engagement / engaging students

“NYC High School Reimagines Career & Technical Education for the 21st Century” [Bauld] + several other items re: the K12 learning ecosystem

On 06/17/2024, in Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), career development, change, changing business models, collaboration, communications, creativity, digital audio, digital video, education, education reform, education technology, engagement / engaging students, engineering, entrepreneurship, experimentation, ideas, innovation, instructional design, journalism, K-12 related, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, maker movement, media/film, more voice more choice more control, multimedia, neurodivergent/special needs, play, podcasting, real-world assignments, robotics, skills, society, sociology, strategy, student-related, teachers, United States, vision/possibilities, vocational / trades, by Daniel Christian

NYC High School Reimagines Career & Technical Education for the 21st Century — from the74million.org by Andrew Bauld
Thomas A. Edison High School is providing students with the skills to succeed in both college and career in an unusually creative way.

From DSC:
Very interesting to see the mention of an R&D department here! Very cool.

Baker said ninth graders in the R&D department designed the essential skills rubric for their grade so that regardless of what content classes students take, they all get the same immersion into critical career skills. Student voice is now so integrated into Edison’s core that teachers work with student designers to plan their units. And he said teachers are becoming comfortable with the language of career-centered learning and essential skills while students appreciate the engagement and develop a new level of confidence.
…
The R&D department has grown to include teachers from every department working with students to figure out how to integrate essential skills into core academic classes. In this way, they’re applying one of the XQ Institute’s crucial Design Principles for innovative high schools: Youth Voice and Choice.
.

Learners need: More voice. More choice. More control. -- this image was created by Daniel Christian

Student Enterprise: Invite Learners to Launch a Media Agency or Publication — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark

Key Points

Client-connected projects have become a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative, offering students opportunities to solve real-world problems in collaboration with industry professionals.
Organizations like CAPS, NFTE, and Journalistic Learning facilitate community connections and professional learning opportunities, making it easier to implement client projects and entrepreneurship education.

Important trend: client projects. Work-based learning has been growing with career academies and renewed interest in CTE. Six years ago, a subset of WBL called client-connected projects became a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative in Kansas City where they are defined as authentic problems that students solve in collaboration with professionals from industry, not-for-profit, and community-based organizations….and allow students to: engage directly with employers, address real-world problems, and develop essential skills.

Portrait of a Community to Empower Learning Transformation — from gettingsmart.com by Rebecca Midles and Mason Pashia

Key Points

The Community Portrait approach encourages diverse voices to shape the future of education, ensuring it reflects the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders.
Active, representative community engagement is essential for creating meaningful and inclusive educational environments.

The Portrait of a Graduate—a collaborative effort to define what learners should know and be able to do upon graduation—has likely generated enthusiasm in your community. However, the challenge of future-ready graduates persists: How can we turn this vision into a reality within our diverse and dynamic schools, especially amid the current national political tensions and contentious curriculum debates?

The answer lies in active, inclusive community engagement. It’s about crafting a Community Portrait that reflects the rich diversity of our neighborhoods. This approach, grounded in the same principles used to design effective learning systems, seeks to cultivate deep, reciprocal relationships within the community. When young people are actively involved, the potential for meaningful change increases exponentially.

Q&A: Why Schools Must Redesign Learning to Include All Students — from edtechmagazine.com by Taashi Rowe
Systems are broken, not children, says K–12 disability advocate Lindsay E. Jones.

Although Lindsay E. Jones came from a family of educators, she didn’t expect that going to law school would steer her back into the family business. Over the years she became a staunch advocate for children with disabilities. And as mom to a son with learning disabilities and ADHD who is in high school and doing great, her advocacy is personal.

Jones previously served as president and CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities and was senior director for policy and advocacy at the Council for Exceptional Children. Today, she is the CEO at CAST, an organization focused on creating inclusive learning environments in K–12. EdTech: Focus on K–12 spoke with Jones about how digital transformation, artificial intelligence and visionary leaders can support inclusive learning environments.

Our brains are all as different as our fingerprints, and throughout its 40-year history, CAST has been focused on one core value: People are not broken, systems are poorly designed. And those systems are creating a barrier that holds back human innovation and learning.

