could set a direction for the rest of a child s life. and ultimately tech can only augment teachers and free up time so that they can do what they do best teach. of course, nothing can beat physically being in the classroom, but even pre pandemic, some students weren t able to be at school for example, those with serious illnesses. but now, thanks to the help of some robots, some of these children might able to attend classes remotely. jen copestake s been finding out more. and can you blink your eyes? that s so cool. qasim is a student at seven kings school in east london. he has a serious medical condition which means he hasn t been able to go out since the beginning of the covid pandemic, but comes to class instead in a robot avatar.
four years ago we visited a school which had started using century al to bolster their teaching. this is software that assesses students as they learn, finding where the gaps are, and prompting them with teaching materials that suit their needs. what it will do is we track all your behaviours, and your mouse movements and how you learn. have they paused, are they scrolling up or down, what words are they looking at, how long are the words, you know, has the child been guessing? have they been skipping? are they hesitating? have they taken longer to answer this question versus another one? well, you know if you know how long it takes for them to read across different subjects. so it s trying to analyse and learn how the student is behaving across the content. the really clever part is that it tracks learning across subjects, so it can differentiate between a student who is struggling with a mathematical equation, and one who s struggling with how the maths question is posed.
much i d pulled away from everyone else until people started literally trying to get me back, which i m very gratefulfor today. karen started looking at isolation and loneliness in pensioners before redirecting attention to children in hospitals who couldn t get to class. they were using video conferencing to get lessons, but she wanted to make a more private way. we were out observing and actually saw a reaction where a kid logged on and everyone in class is saying, like, you re looking ill , then the kid logs off again which is heartbreaking. like, you don t want that to be the experience you have when you show up in class. qasim is now looking forward to getting back to class in person, and should be able to start again this autumn. how long have you been away from school, qasim? i left some time in february, i think. january, february sometime. then i stopped again. i haven t been
in quite a long time. what s that been like to shield for such a long time? eventually, just, it s like, quite annoying i guess because you can t do anything. since the pandemic, we ve really been amazed by the broad range of use cases that we ve seen, but also we ve seen an extreme rise in the level of anxiety amongst students. and just by having that window into the classroom, they gain more confidence, they re able to speak with their peers and their teachers, and the idea of returning to school becomes less daunting. what do you guys think, having qasim interacting like this? i think that it s good from his point of view. he s able to ask the teacher for questions if he needs help. if we didn t have this robot. then i don t think he would be getting the same education that he s getting now hello and welcome to the week in tech. this week we learned that apple boss, tim cook, recently received 5 million shares in the company that he has now sold
in that case it may suggest more literacy tasks. when the pandemic hit, software like this became increasingly important as students were forced to learn from home. and during the first lockdown, united learning, one of the largest groups of schools in england, introduced another adaptive learning platform to 46 of their secondary schools. sparx maths has thousands and thousands of questions and thousands and thousands of hours of exemplification as well videos explaining how to do certain operations. now, that means that no teacher ever has to sit down and work out a specific set of questions for specific children to do, cos the software understands at what point of learning those children are at. also, it marks those questions so the teacher doesn t have to sit for hours marking them in a book and correcting them as well, which i know from personal experience can consume your entire life. over the last 18 months we ve all needed as much help as we could get as our kids have flipped