Free Music Discovery Tools — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan and Chris Dalla Riva
Travel through time and around the world with sound

I love apps like Metronaut and Tomplay, which let me carry a collection of classical (sheet) music on my phone. They also provide piano or orchestral accompaniment for any violin piece I want to play.

Today’s post shares 10 other recommended tools for music lovers from my fellow writer and friend, Chris Dalla Riva, who writes Can’t Get Much Higher, a popular Substack focused on the intersection of music and data. I invited Chris to share with you his favorite resources for discovering, learning, and creating music.

Sections include:

  • Learn about Music
  • Discover New Music
  • Learn an Instrument
  • Tools for Artists
 


Gen AI Is Going Mainstream: Here’s What’s Coming Next — from joshbersin.com by Josh Bersin

I just completed nearly 60,000 miles of travel across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East meeting with hundred of companies to discuss their AI strategies. While every company’s maturity is different, one thing is clear: AI as a business tool has arrived: it’s real and the use-cases are growing.

A new survey by Wharton shows that 46% of business leaders use Gen AI daily and 80% use it weekly. And among these users, 72% are measuring ROI and 74% report a positive return. HR, by the way, is the #3 department in use cases, only slightly behind IT and Finance.

What are companies getting out of all this? Productivity. The #1 use case, by far, is what we call “stage 1” usage – individual productivity. 

.


From DSC:
Josh writes: “Many of our large clients are now implementing AI-native learning systems and seeing 30-40% reduction in staff with vast improvements in workforce enablement.

While I get the appeal (and ROI) from management’s and shareholders’ perspective, this represents a growing concern for employment and people’s ability to earn a living. 

And while I highly respect Josh and his work through the years, I disagree that we’re over the problems with AI and how people are using it: 

Two years ago the NYT was trying to frighten us with stories of AI acting as a romance partner. Well those stories are over, and thanks to a $Trillion (literally) of capital investment in infrastructure, engineering, and power plants, this stuff is reasonably safe.

Those stories are just beginning…they’re not close to being over. 


“… imagine a world where there’s no separation between learning and assessment…” — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton, Ph.D. and Tawnya Means
An interview with Tawnya Means

So let’s imagine a world where there’s no separation between learning and assessment: it’s ongoing. There’s always assessment, always learning, and they’re tied together. Then we can ask: what is the role of the human in that world? What is it that AI can’t do?

Imagine something like that in higher ed. There could be tutoring or skill-based work happening outside of class, and then relationship-based work happening inside of class, whether online, in person, or some hybrid mix.

The aspects of learning that don’t require relational context could be handled by AI, while the human parts remain intact. For example, I teach strategy and strategic management. I teach people how to talk with one another about the operation and function of a business. I can help students learn to be open to new ideas, recognize when someone pushes back out of fear of losing power, or draw from my own experience in leading a business and making future-oriented decisions.

But the technical parts such as the frameworks like SWOT analysis, the mechanics of comparing alternative viewpoints in a boardroom—those could be managed through simulations or reports that receive immediate feedback from AI. The relational aspects, the human mentoring, would still happen with me as their instructor.

Part 2 of their interview is here:


 

Seeing The Unseen Students: The Invisible Strength of Teachers — from teachthought.com by Tasneem Tazkiya
One afternoon, I asked a different question: “What would make school feel worth showing up for again?”

A Moment That Changed My View of Teaching
I’ll never forget a student I’ll call Jalen. He was bright and quick with answers, sharp in debate, but he had built a wall around himself after a difficult year at home. He’d stopped turning in work and began sitting silently in the back of the room, disengaged and defiant.

One afternoon, instead of lecturing him about missing assignments, I asked a different question: “What would make school feel worth showing up for again?”

That simple question opened a door. Over the following weeks, Jalen began sharing ideas for projects connected to his interests, designing sneakers and exploring how geometry applies to shoe patterns. I adapted lessons to let him create, design, and analyze. Slowly, his confidence returned. Months later, he told me, “You made me feel like my ideas mattered.”

That moment reminded me that teaching isn’t just about delivering content; it’s about restoring belief in learning, and in oneself.