Several items re: text-to-video (and even images-to-video)

On 06/14/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Asia, communications, creativity, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, media/film, multimedia, United States, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Dream Machine is an AI model that makes high quality, realistic videos fast from text and images.

It is a highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos making it capable of generating physically accurate, consistent and eventful shots. Dream Machine is our first step towards building a universal imagination engine and it is available to everyone now!

Luma AI just dropped a Sora-like AI video generator called Dream Machine.

But unlike Sora or KLING, it’s completely open access to the public.

Here are 10 wild examples (and how to access it):

1. pic.twitter.com/Dx5Pnbp7lg

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) June 12, 2024

Text-to-Video Emergence for July 2024 — from ai-supremacy.com by Michael Spencer
Who needs Sora?

There have been some incredible teasers in the text-to-video arena of Generative AI. Namely I’m watching:

Kling AI (by Kuaishou)
Luma AI
Vidu (ShengShu Technology and Tsinghua University)
Pika Labs
Zhipu AI & ByteDance (not yet released their products)
The timeline for the release of OpenAI’s Sora

“OpenAI seems to have the ability to create video in Sora, send it to ChatGPT for a script, use Voice Engine for voice over and put it all together.”
byu/MassiveWasabi insingularity

6 Ways State Policymakers Can Build More Future-Focused Education Systems — from gettingsmart.com by Jennifer Kabaker

Key Points

Guided by a vision – often captured as a Portrait of a Graduate – co-constructed with local leaders, community members, students, and families, state policymakers can develop policies that equitably and effectively support students and educators in transforming learning experiences.
The Aurora Institute highlights the importance of collaborative efforts in creating education systems that truly meet the diverse needs of every student.

The Aurora Institute has spent years working with states looking to advance competency-based systems, and has identified a set of key state policy levers that policymakers can put into action to build more personalized and competency-based systems. These shifts should be guided by a vision–co-constructed with local leaders, community members, students, and families–for what students need to know and be able to do upon graduating.

Career Pathways In A Rapidly Changing World: US Career Pathways Story — from gettingsmart.com by Paul Herdman

Key Points

There has been a move away from the traditional “Bachelor’s or Bust” mentality towards recognizing the value of diverse career pathways that may not necessarily require a four-year degree.
Local entities such as states, school districts, and private organizations have played a crucial role in implementing and scaling up career pathways programs.

While much has been written on this topic (see resources below), this post, in the context of our OECD study of five Anglophone countries, will attempt to provide a backdrop on what was happening at the federal level in the U.S. over the last several decades to help catalyze this shift in career pathways and offer a snapshot of how this work is evolving in two very different states—Delaware and Texas.

U.S. public, private and charter schools in 5 charts — from pewresearch.org by Katherine Schaeffer
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“6 AI Tools Recommended by Teachers” [Fitzpatrick] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 06/12/2024, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assessment, bots, business, content development, aggregation, repositories, copyright/ownership/NFTs, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, education, education technology, elearning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, parents/guardians, personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, skills, strategy, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, training / L&D, vendors, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

AI Policy 101: a Beginners’ Framework — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
How to make a case for AI experimentation & testing in learning & development

6 AI Tools Recommended By Teachers That Aren’t ChatGPT — from forbes.com by Dan Fitzpatrick

Here are six AI tools making waves in classrooms worldwide:

Brisk Teaching
SchoolAI
Diffit
Curipod
Skybox by Blockade Labs in ThingLink
Ideogram

With insights from educators who are leveraging their potential, let’s explore them in more detail.

AI Is Speeding Up L&D But Are We Losing the Learning? — from learningguild.com by Danielle Wallace

The role of learning & development
Given these risks, what can L&D professionals do to ensure generative AI contributes to effective learning? The solution lies in embracing the role of trusted learning advisors, guiding the use of AI tools in a way that prioritizes achieving learning outcomes over only speed. Here are three key steps to achieve this:

1. Playtest and Learn About AI…
2. Set the Direction for AI to Be Learner-Centered…
3. Become Trusted Learning Advisors…

Some other tools to explore:

Descript: If you can edit text, you can edit videos. — per Bloomberg’s Vlad Savov
Descript is the AI-powered, fully featured, end-to-end video editor that you already know how to use.

