22/03/2014 Click

This is going to be great. This is going to be SO good.

First day on the job as a supply teacher.

I've got my lesson plan sorted.

I'm going to let the kids call me by my first name.

No, my Twitter handle. They're going to love me!

This week, Click goes to school at both ends of the tech spectrum.

We'll get hands on with the simple phone that's teaching Afghans

to read and write

and we'll meet the Norwegian teacher who prefers Facebook

to textbooks.

And from kids in Norway to mummies in Sweden.

Yes, we don't throw this show together, you know.

We'll use 3D scanning to get under the skin of an ancient

Egyptian priest.

We take a look at the pen that teaches you how to write

as you write.

We'll also have the latest tech news

and the website that helps you learn 12 different languages in Webscape.

Trust me, it's all going to be very educational.

Welcome to Click. I'm Spencer Kelly.

How often do we talk about how technology can change the way

that kids learn

in and out of school?

The problem is, there's only a handful of schools

around the world which really are using next generation

techniques to teach and inspire their pupils.

Well, this week we have a brilliant opportunity to see one of them

in action.

Now, as part of the BBC's School Report project, students Mary

and Olivia from Burntwood School here in London have travelled

to Norway to meet a teacher who's tearing up her textbooks

and replacing them with social media.

This is their story.

We're very excited to be here in Norway to meet

the students at Sandvika High School.

One teacher here is using technology

instead of books to teach her lessons.

I have some students who can answer your questions here

now in front of you.

Anne Michaelson is teaching International English.

Her students are 17 to 18-year-olds

so a few years older than me and Olivia.

We are 14 and 13.

This is very different to how we work in London

where all of our lessons are taught from textbooks.

Unlike in our classrooms,

students here are encouraged to go on social media during their class.

Everyone here is given a laptop by the Norwegian government.

The students can access Wi-Fi during the lessons.

Why did you decide to teach in this way?

Because a textbook could be a book from 2006 and we're in 2014,

so the content won't change in a book,

but it will otherwise,

things are happening in the world and with my subject, like

International English, it's good to use the net

and find resources there instead of going in a book.

'The day started with a Skype call to a classroom in South Africa.'

The Wi-Fi is going all the way over Europe, all the way over Africa...

But the technology was not working perfectly,

so we got to speak to the students without a video feed.

But it would have been great to be able to see them,

to get a picture of what their school was like.

The students use blogs to write up their homework.

They also use Twitter hashtags to share their lessons

and help each other online.

They have a Facebook group

where Ann can post reminders about their homework,

and where they can help each other with lessons.

We thought this might be distracting for the students.

If they are doing a task on the Facebook group,

and a message popped up, do you think they would click that and check it?

Yes, there is a risk.

There is a risk if the teacher doesn't pay attention to

what's going on in the classroom. There is a risk if I say,

"Here is the task, I'll be back in a couple of hours."

Then they probably would do a lot of other things.

The students realise they are lucky

to have access to all of this technology.

All around the school are posters of students in Lesotho.

Sandvika is fundraising to build a new school there.

We spoke to one of the students, Leah,

who is involved with the project and has been to Lesotho.

The project funds their internet connection,

and we've been sponsoring that since the beginning.

Last time people from our school visited,

they brought down a couple of laptops.

When we visited, we brought down some more laptops.

So we had to give them basic teaching how to use Word

and how to open the internet,

because they'd obviously never seen computers before.

It's amazing really how little some people in the world know

about internet and social media

and everything like that.

'The Norwegian students see us as having much less access to

'technology in the UK as well.'

Do you think we'd be at a disadvantage

because we don't use as much technology?

I think so, because when you start your work life,

you are going to use computers all the time.

But if you're not using and getting to know the computer

as it is right now, you have a real disadvantage

when it comes to your future life.

'Seeing all the social media being used in the classroom, we wondered

'whether technology will replace school life as we know it now.'

Do you ever worry that, in the future,

they are not going to need teachers to teach the lesson?

-Everything will be just on the computer?

-That's a good question.

I think teachers have to realise

that students can learn without the teacher.

So I think that schools need to be very relevant.

You have to be an alternative to sitting alone in your home

and working.

You have to come to school because you know we're going to

Skype with South Africa, we're doing some questions,

we're working on a project that we need more people to be on.

