Smart Speakers: Why Every Classroom Should Have One.

Smart speakers are all the rage now! With three technology giants offering their own rendition, Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod anyone on almost any ecosystem can have one for their home.

These devices are very useful in the home. You can have them control smart home devices like TVs, thermostats, lights, locks, doorbells and many more. In fact, this market will just keep on getting bigger. Another great thing these smart devices can do is play music, watch content, help you in the kitchen with recipes, tell stories to your children, play games with you, tell you jokes and other interesting facts.

What is even better is that the capabilities of these devices just keep on improving. For example, many of these devices recognize who is talking to them and give them personalized, relevant information. For example, if I ask my Google Home to call my mother, it knows who I am and will call my mother, not my wife. When my son asks to call his mom, it calls his mom and not my mom.

This is all great, but what does this have to do with technology in the classroom?

Smart speakers also have the ability to answer questions, albeit some better than others. You can also ask them to help spell words, look up interesting facts about the world we live in. In fact, they are like having a dictionary and an encyclopedia in a tiny corner of your room accessible by all with just their voice. They can translate word, convert numbers and do basic math. These devices are super spots of information.

Imagine these scenarios.

Senario 1:

A student is writing a paper and comes across a word they are uncertain about how to spell. They try to sound it out and do their best but they want to make sure that the did a good job. They could do two things, go and get the dictionary and look it up or ask the smart speaker. Either way will work but asking the smart speaker makes the process easier. It also alerts the learning environment that someone has a hard time with this word. Others might also have a hard time spelling this word. If the teacher has a word wall, the student who had a hard time could write the word on the wall after asking the smart speaker. In this way the whole class benefits. The auditory answer of the smart speaker alerts the other learners in the classroom that a new word is being added to the wall. They can take a small amount of time to be mindful about the word that is being added.

Senario 2

The teacher is doing a short mini lesson introducing the topic for the day and a student asks a question the teacher is not sure of. The teacher can then pause and quickly ask the smart speaker. In this way the teacher is doing something far more important than teaching content, they are modeling life-long learning. Sure any teacher could do this on any computer using a search engine but using the smart speaker is much faster and will probably give the answer the student is looking for. However, it is important that the teacher models going deeper by saying, “Hmm that was an interesting answer to your question. I am now intrigued to find out more. Would you be willing to find out more at the library about this topic or later on during class?” In this way, the teacher is modeling that the smart speaker might answer the question but that there is always more to learn.

Scenario 3

It is time to have the students transition from one activity, learning experience or break to another. Many teachers have a song that they play for this. For example, when I was a kindergarten teacher, I had many songs that I played for different transitions. When the kids were having play time in the class and I needed them to clean up so that we could do something else I would go to my computer, find the cleanup song and play it over my speakers. The kids would instantly get into action and begin cleaning up. The smart speaker could easily be used in this way as well. All the teacher would need to do is ask the smart speaker to play the cleanup song.

As you can see, there are many possible scenarios that a smart speaker would be beneficial in a classroom. I am sure after reading these many of you are already coming up with others.

Which One?

Not all smart speakers are created equal. In fact, some I would not recommend. Specifically the Apple HomePod. I strongly suggest that you DO NOT purchase one of these for your classrooms. The reason for this is that Siri does not support the kinds of things I discussed above. Many times Siri will not answer my questions and will only give me a search result. Since these speakers rely on various personal assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri here is a video that shows these compared.

Personally, I like the Google Home as it has the Google Assistant built in and it just works better for most of the things teachers and students might use it for. Amazon’s Echo is also a great choice. It really comes down to what ecosystem you use. Both companies offer various models for different prices. If you don’t want to spend a lot, the Amazon Echo Dot and the Google Home Mini are both very affordable.

Move your classroom into the 21st century and add a smart speaker to it today!

Thanks for reading

Dr. Shannon H. Doak