A video editor that works like docs and slides

No need to learn a new tool — Descript works like the tools you’ve already learned.

Audeze | Filter — per Bloomberg’s Vlad Savov

AI Chatbots in Schools Findings from a Poll of K-12 Teachers, Students, Parents, and College Undergraduates — from Impact Research; via Michael Spencer and Lily Lee

Key Findings

In the last year, AI has become even more intertwined with our education system. More teachers, parents, and students are aware of it and have used it themselves on a regular basis. It is all over our education system today.
While negative views of AI have crept up over the last year, students, teachers, and parents feel very positive about it in general. On balance they see positive uses for the technology in school, especially if they have used it themselves.
Most K-12 teachers, parents, and students don’t think their school is doing much about AI, despite its widespread use. Most say their school has no policy on it, is doing nothing to offer desired teacher training, and isn’t meeting the demand of students who’d like a career in a job that will need AI.
The AI vacuum in school policy means it is currently used “unauthorized,” while instead people want policies that encourage AI. Kids, parents, and teachers are figuring it out on their own/without express permission, whereas all stakeholders would rather have a policy that explicitly encourages AI from a thoughtful foundation.

The Value of AI in Today’s Classrooms — from waltonfamilyfoundation.org

There is much discourse about the rise and prevalence of AI in education and beyond. These debates often lack the perspectives of key stakeholders – parents, students and teachers.

In 2023, the Walton Family Foundation commissioned the first national survey of teacher and student attitudes toward ChatGPT. The findings showed that educators and students embrace innovation and are optimistic that AI can meaningfully support traditional instruction.

A new survey conducted May 7-15, 2024, showed that knowledge of and support for AI in education is growing among parents, students and teachers. More than 80% of each group says it has had a positive impact on education.

Hybrid learning through podcasts: a practical approach [Chambers]

On 06/06/2024, in A/V -- audio/visual, blended learning, digital audio, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, faculty, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, hybrid learning, ideas, learning, Learning Experience Design, more voice more choice more control, multimedia, online learning, podcasting, skills, student-related, by Daniel Christian

Hybrid learning through podcasts: a practical approach — from timeshighereducation.com by Catherine Chambers
Adapting practice-based learning to a blend of synchronous and asynchronous delivery gives learners more control and creates opportunities for real-world learning of skills such as podcast production, writes Catherine Chambers

Hybrid learning provides students with greater control over their learning and enables the development of employability skills, supporting practice-based group work through in situ activities.

Aligned with Keele’s curriculum expectations framework, the module was designed around podcasts to support inclusivity, active learning, digital capability and external engagement.

12 Shifts to Move from Teacher-Led to Student-Centered Environments [Wagner]

On 06/03/2024, in active learning, education, education reform, engagement / engaging students, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, more voice more choice more control, motivation, strategy, student-related, teachers, by Daniel Christian

12 Shifts to Move from Teacher-Led to Student-Centered Environments — from gettingsmart.com by Kyle Wagner

Key Points

Despite modern technological advancements in classroom tools, many educational settings still center around a traditional model where the teacher is the primary source of information and students passively receive content.
Slowly, learning environments are inviting students to actively participate and take ownership of their learning through collaborative projects, inquiry-based experiences, and real-world problem-solving, thereby transforming traditional educational roles and practices.

Two great resources for parents, caregivers, teachers, or anyone who works with children

On 05/20/2024, in education, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, K-12 related, neurodivergent/special needs, parents/guardians, society, sociology, teachers, youth, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
My wife does a lot of work with foster families and CASA kids, and she recommends these resources for helping children who have experienced adversity, early harm, toxic stress, and/or trauma.

TBRI: Trust Based Relational Intervention — from child.tcu.edu by Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development

TBRI^® is an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. TBRI^® uses Empowering Principles to address physical needs, Connecting Principles for attachment needs, and Correcting Principles to disarm fear-based behaviors. While the intervention is based on years of attachment, sensory processing, and neuroscience research, the heartbeat of TBRI^® is connection.