So I think teachers should realise that

students are learning on their own as well.

Back in our school in London, the older students already use blogs.

We think we should use technology more in our classrooms.

It would be great to have iPads and laptops for our lessons.

But it wouldn't be as easy to fund this in the UK.

It would also be great if we could use technology to share

our ideas in the same way they do in Norway,

through a group discussion board

or an app that is accessible only to students in the school.

We don't think it is good to combine our personal social media

with schoolwork in the same way they do in Norway.

Olivia and Mary in Norway.

You can see that film, along with thousands of other reports

from schools around the UK, from this Thursday, School Report Day at:

Now, whether you use social media, video conferencing or just

plain old books, it is easy to take education for granted.

But in many parts of the world, anything is better than nothing.

In Afghanistan, 75% of people are illiterate, and many institutions

are trying to throw sophisticated and expensive technology

at the problem.

However, the solution may actually lie in a much simpler device.

You might not know this, but Click has a sister programme

which broadcasts to Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

The team there discovered some software that allows the simple

and, importantly, very plentiful candy bar style mobile phone to

teach someone to read and write.

In Afghanistan,

the Ministry of Education has distributed 5,000 laptops

for the One Laptop Per Child project to schools in Kabul and elsewhere.

It's hoped that the cheap Indian laptop, called Aakash,

will be added to these soon.

But with so many people to teach,

this is, of course, nowhere near enough.

Unfortunately, the laptops are still pretty expensive by Afghan standards,

so we came up with the concept of this mobile here, which is putting

the same education experience with audio, video, quizzes and games into

35-40 cheap mobile phones, candy bar style,

that are commonly owned by Afghans.

With financial help from the US State Department,

the Paiwastoon company produced a course using the Ustad Mobil

application for teaching Dari and Pashto literacy.

People assumed that these phones didn't have any real capabilities,

yet I knew, as a programmer, that those phones that support what you

call Java Micro edition are almost the same as 1997 computers that can

store information, process, run programs, run quizzes, run games,

connect to the internet.

All of this was possible.

From the beginning,

Ustad Mobil has been designed as an open source project.

There's also an Android app version for smartphones and tablets,

and an iOS version is in development.

Perhaps the coolest thing about Ustad Mobil

is it's genuinely an Afghan export.

We took it from what worked in Afghanistan and went to Zambia,

trained people there, and they are now using the same software, the same

systems, to make courses for literacy in the seven languages of Zambia.

Instead of education technology being about some shiny particular device,

it's about the content and the learning.

The device is whatever device you want to use.

Of course we'd love to hear your thoughts on what you've just seen,

so e-mail Click:

Get in touch with us on Twitter.

Next up, it's a look at this week's tech news.

Google is eyeing up the smartwatch market.

It's released a new version of its operating system

Android For Wearables.

These smartwatches give a taste of the style that Google is aiming for,

together with its manufacturing partners and fashion brands.

The first devices, which will make use of the voice-controlled

Google Now interface, are expected later this year.

Sony has unveiled a virtual reality headset for its PlayStation 4.

Project Morpheus has been three years in the making.

The device features a full HD display with a 90-degree field of view,

and is equipped with positional head-tracking.

Sony admits it's counting on innovative developers to help

make the games that will sell the hardware.

Can't put a name to a face?

Ask Facebook, which is

now using the world's largest collection of photos, its own,

to develop a program that can recognise a face before it's tagged.

DeepFace can determine whether two photos of the face

are the same person, claiming 97% accuracy.

The tech brings Facebook's current facial recognition software to

an accuracy level almost on par with humans.

And finally, for anyone that wants to use social media's power to

disconnect, a new app called Cloak helps you avoid your friends.

The antisocial service uses public location data from social networks

such as Foursquare or Instagram to alert users

when "friends" are believed to be nearby.

Useful for avoiding the boss.

Tapping on screens and keyboards is all very well,

but we do still need to learn how to write with a pen.

At least for the moment.

Well, next month, a new German-based outfit will introduce a pen

into schools in the UK, Austria and Germany,

which it claims will warn us if we make a mistake.

Dan Simmons has been to try out the pen that could help us

learn as we write.

Leon loves his toy helicopter,

and it proved to be the inspiration his father needed to help Leon,

and potentially millions more, learn how to write.

