. One aspect I did not see very much of was wearables in therapy. Working presently with research using wearables as VR with a specific stand-alone program designed to address areas such as self esteem, emotional challenges and depression, wearables as VR are really powerful as the user is immersed in the specific reality at the time of use and thus psychologically becomes a private part of the reality designed to address mental health challenges.
The other aspect is the length of time VR can be used without some secondary physical symptoms. The unknown variable in VR is where exactly does each user neurologically experience significant impact or change, Having tested this out with work colleagues there were those who presented with certain symptoms from dizziness to nausea and one had abdom. pain. Thus, until its impact can be more intensively monitored all programs via VR must be vetted and previewed prior to use in therapy especially.
For those with PTSD, VR has become a useful tool to combat symptoms and retrain the brain not to react to triggers which stimulate the onset of PTSD.
All in all, however, wearables and specially VR for therapy have indicated the potential to heal as we remain aware of its invasive and influencing nature