Also see:

The Power of Play — from barbarabray.net by Barbara Bray

Play brings joy and happiness to learning. Infusing play in schools prepares kids as future citizens.
When you play a game with your friends, how do you feel?

When you see children playing with other children, what do you notice?

Ask a child if they remember the worksheet they filled out last week.
Did they have fun?

Do they remember what they learned?

Let’s play more and discover how learning unfolds.
Schools can invest in more play through games, interactive experiences, and just making learning fun. Providing engaging activities through play creates learners who become critical thinkers, researchers, and designers.


Also re: teaching and learning:

 

“OpenAI’s Atlas: the End of Online Learning—or Just the Beginning?” [Hardman] + other items re: AI in our LE’s

OpenAI’s Atlas: the End of Online Learning—or Just the Beginning? — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman

My take is this: in all of the anxiety lies a crucial and long-overdue opportunity to deliver better learning experiences. Precisely because Atlas perceives the same context in the same moment as you, it can transform learning into a process aligned with core neuro-scientific principles—including active retrieval, guided attention, adaptive feedback and context-dependent memory formation.

Perhaps in Atlas we have a browser that for the first time isn’t just a portal to information, but one which can become a co-participant in active cognitive engagement—enabling iterative practice, reflective thinking, and real-time scaffolding as you move through challenges and ideas online.

With this in mind, I put together 10 use cases for Atlas for you to try for yourself.

6. Retrieval Practice
What:
Pulling information from memory drives retention better than re-reading.
Why: Practice testing delivers medium-to-large effects (Adesope et al., 2017).
Try: Open a document with your previous notes. Ask Atlas for a mixed activity set: “Quiz me on the Krebs cycle—give me a near-miss, high-stretch MCQ, then a fill-in-the-blank, then ask me to explain it to a teen.”
Atlas uses its browser memory to generate targeted questions from your actual study materials, supporting spaced, varied retrieval.




From DSC:
A quick comment. I appreciate these ideas and approaches from Katarzyna and Rita. I do think that someone is going to want to be sure that the AI models/platforms/tools are given up-to-date information and updated instructions — i.e., any new procedures, steps to take, etc. Perhaps I’m missing the boat here, but an internal AI platform is going to need to have access to up-to-date information and instructions.


 

Chegg CEO steps down amid major AI-driven restructure — from linkedin.com by Megan McDonough

Edtech firm Chegg confirmed Monday it is reducing its workforce by 45%, or 388 employees globally, and its chief executive officer is stepping down. Current CEO Nathan Schultz will be replaced effective immediately by executive chairman (and former CEO) Dan Rosensweig. The rise of AI-powered tools has dealt a massive blow to the online homework helper and led to “substantial” declines in revenue and traffic. Company shares have slipped over 10% this year. Chegg recently explored a possible sale, but ultimately decided to keep the company intact.

 

Entrepreneurship: The New Core Curriculum — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark

Key Points

  • Entrepreneurship education fosters resilience, creativity, and financial literacy—skills critical for success in an unpredictable, tech-driven world.
  • Programs like NFTE, Junior Achievement, and Uncharted Learning empower students by offering real-world entrepreneurial experiences and mentorship.

“Entrepreneurship is the job of the future.”

— Charles Fadel, Education for the Age of AI

This shift requires a radical re-evaluation of what we teach. Education leaders across the country are realizing that the most valuable skill we can impart is not accounting or marketing, but the entrepreneurial mindset. This mindset—built on resilience, creative problem-solving, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to pivot—is essential in startups, as an intrapreuer in big organizations, or as a citizen working for the common good.

 

Where are tomorrow’s teachers? Education degrees drop over 2 decades. — from k12dive.com by Anna Merod
Declines came in both bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded between 2003-04 and 2022-23, an AACTE analysis of federal data shows.

The number of education degrees awarded in the U.S. steadily decreased in the nearly two decades between 2003-04 and 2022-23, according to a new analysis of federal data by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

Bachelor’s degrees in education dipped from 109,622 annually to 90,710 while master’s degrees declined from 162,632 to 143,669 in that time span, AACTE said in its report on data from the U.S. Department of Education.

