Yet the history and research of intelligent tutors show that using the right design to harness the power of chatbots like ChatGPT can make deeper, individualized learning available to almost anyone. For example, if people use ChatGPT to ask students questions that prompt them to revise or explain their work, students will have better learning gains. Since ChatGPT has access to far more knowledge than Aristotle ever did, it has great potential for providing tutoring to students to help them learn more than they would otherwise.
13 Formative Assessments That Inspire Creativity — from edutopia.org by Paige Tutt Sometimes mixing in formative assessments that go a step beyond exit slips and low-stakes quizzes can inject some fun—and creativity—into learning.
Excerpt:
Quick checks for understanding aren’t new, of course, but when time allows, occasionally injecting an element of creativity into formative assessments can deliver unexpected benefits. For example—regardless of a student’s artistic talent—research suggests that drawing the information they’re learning can increase student recall by nearly double. And when kids are encouraged to tap into their imagination to show what they know, they tend to ask more innovative questions of themselves, brainstorm fresh solutions to problems, and synthesize material in original and surprising ways.
Here are 13 formative assessment strategies that lean into creativity—inspired by the work of several Edutopia contributors, and from Finley’s handy list of quick checks for understanding.
Also see:
Is This Elementary School Near Pittsburgh the Future of Education? — from smithsonianmag.com by Kellie B. Gormly; with thanks to Tom Vander Ark out on Twitter for this resource Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School is an innovative blend of children’s museum and classroom
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
At Seneca Valley’s Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School, K-6 students are benefiting from an unusual collaboration. School leaders, architects and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh teamed up on the $63 million project,which opened in August 2022 after 790 construction days. With a student capacity of 1,400, the 200,000-square-foot facility takes a novel approach, forgoing the traditional school design for the playful, interactive, colorful elements of a children’s museum.Time magazine declared it one of the “Best Inventions of 2022.”
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Matilda McQuaid, acting curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, says this is the first time she has heard of a museum collaborating with a school to create a new environment from the ground up.
From DSC: I love this collaboration — a children’s museum and a school district! — and the energy and creativity throughout this learning space!
Why Studying Is So Hard, and What Teachers Can Do to Help— from edutopia.org by Laura McKenna Beginning in the upper elementary grades, research-backed study skills should be woven into the curriculum, argues psychology professor Daniel Willingham in a new book.
Excerpt:
The additional context for Willingham’s new book is that students often don’t know the best methods to study for tests, master complex texts, or take productive notes, and it’s difficult to explain to them why they should take a different tack. In the book, Willingham debunks popular myths about the best study strategies, explains why they don’t work, and recommends effective strategies that are based on the latest research in cognitive science.
I recently spoke to him about why listening to lectures isn’t like watching a movie, how our self-monitoring of learning is often flawed and self-serving, and when it’s too late to start teaching students good study skills.
Best Document Cameras for Teachers — from techlearning.com by Luke Edwards Get the best document camera for teachers to make the classroom more digitally immersive
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The Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence: Best of 2022 celebrate educational technology from the last 12 months that has excelled in supporting teachers, students, and education professionals in the classroom, for professional development, or general management of education resources and learning. Nominated products are divided into three categories: Primary, Secondary, or Higher Education.
The practical guide to using AI to do stuff— from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick; with thanks to Sam DeBrule for this resource. Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he studies entrepreneurship & innovation, as well as how we can better learn and teach. A resource for students in my classes (and other interested people).
Excerpts:
My classes now require AI (and if I didn’t require AI use, it wouldn’t matter, everyone is using AI anyway). But how can students use AI well? Here is a basic tutorial and guide I am providing my classes. It covers some of the many ways to use AI to be more productive, creative, and successful, using the technology available in early 2023, as well as some of the risks.
… Come up with ideas Open Source Option: Nothing very good Best free (for now) option: ChatGPT (registration may require a phone number) Best option if ChatGPT is down: OpenAI Playground .
Also relevant/see:
It was nice talking to @lapiaenrose for the @WIRED article on #ChatGPT and #education. I shared how I use LLMs in class and suggested that banning them would not remove the need for redesigning both the learning goals and assessment methods. #AIEthicshttps://t.co/30tqFN1FSS
They see an education and skills gap: Forty-four percent said that school only taught them very basic computing skills, while 37% said that school education (for children under age 16) didn’t prepare them with the technology skills they needed for their planned careers. Forty percent consider learning new digital skills essential to future career options.
