Students from the 6th grade at Nathan Hale School complete a “bingo challenge” as part of the Red Sox Hall of Fame stop on their guided tour of the Fenway Park Learning Lab.
Excerpt:
The six-stop tour has students learning history, geography, math, and science. Student visitors get baseball caps, t-shirts, and a backpack full of other souvenir items like baseball cards, binoculars, a calculator, and a pen. The most important piece of equipment may be a 40-page, seriously substantive workbook, developed with the Boston Public Schools, that students work their way through along the hourlong guided tour.
In March, I reported a pair of stories from Jackson, Miss., where the school district is paying for unlicensed classroom aides to go back to school and get their master’s degrees.
In April, I told the story of a remarkable idea: A new high school in San Antonio dedicated entirely to training high-schoolers in the art and science of good teaching.
From DSC: I would add a few more items:
Significantly reduce the impact of legislators on K-12. If they do vote on something that would impact schools, each legislator that votes on such legislation must first spend at least ___ week(s) observing in some of the schools that would be impacted before even starting to draft legislation and/or debate on the topic(s).
Instead, turn over more control and power to the students, teachers, K12 administrators, parents, and school boards.
Provide more choice, more control as each student can handle it.
Stop the one-size fits all system. Instead use AI-based systems to provide more personalized learning.
Develop more hybrid programs — but this time I’m talking mixing what we’ve known as public education with homeschooling and smaller learning pods. Let’s expand what’s included when we discuss “learning spaces.”
Strive for a love of learning — vs. competition and developing gameplayers
Support makerspaces, entrepreneurship, and experiments
Speaking of experiments, I would recommend developing more bold experiments outside of the current systems.
Along the lines of potential solutions/visions, see:
Foremost among them is this: Despite all the fancy models and white papers around what are all the levers to pull in order to transform a system, system transformation almost never happens by changing the fundamental tenets of the system itself. Instead, it comes from replacing the system with a brand-new system.
To start to understand why, consider the complicated system in which public schools find themselves. As Thomas Arnett explained, they are one part of a vast value network of federal, state, and local regulators, voters and taxpayers, parents and students, teachers, administrators, unions, curriculum providers, school vendors, public infrastructure, higher education institutions, and more.
New ideas, programs, or entities that don’t fit into these processes, priorities, and cost structures are simply not plug-compatible into that value network. They consequently get rejected, tossed to the fringe, or altered to meet the needs of the existing actors in the value network.
What Does Assistive Tech Look Like with One-to-One Programs? — from edtechmagazine.com by Rebecca Torchia In a recent episode of Focus on EDU, one special education teacher shared tips for working with parents and integrating tech’s assistive benefits into the classroom.
Excerpt:
As K–12 schools adopt one-to-one device programs, they have the opportunity to introduce more assistive technologies into classrooms. These accommodations can help bring equity into schools, and in ways that don’t make students feel singled out.
“When I started teaching, students who needed anything outside of that traditional pen-and-paper environment had to leave the environment in general education to be able to access those things,” Laura Hess, executive director of special education at St. Vrain Valley Schools in Colorado, said on an episode of Focus on EDU. “Now, a lot of districts across the U.S. are one-to-one districts, so all of our students have access to technology. Students don’t need to leave the classroom to access that support.”
There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own.
The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step.
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From DSC: The idea of personalized storytelling is highly intriguing to me. If you write a story for someone with their name and character in it, they will likely be even more engaged with the story/content. Our daughter recently did this with a substitute teacher, who she really wanted to thank before she left (for another assignment at another school). I thought it was very creative of her.
We’re building resources to teach AI literacies for high school and college instructors and assembling them into a full curriculum that will be deployed in a course with the National Educational Equity Lab offered in Fall 2023. .
AI video is getting insanely powerful.
Soon, you’ll be able to create a Hollywood-grade movie from your pocket.
Here’s the most breathtaking AI-generated videos I’ve seen:
— The AI Solopreneur (@aisolopreneur) May 11, 2023
ChatGPT has changed the world.
It does lack in some areas, but my favorite use case is leveraging it to teach me things twice as fast.
Here are the 10 best prompts to learn anything faster:
Why I’m Excited About ChatGPT— from insidehighered.com by Jennie Young Here are 10 ways ChatGPT will be a boon to first-year writing instruction, Jennie Young writes.
Excerpt:
But from my perspective as a first-year writing program director, I’m excited about how this emerging technology will help students from all kinds of educational backgrounds learn and focus on higher-order thinking skills faster. Here are 10 reasons I’m excited about ChatGPT.