 

Digest #182: How To Increase (Self-)Motivation — from lifehack.org by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

No matter whether you are a student or a teacher, sometimes it can be difficult to find motivation to start or complete a task. Instead, you may spend hours procrastinating with other activities and that opens an unhelpful cycle of stress and unhappiness. Stressful environments which are common in educational settings can increase the likelihood of maladaptive procrastination (1) and hamper motivation. This digest offers four resources on ways to think about and boost (self-)motivation.

Also see:

 

There is no God Tier video model — from downes.ca by Stephen Downes

From DSC:
Stephen has some solid reflections and asks some excellent questions in this posting, including:

The question is: how do we optimize an AI to support learning? Will one model be enough? Or do we need different models for different learners in different scenarios?


A More Human University: The Role of AI in Learning — from er.educause.edu by Robert Placido
Far from heralding the collapse of higher education, artificial intelligence offers a transformative opportunity to scale meaningful, individualized learning experiences across diverse classrooms.

The narrative surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education is often grim. We hear dire predictions of an “impending collapse,” fueled by fears of rampant cheating, the erosion of critical thinking, and the obsolescence of the human educator.Footnote1 This dystopian view, however, is a failure of imagination. It mistakes the death rattle of an outdated pedagogical model for the death of learning itself. The truth is far more hopeful: AI is not an asteroid coming for higher education. It is a catalyst that can finally empower us to solve our oldest, most intractable problem: the inability to scale deep, engaged, and truly personalized learning.


Claude for Life Sciences — from anthropic.com

Increasing the rate of scientific progress is a core part of Anthropic’s public benefit mission.

We are focused on building the tools to allow researchers to make new discoveries – and eventually, to allow AI models to make these discoveries autonomously.

Until recently, scientists typically used Claude for individual tasks, like writing code for statistical analysis or summarizing papers. Pharmaceutical companies and others in industry also use it for tasks across the rest of their business, like sales, to fund new research. Now, our goal is to make Claude capable of supporting the entire process, from early discovery through to translation and commercialization.

To do this, we’re rolling out several improvements that aim to make Claude a better partner for those who work in the life sciences, including researchers, clinical coordinators, and regulatory affairs managers.


AI as an access tool for neurodiverse and international staff — from timeshighereducation.com by Vanessa Mar-Molinero
Used transparently and ethically, GenAI can level the playing field and lower the cognitive load of repetitive tasks for admin staff, student support and teachers

Where AI helps without cutting academic corners
When framed as accessibility and quality enhancement, AI can support staff to complete standard tasks with less friction. However, while it supports clarity, consistency and inclusion, generative AI (GenAI) does not replace disciplinary expertise, ethical judgement or the teacher–student relationship. These are ways it can be put to effective use:

  • Drafting and tone calibration:
  • Language scaffolding:
  • Structure and templates: ..
  • Summarise and prioritise:
  • Accessibility by default:
  • Idea generation for pedagogy:
  • Translation and cultural mediation:

Beyond learning design: supporting pedagogical innovation in response to AI — from timeshighereducation.com by Charlotte von Essen
To avoid an unwinnable game of catch-up with technology, universities must rethink pedagogical improvement that goes beyond scaling online learning


The Sleep of Liberal Arts Produces AI — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton, Ph.D.
A keynote at the AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium Conference

This past weekend, I had the honor to be the keynote speaker at a really fantstistic conferece, AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium at Connecticut College. I had shared a bit about this before with my interview with Lori Looney. It was an incredible conference, thoughtfully composed with a lot of things to chew on and think about.

It was also an entirely brand new talk in a slightly different context from many of my other talks and workshops. It was something I had to build entirely from the ground up. It reminded me in some ways of last year’s “What If GenAI Is a Nothingburger”.

It was a real challenge and one I’ve been working on and off for months, trying to figure out the right balance. It’s a work I feel proud of because of the balancing act I try to navigate. So, as always, it’s here for others to read and engage with. And, of course, here is the slide deck as well (with CC license).