It’s clear that Gen Z see technology as pivotal for their future prosperity. It is now up to us—leading technology providers, governments, and the public sector—to work together and set them up for success by improving the quality and access to digital learning. Forty-four percent of Gen Z feel educators and businesses should work together to bridge the digital skills gap, and with the speed at which technology continues to evolve, this will require constant collaboration.
Aongus Hegarty, president of international markets at Dell Technologies
AI raises floor, not ceiling.
Basic writers ?? Good writers
Basic designers ?? Good designers
Basic instructors ?? Good instructors
Experts see fewer benefits
AI ?? speed + ideation but better to be original + unique as expert. That’s ? AI
From DSC: Let’s put together a nationwide campaign that would provide a website — or a series of websites if an agreement can’t be reached amongst the individual states — about learning how to learn. In business, there’s a “direct-to-consumer” approach. Well, we could provide a “direct-to-learner” approach — from cradle to grave. Seeing as how everyone is now required to be a lifelong learner, such a campaign would have enormous benefits to all of the United States. This campaign would be located in airports, subway stations, train stations, on billboards along major highways, in libraries, and in many more locations.
We could focus on things such as:
Quizzing yourself / retrieval practice
Spaced retrieval
Interleaving
Elaboration
Chunking
Cognitive load
Learning by doing (active learning)
Journaling
The growth mindset
Metacognition (thinking about one’s thinking)
Highlighting doesn’t equal learning
There is deeper learning in the struggle
…and more.
NOTE:
The URL I’m using above doesn’t exist, at least not at the time of this posting.
But I’m proposing that it should exist.
ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education — from ditchthattextbook.com by Matt Miller AI just stormed into the classroom with the emergence of ChatGPT. How do we teach now that it exists? How can we use it? Here are some ideas.
Excerpt: Now, we’re wondering …
What is ChatGPT? And, more broadly, what are chatbots and AI?
How is this going to impact education?
How can I teach tomorrow knowing that this exists?
Can I use this as a tool for teaching and learning?
Should we block it through the school internet filter — or try to ban it?
The tech world is abuzz over ChatGPT, a chat bot that is said to be the most advanced ever made.
It can create poems, songs, and even computer code. It convincingly constructed a passage of text on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, in the voice of the King James Bible.
As a PhD microbiologist, I devised a 10-question quiz that would be appropriate as a final exam for college-level microbiology students. ChatGPT blew it away.
On the one hand, yes, ChatGPT is capable of producing prose that looks convincing. But on the other hand, what it means to be convincing depends on context. The kind of prose you might find engaging and even startling in the context of a generative encounter with an AI suddenly seems just terrible in the context of a professional essay published in a magazine such as The Atlantic. And, as Warner’s comments clarify, the writing you might find persuasive as a teacher (or marketing manager or lawyer or journalist or whatever else) might have been so by virtue of position rather than meaning: The essay was extant and competent; the report was in your inbox on time; the newspaper article communicated apparent facts that you were able to accept or reject.
These lines of demarcation—the lines between when a tool can do all of a job, some of it, or none of it—are both constantly moving and critical to watch. Because they define knowledge work and point to the future of work. We need to be teaching people how to do the kinds of knowledge work that computers can’t do well and are not likely to be able to do well in the near future. Much has been written about the economic implications to the AI revolution, some of which are problematic for the employment market. But we can put too much emphasis on that part. Learning about artificial intelligence can be a means for exploring, appreciating, and refining natural intelligence. These tools are fun. I learn from using them. Those two statements are connected.
Google is planning to create a new AI feature for its Search engine, one that would rival the recently released and controversial ChatGPT from OpenAI. The company revealed this after a recent Google executive meeting that involved the likes of its CEO Sundar Pichai and AI head, Jeff Dean, that talked about the technology that the internet company already has, soon for development.
Employees from the Mountain View giant were concerned that it was behind the current AI trends to the likes of OpenAI despite already having a similar technology laying around.
And more focused on the business/vocational/corporate training worlds:
There are a lot of knowledge management, enterprise learning and enterprise search products on the market today, but what Sana believes it has struck on uniquely is a platform that combines all three to work together: a knowledge management-meets-enterprise-search-meets-e-learning platform.
Three sources briefed on OpenAI’s recent pitch to investors said the organization expects $200 million in revenue next year and $1 billion by 2024.
The forecast, first reported by Reuters, represents how some in Silicon Valley are betting the underlying technology will go far beyond splashy and sometimes flawed public demos.
“We’re going to see advances in 2023 that people two years ago would have expected in 2033. It’s going to be extremely important not just for Microsoft’s future, but for everyone’s future,” he said in an interview this week.