The Connected Child by Karen Purvis

The adoption of a child is always a joyous moment in the life of a family. Some adoptions, though, present unique challenges. Welcoming these children into your family–and addressing their special needs–requires care, consideration, and compassion. Written by two research psychologists specializing in adoption and attachment, The Connected Child will help you:

Build bonds of affection and trust with your adopted child
Effectively deal with any learning or behavioral disorders
Discipline your child with love without making him or her feel threatened

Learning On Purpose | What problem do you want to solve? [Weise]

On 05/12/2024, in Design Thinking, education, education reform, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, Learning Experience Design, motivation, project-based learning, real-world assignments, reinvent, society, student-related, teachers, United States, by Daniel Christian

Learning On Purpose | What problem do you want to solve? — from michelleweise.substack.com by Dr. Michelle R. Weise

I quickly decided to take a different tack with my students, and instead asked each of them, “What problem in the world do you think you want to solve? If you could go to a school of hunger, poverty, Alzheimer’s disease, mental health … what kind of school would you want to attend?” This is when they started nodding vigorously.

What each of them identified was a grand challenge, or what Stanford d.school Executive Director Sarah Stein Greenberg has called: purpose learning. In a great talk for Wired, Greenberg asks,

What if students declared missions not majors? Or even better, what if they applied to the School of Hunger or the School of Renewable Energy? These are real problems that society doesn’t have answers to yet. Wouldn’t that fuel their studies with some degree of urgency and meaning and real purpose that they don’t yet have today?

Are Colleges Ready For an Online-Education World Without OPMs? — from edsurge.com by Robert Ubell (Columnist)
Online Program Management companies have helped hundreds of colleges build online degree programs, but the sector is showing signs of strain.

For more than 15 years, a group of companies known as Online Program Management providers, or OPMs, have been helping colleges build online degree programs. And most of them have relied on an unusual arrangement — where the companies put up the financial backing to help colleges launch programs in exchange for a large portion of tuition revenue.
…
As a longtime administrator of online programs at colleges, I have mixed feelings about the idea of shutting down the model. And the question boils down to this: Are colleges ready for a world without OPMs?

Guy Raz on Podcasts and Passion: Audio’s Ability to Spark Learning — from michaelbhorn.substack.com by Michael B. Horn

This conversation went in a bunch of unexpected directions. And that’s what’s so fun about it. After all, podcasting is all about bringing audio back and turning learning into leisure. And the question Guy and his partner Mindy Thomas asked a while back was: Why not bring kids in on the fun? Guy shared how his studio, Tinkercast, is leveraging the medium to inspire and educate the next generation of problem solvers.

We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!

NEW: Is this America’s next big middle-class job?

28,000 more “technicians” will soon be needed to run giant machines that make tiny semiconductor chips used in phones, cars, missiles, etc.

Pay starts at ~$25/hr@kairyssdal @MHollenhorst & I went to Phoenix to see this “chips… pic.twitter.com/dFvVpttSJ9

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) April 30, 2024

April 2024 Job Cuts Announced by US-Based Companies Fall; More Cuts Attributed to TX DEI Law, AI in April — from challengergray.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Education
Companies in the Education industry, which includes schools and universities, cut the second-most jobs last month with 8,092 for a total of 17,892. That is a 635% increase from the 2,435 cuts announced during the first four months of 2023.

“April is typically the time school districts are hiring and setting budgets for the next fiscal year. Certainly, there are budgetary constraints, as labor costs rise, but school systems also have a retention and recruitment issue,” said Challenger.

Lifetime college returns differ significantly by major, research finds — from highereddive.com by Lilah Burke
Engineering and computer science showed the best return out of 10 fields of study that were examined.

Dive Brief:

The lifetime rate of return for a college education differs significantly by major, but it also varies by a student’s gender and race or ethnicity, according to new peer-reviewed research published in the American Educational Research Journal.
A bachelor’s degree in general provides a roughly 9% rate of return for men, and nearly 10% for women, researchers concluded. The majors with the best returns were computer science and engineering.
Black, Hispanic and Asian college graduates had slightly higher rates of return than their White counterparts, the study found.