I have these small helicopters in mind that fly around,

and they have motion sensors on it.

If these helicopters can fly around with these motion sensors,

we can have a pen with the same motion sensors getting

the handwriting - that's the core of the idea.

Leon makes some mistakes doing his homework,

and my wife says, "Oh, the pen should give him a signal.

"It can be an electric shock or whatever."

I say an electric shock is a bit much

but a small vibration should be perfect,

so you can also use it in the classrooms.

This is one of the first prototypes of the Lernstift, or learning pen.

The final version, once calibrated to its owner's handwriting,

will use an internal gyroscope to recognise what's being written.

Unlike a teacher's red pen that corrects long after mistakes are

made, or a tutor publicly pointing out his errors, Leon's pen

tells him candidly through vibrating when it thinks something's wrong.

Hooked up to a phone, an app would give more detail.

The pen uses normal ink refills,

but it doesn't actually need any ink to work at all.

And because there are no optical sensors in here,

it doesn't need any expensive special paper to work.

In fact, it doesn't need paper to work at all.

It will work perfectly well in thin air.

So how easy is it to make a pen that can read what you write?

We tested out the latest working prototype which uses wires

so hardware adjustments can be made more easily.

It's far from top of the class, although, once trained,

it matched most of software developer Adam's simple words.

Like voice recognition, the software will also take

account of the context of what we are trying to write too.

Opening up possibilities for other uses like learning a new language.

Future plans are to have developers come in and develop their own apps

because it's an open system.

As well we have the pen detect grammar mistakes,

so that means it will correct the word order.

But, also like word recognition,

this system needs more refinement to be able to adapt to each individual.

Beta tests in schools with fully wireless models will begin in spring,

and if that goes well, it is hoped that a fully working pen that quietly

tells us when we get it wrong will go on sale by the end of the year.

Dan Simmons learning how to write.

At least his handwriting is better than mine,

I can tell you that for nothing!

Anyway, next lesson today is history.

And specifically, a new exhibition which has opened in Stockholm

in which you can unwrap an Egyptian mummy virtually

while standing right next to the real thing.

Now, it uses technology designed by Swedish developers

and originally intended for use in virtual autopsies.

Neil Bowdler is your teacher.

Underground in the vault of a former bank in central Stockholm

lies an Egyptian priest.

His remains are one of eight mummies which belong to

the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities.

He lived in the 3rd century BC in Thebes, modern-day Luxor.

We know how important he must have been from the coffins

he was sealed in and the sheer splendour of his decorated mummy.

We know that his mother's name was Takerheb.

And we can also see that he belonged

to the upper classes of Egyptian society

because he could afford an expensive mummification. Not everybody could.

And he also has a gilded cartonnage.

He has two coffins and he has a lot of amulets.

The museum's Egyptian collection

has just undergone a radical transformation

which involved disturbing Neswaiu

and the other mummies from their slumber.

They were taken to a hospital to undergo CT scanning

to see right inside the bodies and wrapping.

Next, the coffins and mummies were photographed from multiple angles

and the 2D pictures used to build a 3D surface map

using recap photo from software company Autodesk.

All the data was fed into this virtual autopsy table

which sits in a room next to Neswaiu's body

in the new permanent exhibition.

We can actually look at the mummy in greater detail.

Beginning with the outer coffin.

And then just peel off layer after layer.

The inner coffin with all the inscriptions,

then we have the cartonnage covering the head and the entire body.

And then the wrappings

and the bead net protecting the mummy from anything evil.

And then down to the skeleton.

With details about, for example, dental health, dental status.

We can actually see the infection in one of the teeth.

And then we'll just dress him again, back to the outer coffin.

CT-scanning Neswaiu doesn't just allow us to unwrap the mummy,

it also allows us to find objects like this.

This is a 3D printout of a falcon-shaped amulet

that was seen inside the mummy, the real one is still in there,

during the scanning process.

It was thought it was put there to protect Neswaiu in the afterlife.

The virtual autopsy table

is the work of a Swedish research institute.

They first built the software, called Inside Explorer,

for autopsies in hospitals and for use by medical students.

But they have since moved into the museum business.