? stfu and take my money
This is the most impressive campaign I’ve seen from a mega brand so far using AI & StableDiffusion.
edX Debuts Two AI-Powered Learning Assistants Built on ChatGPT — from press.edx.org; with thanks to Matthew Tower for this resource edX plugin launches in ChatGPT plugin store to give users access to content and course discovery edX Xpert delivers AI-powered learning and customer support within the edX platform
Excerpt:
LANHAM, Md. – May 12, 2023 – edX, a leading global online learning platform from 2U, Inc. (Nasdaq: TWOU), today announced the debut of two AI-powered innovations: the new edX plugin for ChatGPT and edX Xpert, an AI-powered learning assistant on the edX platform. Both tools leverage the technology of AI research and deployment company OpenAI to deliver real-time academic support and course discovery to help learners achieve their goals.
We’ve found pockets of excellence in three dozen high school visits this spring.
Where we’ve spotted evidence of deeper learning (i.e., engagement, critical thinking, excellent public products) it’s been work that matters to the learner and their community– it’s relevant, purposeful, and consequential work.
How Testing Students Twice Can Improve Note-Taking Skills — from edutopia.org by Benjamin Barbour Allowing students to take a test two times—once from memory and once using their notes—can boost note-taking, study skills, and reading habits, all at once.
Excerpt:
Along the way, Barbour also came up with an ingenious strategy for improving students’ note-taking—he calls it the “test average method.” He tests his students twice, back-to-back: once, when they don’t use their notes (which incentivizes good studying), and a second time, when they use their notes (which incentivizes good note-taking). He then averages their scores.
Across all socioeconomic and racial groups, Americans want an education system that goes beyond college preparation and delivers practical skills for every learner, based on their own needs, goals and vision for the future.
We believe that this can be achieved by making the future of learning more personalized, focused on the needs of individual learners, with success measured by progress and proficiency instead of point-in-time test scores.
Change is hard, but we expect our students to take risks and fail every day. We should ask no less of ourselves.
In this episode, I share ChatGPT prompts for teachers you can use to save time and make the most of this free artificial intelligence tool. You’ll also hear tips for generating and refining prompts to optimize your workflow this school year, along with 10 prompts to try in ChatGPT that may surprise you!
Tips for Prompts to Try in ChatGPT
Think about your time-consuming tasks.
Keep in mind tone, context, and specificity.
Use prompts to generate activity ideas and classroom resources.
In particular, TutorND’s emphasis on applying principles of cognitive science – the science of our how minds work – in tutoring practice has not only bolstered the interest and confidence of some of its tutors to pursue teaching, but also strengthened their instructional skills and meaningfully contributed to PK-12 student growth.
Today, TutorND trains and supports 175 tutors in schools across the greater South Bend community and across the country. Given that these tutors are students, faculty, and staff interested in cognitive science research and its application to student learning, they’re able to bridge theory and practice, assess the effectiveness of instructional moves, and foster learning experiences for students that are rigorous, affirming, and equitable.
So today, I wanted to share something that I’m also personally proud of – an elaborate resources page for student podcasting that our team published earlier this year. My big boss Steve Drummond named it “Sound Advice: The NPR guide to student podcasting.” And, again, this isn’t just for Student Podcast Challenge participants. We have guides from NPR and more for anyone interested in starting a podcast!
Here’s a sampler of some of my favorite resources:
Using sound: Teachers, here’s a lovely video you can play for your class! Or for any visual learners, this is a fun watch! In this video, veteran NPR correspondent Don Gonyea walks you through how to build your own recording studio – a pillow fort! (And yes, this is an actual trick we use at NPR!)
Voice coaching: Speaking into a microphone is hard, even for our radio veterans. In this video, NPR voice coach Jessica Hansen and our training team share a few vocal exercises that will help you sound more natural in front of a mic! I personally watched this video before recording my first radio story, so I’d highly recommend it for everyone!
Life Kit episode on podcasting:In this episode from NPR’s Life Kit, Lauren Migaki, our very own NPR Ed senior producer, brings us tips from podcast producers across NPR, working on all your favorite shows, including Code Switch, Planet Money and more! It’s an awesome listen for a class or on your own!
As we look at career pathways for students we might do more to support students to find meaningful work.
Data suggests young people care about having jobs that make an impact.
Difference-making, social innovation, social entrepreneurship – there’s a thread that unites these various themes. They are purpose-driven. As we look at career pathways for students we might do more to support students to find meaningful work. Data suggests young people care about having jobs that make an impact. They want to do something that contributes positively to society, and the environment while earning a paycheck. This is something that we must nurture as educators.