Reid Hoffman meets his AI twin

On 04/30/2024, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, communications, content development, aggregation, repositories, digital audio, digital video, education, education technology, educational games / serious games, emerging technologies, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, higher education, history, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, interactivity, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, liberal arts, lifelong learning, Microsoft, multimedia, Natural Language Processing (NLP), platforms, play, United States, universities, user experience (UX), vision/possibilities, youth, by Daniel Christian

Description:

I recently created an AI version of myself—REID AI—and recorded a Q&A to see how this digital twin might challenge me in new ways. The video avatar is generated by Hour One, its voice was created by Eleven Labs, and its persona—the way that REID AI formulates responses—is generated from a custom chatbot built on GPT-4 that was trained on my books, speeches, podcasts and other content that I’ve produced over the last few decades. I decided to interview it to test its capability and how closely its responses match—and test—my thinking. Then, REID AI asked me some questions on AI and technology. I thought I would hate this, but I’ve actually ended up finding the whole experience interesting and thought-provoking.

From DSC:
This ability to ask questions of a digital twin is very interesting when you think about it in terms of “interviewing” a historical figure. I believe character.ai provides this kind of thing, but I haven’t used it much.

“The AI Tools in Education Database” + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 04/23/2024, in adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assessment, colleges, communications, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, education, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, face-to-face, faculty, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learner profiles, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, lifelong learning, mathematics, more voice more choice more control, motivation, pedagogy, project-based learning, reinvent, skills, student-related, teachers, tools, United States, universities, vendors, youth, by Daniel Christian

The AI Tools in Education Database — from aitoolsdirectory.notion.site; via George Siemens

Since AI in education has been moving at the speed of light, we built this AI Tools in Education database to keep track of the most recent AI tools in education and the changes that are happening every day. This database is intended to be a community resource for educators, researchers, students, and other edtech specialists looking to stay up to date. This is a living document, so be sure to come back for regular updates.

Another Workshop for Faculty and Staff — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton
A recent workshop with some adjustments.

The day started out with a short talk about AI (slides). Some of it is my usual schtick where I do a bit of Q&A with folks around myths and misunderstandings of generative AI in order to establish some common ground. These are often useful both in setting the tone and giving folks a sense of how I come to explore generative AI: with a mixture of humor, concern, curiosity, and of course, cat pics.

From there, we launched into a series of mini-workshops where folks had time to first play around with some previously created prompts around teaching and learning before moving onto prompts for administrative work. The prompts and other support materials are in this Workshop Resource Document. The goal was to just get them into using one or more AI tools with some useful prompts so they can learn more about its capabilities.

The Edtech Insiders Rundown of ASU+GSV 2024 — from edtechinsiders.substack.com by by Sarah Morin, Alex Sarlin, and Ben Kornell
And more on Edtech Insiders+, upcoming events, Gauth, AI Reading Tutors, The Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute, and TeachAI Policy Resources

Alex Sarlin

4. Everyone is Edtech Now
This year, in addition to investors, entrepreneurs, educators, school leaders, university admins, non-profits, publishers, and operators from countless edtech startups and incumbents, there were some serious big tech companies in attendance like Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Tiktok, and Canva. Additionally, a horde of management consultancies, workforce organizations, mental health orgs, and filmmakers were in attendance.

Edtech continues to expand as an industry category and everyone is getting involved.

Ep 18 | Rethinking Education, Lessons to Unlearn, Become a Generalist, & More — Ana Lorena Fábrega — from mishadavinci.substack.com by Misha da Vinci

It was such a delight to chat with Ana. She’s brilliant and passionate, a talented educator, and an advocate for better ways of learning for children and adults. We cover ways to transform schools so that students get real-world skills, learn resilience and how to embrace challenges, and are prepared for an unpredictable future. And we go hard on why we must keep learning no matter our age, become generalists, and leverage technology in order to adapt to the fast-changing world.

Misha also featured an item re: the future of schooling and it contained this graphic:

Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI — from theverge.com by Jess Weatherbed

The Texas Tribune reports an “automated scoring engine” that utilizes natural language processing — the technology that enables chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand and communicate with users — is being rolled out by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to grade open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exams. The agency is expecting the system to save $15–20 million per year by reducing the need for temporary human scorers, with plans to hire under 2,000 graders this year compared to the 6,000 required in 2023.