They've worked with the Smithsonian in Washington

and the British Museum in London,

but the Neswaiu project represents the most advanced work yet.

We started the process by CT scanning.

It describes the interior, but it doesn't give you any colour or surface information.

So we continued the process by doing laser scanning and photogrammetry.

And that process gave us information about the surface

and the textures and colours of the mummy.

Then we are taking all of that data and putting it onto the table

to make it accessible for museum visitors.

For the Egyptian curator at the Mediterranean Museum,

the digital-scanning project offered an unique chance

to enhance both her understanding of the mummies

and pass on what they learned to the visitors.

We wanted partly to get more information about them,

but we also wanted to include them into this virtual autopsy table

so that the visitors themselves

could see this information first-hand

and not always have to count on researchers

explaining what can be found on this mummy.

You can simply unwrap it virtually yourself.

Wow! If only history was that exciting when I was at school.

Still, the only thing left for this education special

is to get a quick lesson from our very own web monitor, Kate Russell.

Here comes Webscape.

# School's out for summer...#

School's never out online.

"Ciao. Come stai?"

Busuu is a social-learning platform that teaches 12 languages

using colourful buttons, clicks and drag-and-drop interactivity.

It's social because users connect with each other

to assess and monitor results.

In this increasingly-mobile world,

the addition of the smartphone apps is a great idea

as it allows users to make the most

of time spent on the train or the bus.

And mobile app usage in general increased 115% last year.

And already, Busuu are reporting over half its users

logging on to learn through the apps.

There are lots of initiatives

to encourage youngsters to learn coding right now.

Code.org is a great starting point,

serving up practical lessons you can complete in your bedroom

that give you real results really quickly.

Like this interactive lesson to make your own Flappy Bird game.

"Drag-and-drop programming is the easiest way to learn.

"It's even how university students start learning to code.

"Each of these blocks is represented by real code.

"If you take a look at the work space,

"there are some green blocks that are filled in for you.

"These are event handlers."

Just so you know, the creator of Flappy Bird

was making about 50,000 a day in advertising

before he took the iPhone app off the market.

Or how about 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio,

who can not only count uber-famous

tech-evangelist Stephen Fry among his friends,

but also sold the news app he created, Summly,

to Yahoo last year for almost 30 million?

There is no reason why that couldn't be you

if you're prepared to work hard enough.

The Year of Code is a project running this year

to nurture the coders of the future

with great support, advice and loads of other resources,

where you can pick up computer skills free of charge.

# I know she can beat them

# Oh, Yoshimi. #

A couple of resources for educators next.

Get Kahoot lets you make quizzes, discussions and surveys

to encourage interactivity in the classroom.

# A, B, C

# Easy as 1, 2, 3

# As simple as... #

The quizzes can be run on any platform,

so if you have students who won't put their smartphones away,

what better way to focus their attention on the lesson

than getting them to interact on their own devices?

Before you know it, Snapchat and Facebook will be forgotten

and a whole lot more learning can begin.

And if you're still hungry for education resources,

this blog by a teaching professional

has compiled over 193 teaching

and learning activities for you to dip into.

# 1, 2, 3, you and me. #

Learning isn't just for the young ones, though.

On 31st March, the Spring Online digital inclusion campaign

begins for another year.

Helping thousands of older and less confident computer users

take their first steps with technology.

# Show a lot of these and those

# Springtime's here again. #

"So, are there any positive effects?

"Can video games actually make you smarter?"

Some children and adults would rather play video games than study,

but perhaps that's not as bad as you think.

This week's video comes from AsapSCIENCE

and investigates whether playing video games can make you smarter.

"One study in particular had participants play Super Mario 64

"for 30 minutes a day over two months.

"Afterwards, the brains of these participants

"saw an increase of grey matter in areas associated with memory,

"strategic planning and fine motor skills of the hands,

"compared to those who had not played.

"These are particularly encouraging results

"for mental disorders which cause these brain regions to shrink."

Thank you, Kate, great video. I can feel my IQ moving as we speak.

I won't tell you which way, though.

Anyway, that's it. Kate's links, more from us,

and your regularly updated digest of tech news

are all available at our website.

Please get in touch about anything and everything you've seen today.

Don't forget to check out the BBC's School Report project from Thursday.

Thank you very much for watching. It's home time!