Implementing UDL with a Focus on Accessibility UDL is a proven methodology that benefits all students, but when instructors embrace universal design, they need to consider how their decisions will affect students with disabilities.
Some key considerations to keep in mind:
Instructional materials should not require a certain type of sensory perception.
A presentation that includes images should have accurate alternative text (also called alt text) for those images.
Transcripts and captions should be provided for all audio content.
Color alone should not be used to convey information, since some students may not perceive color (or have different cultural understandings of colors).
Student presentations should also follow accessibility guidelines. This increases the student’s workload, but it’s an excellent opportunity to teach the importance of accessibility.
Think of working memory as the reception counter to a huge archive.
To summarize, working memory processing resources are highly limited, and yet meaningful processing is essential for storage in long-term memory. It is therefore important to use these resources effectively when learning. There are many tested and proven effective teaching strategies, but a question that often comes up is when to apply each strategy for the best results?
It would be an understatement to say that lecturing is frowned upon in modern teaching. At this point it’s almost become a cliché: Don’t be the sage on the stage; be the guide on the side. Ideally, we should stick to supporting students through inquiry learning, cooperative learning, project-based learning, and so on. I have personally advocated for ALL of these approaches, over and over again. And I do believe that students need to be active in their learning.
But does that mean we dump lectures altogether? At a time when TED Talks and online courses are incredibly popular, when our students get at least some portion of their instruction through video-based, blended learning platforms, and when most people reading this have probably learned something useful or interesting in the last month from YouTube, aren’t we all learning from lectures all the time?
I’d argue that two factors have given lectures a bad name: overuse and poor execution. Let’s look at these issues one at a time.
Best Webcams for Teachers and Students — from techlearning.com by Luke Edwards Get the best webcams for teachers and students to help with hybrid learning and more
Community college-based teaching programs like this are rare, but growing. They can dramatically cut the cost and raise the convenience of earning a teaching degree, while making a job in education accessible to a wider diversity of people.
In Washington, nine community colleges offer education degrees. Nationally, Community College Baccalaureate Association data indicates just six other states — Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada and New Mexico — offer baccalaureate degrees related to K-12 education. (Two other states, Texas and Wyoming, offer early childhood education degrees.)
The expansion comes at a good time: Teacher shortages have worsened in the past decade, and fewer undergraduates are going into teacher training programs.
Last month on Twitter, I shared some of the many, many things I’ve learned from podcast guests over the last six years. I encourage you to check out that thread and listen to a few of my favorite episodes. Here on the blog, I’d like to share a few more general reflections about what I learned through producing Leading Lines.
Finally, one lesson that the podcast reinforced for me is that faculty and other instructors want to hear stories. Sure, a peer-reviewed journal article on the impact of some teaching practice is useful, but some of those can focus too much on assessment and not enough on the practice itself. Hearing a colleague talk about their teaching, the choices they’ve made, why they made those choices, what effects those choices have had on student learning… that can be both inspirational and intensely practical for those seeking to improve their teaching. A big part of Leading Lines was finding instructors with compelling stories and then letting them shine during our interviews.
Adding an entirely new content format to our service is no small feat. But we’ve done it before with podcasts, and we’re excited to now do the same with audiobooks.
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Just as we did with podcasting, this will introduce a new format to an audience that has never before consumed it, unlocking a whole new segment of potential listeners. This also helps us support even more kinds of creators and connect them with fans that will love their art—which makes this even more exciting.
“We have had basically at least an orange flag that’s been waving for the past 10 — and in urban and rural areas, well over 20 years — to say we’re not doing enough to recruit teachers,” said Kendra Hearn, associate dean for educator preparation programs at the University of Michigan. “…Everything has just been exacerbated by COVID.”
Experts believe a combination of economic and social factors are contributing to the decline: High stress working conditions, restrictions and political influence on what can be taught and low wages.
As educators look for ways to help students gain ground academically, research suggests refining traditional classroom reading groups could help.
As part of an Education Week webinar with educators Thursday, special education professor Matthew Burns talked about how to improve the effectiveness of small-group instruction. Burns, the director of the University of Missouri Center for Collaborative Solutions for Kids, Practice, and Policy, said effective small-group reading instruction can cut across different grades and subject areas, but students should be arranged based on the specific skills they need to hone in comprehension, fluency, phonics, and phonemic awareness—rather than overall reading levels.
Key Statement: This article focuses on innovative, engaging, and effective recoding for learning strategies to aid critical thinking for students discussing and interpreting second language texts within an online classroom experience.
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