Debating About AI: An Easy Path to AI Awareness and Basic Literacy — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard
If you are an organization committed to AI literacy, consider sponsoring some debate topics and/or debates next year and expose thousands of students to AI literacy.

Resolved: Teachers should integrate generative AI in their teaching and learning.

The topic is simple but raises an issue that students can connect with.

While helping my students prepare and judging debates, I saw students demonstrate an understanding of many key issues and controversies.

These included—

*AI writing assessment/grading
*Bias
*Bullying
*Cognitive load
*Costs of AI systems
*Declining test scores
*Deep fakes
*Differentiation
*Energy consumption
*Hallucinations
*Human-to-human connection
*Inequality and inequity in access
*Neurodiversity
*Personalized learning
*Privacy
*Regulation (lack thereof)
*The future of work and unemployment
*Saving teachers time
*Soft skills
*Standardized testing
*Student engagement
*Teacher awareness and AI training; training resource trade-offs
*Teacher crowd-out
*Transparency and explainability
*Writing detectors (students had an exaggerated sense of the workability of these tools).

Meeting students needs for emotional support, career readiness, student voice, and more

On 04/19/2024, in career development, education, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, learning ecosystem, parents/guardians, pedagogy, psychology, student-related, teachers, United States, youth, by Daniel Christian

Meeting Students’ Needs for Emotional Support — from edutopia.org by Zi Jia Ng
A new survey finds that a large percentage of students don’t feel that they have an adult to turn to at school when they’re troubled.

Only 55 percent of elementary school students (grades three through five), 42 percent of middle school students, and 40 percent of high school students in the United States have an adult at school they can talk to when they feel upset or stressed, according to a survey of more than 200,000 students across 20 different states. At every age, students benefit from a hand to hold, an ear to listen, and a heart to understand them.

Here’s one strategy for helping to ensure that every student has a trusted adult at school.

Getting Middle and High School Students With Low Grades Back on Track — from edutopia.org by Christine Boatman
By sitting down with students and laying out just what they need to do to pass, teachers can give them the tools to succeed.

AN ANTIDOTE TO PROCRASTINATION
There are effective preventive measures that teachers can take to support middle and high school students with time-management and organizational skills. Still, some students inevitably may find themselves behind at the end of the semester and need individualized Tier 2 interventions as a result of their procrastination.

A Tier 2 strategy that teachers can use to support student efforts to pass classes during the end-of-the-semester scramble is the creation of individual PDSA (plan, do, study, act) cycles. A PDSA cycle is a process in which teachers and students work together to create a plan for improvement; implement, or do, the plan; study if the plan’s actions were successful; and act to create long-term improvement actions based on the results of the plan.

In PDSA cycles, teachers work with their students to create plans for success. These plans can be used either with a whole group or on an individual basis. Through working one-on-one with students this way, I’ve seen large gains in student achievement and agency.

A Student’s Perspective on Career and Interview Readiness — from gettingsmart.com by Tyler Robert and Todd Smith

Key Points

Sharing experiences in real-world learning is an asset when interviewing for early career opportunities.
Building confidence in not only being interviewed but also speaking about your skills in common language is a key part of creating effective pathways.

Asking Students What They Would Do If They Were The Teacher — from thebrokencopier.substack.com by Marcus Luther
one of my favorite practices we’ve normed in our classroom

Though it had been a bit since our previous check-in, the major drop in how students were doing overall was staggering—yet also very much tracked with the “vibe” of the classroom of late: students still feel pretty good about what we’re doing, but overall are exhausted and stressed, each in their own way but collectively as well.

My plan on Monday, then?

To share these results with the entire classroom followed by a simple question:

“If you were the teacher and you saw this feedback, what would you think and, more importantly, what would you do?”

And then I’ll listen to what they have to say.

Reflecting back on my own classroom over the years, though, too often the collecting of the feedback became a dead end as far as how students experienced this: they gave their results and then those results disappeared into the digital ether, in their eyes.

AI Resources and Teaching [Kent State U] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 04/16/2024, in adjunct faculty, art, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, computer science, content development, aggregation, repositories, design, digital audio, digital learning, digital storytelling, digital video, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, faculty, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, Google, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, liberal arts, media/film, Microsoft, multimedia, music, Natural Language Processing (NLP), new media literacies, online media, online tutoring, Open AI, open courseware and systems, pedagogy, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, teaching & learning, tools, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

AI RESOURCES AND TEACHING (Kent State University) — from aiadvisoryboards.wordpress.com

AI Resources and Teaching | Kent State University offers valuable resources for educators interested in incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices. The university recognizes that the rapid emergence of AI tools presents both challenges and opportunities in higher education.

The AI Resources and Teaching page provides educators with information and guidance on various AI tools and their responsible use within and beyond the classroom. The page covers different areas of AI application, including language generation, visuals, videos, music, information extraction, quantitative analysis, and AI syllabus language examples.

A Cautionary AI Tale: Why IBM’s Dazzling Watson Supercomputer Made a Lousy Tutor — from the74million.org by Greg Toppo
With a new race underway to create the next teaching chatbot, IBM’s abandoned 5-year, $100M ed push offers lessons about AI’s promise and its limits.

For all its jaw-dropping power, Watson the computer overlord was a weak teacher. It couldn’t engage or motivate kids, inspire them to reach new heights or even keep them focused on the material — all qualities of the best mentors.

It’s a finding with some resonance to our current moment of AI-inspired doomscrolling about the future of humanity in a world of ascendant machines. “There are some things AI is actually very good for,” Nitta said, “but it’s not great as a replacement for humans.”

His five-year journey to essentially a dead-end could also prove instructive as ChatGPT and other programs like it fuel a renewed, multimillion-dollar experiment to, in essence, prove him wrong.
…

To be sure, AI can do sophisticated things such as generating quizzes from a class reading and editing student writing. But the idea that a machine or a chatbot can actually teach as a human can, he said, represents “a profound misunderstanding of what AI is actually capable of.”

Nitta, who still holds deep respect for the Watson lab, admits, “We missed something important. At the heart of education, at the heart of any learning, is engagement. And that’s kind of the Holy Grail.”

From DSC:
This is why the vision that I’ve been tracking and working on has always said that HUMAN BEINGS will be necessary — they are key to realizing this vision. Along these lines, here’s a relevant quote:

Another crucial component of a new learning theory for the age of AI would be the cultivation of “blended intelligence.” This concept recognizes that the future of learning and work will involve the seamless integration of human and machine capabilities, and that learners must develop the skills and strategies needed to effectively collaborate with AI systems. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to human intelligence, a blended intelligence approach seeks to harness the complementary strengths of humans and machines, creating a symbiotic relationship that enhances the potential of both.

Per Alexander “Sasha” Sidorkin, Head of the National Institute on AI in Society at California State University Sacramento.

The US is experiencing a boom in microschools. What are they? [O’Connell-Domenech] + other items from the K12 learning ecosystem

On 04/12/2024, in Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), education, education reform, engagement / engaging students, learning, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, motivation, neurodivergent/special needs, participation, personalized/customized learning, society, student-related, teachers, United States, youth, by Daniel Christian

The US is experiencing a boom in microschools. What are they? — from thehill.com by Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech; via GSV

Story at a glance (emphasis DSC)

There has been a surge in new microschools in the U.S. since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The National Microschooling Network estimates there are about 95,000 microschools in the country. The median microschool serves 16 students.
There is no regulatory body solely responsible for tracking microschools, so it is difficult to determine just how much their popularity has grown.

Advocates for microschools say they offer some students — especially those who are gifted or have learning disabilities — a greater chance to thrive academically and socially than traditional schools do.

At Sphinx Academy, a micro-school based in Lexington, Ky., almost all 24 students are “twice exceptional,” meaning they are gifted in one academic area but have one or more learning disabilities like ADHD or dyslexia, according to the school’s director Jennifer Lincoln.

Student Apathy Is a Big Classroom Challenge, Teachers Say. Cellphones Aren’t Helping — from edweek.org by Madeline Will

The stakes are high: Students have a lot of academic ground to make up following the pandemic. Yet they’re not fully engaged in the classroom, teachers report in a new national survey.

Learning Ecosystems

“Are Colleges Ready For an Online-Education World Without OPMs?” [Ubell] + other HE-related items

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