 

The above posting on LinkedIn then links to this document


Designing Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower educators, students, and staff — from microsoft.com by Deirdre Quarnstrom

While over 80% of respondents in the 2025 AI in Education Report have already used AI for school, we believe there are significant opportunities to design AI that can better serve each of their needs and broaden access to the latest innovation.1

That’s why today [10/15/25], we’re announcing AI-powered experiences built for teaching and learning at no additional cost, new integrations in Microsoft 365 apps and Learning Management Systems, and an academic offering for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Introducing AI-powered teaching and learning
Empowering educators with Teach

We’re introducing Teach to help streamline class prep and adapt AI to support educators’ teaching expertise with intuitive and customizable features. In one place, educators can easily access AI-powered teaching tools to create lesson plans, draft materials like quizzes and rubrics, and quickly make modifications to language, reading level, length, difficulty, alignment to relevant standards, and more.

 

 

10 Tips from Smart Teaching Stronger Learning — from Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D.

Per Dr. Pooja Agarwal:

Combining two strategies—spacing and retrieval practice—is key to success in learning, says Shana Carpenter.


On a somewhat related note (i.e., for Instructional Designers, teachers, faculty members, T&L staff members), also see:

 

“A new L&D operating system for the AI Era?” [Hardman] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

From 70/20/10 to 90/10 — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
A new L&D operating system for the AI Era?

This week I want to share a hypothesis I’m increasingly convinced of: that we are entering an age of the 90/10 model of L&D.

90/10 is a model where roughly 90% of “training” is delivered by AI coaches as daily performance support, and 10% of training is dedicated to developing complex and critical skills via high-touch, human-led learning experiences.

Proponents of 90/10 argue that the model isn’t about learning less, but about learning smarter by defining all jobs to be done as one of the following:

  • Delegate (the dead skills): Tasks that can be offloaded to AI.
  • Co-Create (the 90%): Tasks which well-defined AI agents can augment and help humans to perform optimally.
  • Facilitate (the 10%): Tasks which require high-touch, human-led learning to develop.

So if AI at work is now both real and material, the natural question for L&D is: how do we design for it? The short answer is to stop treating learning as an event and start treating it as a system.



My daughter’s generation expects to learn with AI, not pretend it doesn’t exist, because they know employers expect AI fluency and because AI will be ever-present in their adult lives.

— Jenny Maxell

The above quote was taken from this posting.


Unlocking Young Minds: How Gamified AI Learning Tools Inspire Fun, Personalized, and Powerful Education for Children in 2025 — from techgenyz.com by Sreyashi Bhattacharya

Table of Contents

Highlight

  • Gamified AI Learning Tools personalize education by adapting the difficulty and content to each child’s pace, fostering confidence and mastery.
  • Engaging & Fun: Gamified elements like quests, badges, and stories keep children motivated and enthusiastic.
  • Safe & Inclusive: Attention to equity, privacy, and cultural context ensures responsible and accessible learning.

How to test GenAI’s impact on learning — from timeshighereducation.com by Thibault Schrepel
Rather than speculate on GenAI’s promise or peril, Thibault Schrepel suggests simple teaching experiments to uncover its actual effects

Generative AI in higher education is a source of both fear and hype. Some predict the end of memory, others a revolution in personalised learning. My two-year classroom experiment points to a more modest reality: Artificial intelligence (AI) changes some skills, leaves others untouched and forces us to rethink the balance.

This indicates that the way forward is to test, not speculate. My results may not match yours, and that is precisely the point. Here are simple activities any teacher can use to see what AI really does in their own classroom.

4. Turn AI into a Socratic partner
Instead of being the sole interrogator, let AI play the role of tutor, client or judge. Have students use AI to question them, simulate cross-examination or push back on weak arguments. New “study modes” now built into several foundation models make this kind of tutoring easy to set up. Professors with more technical skills can go further, design their own GPTs or fine-tuned models trained on course content and let students interact directly with them. The point is the practice it creates. Students learn that questioning a machine is part of learning to think like a professional.


Assessment tasks that support human skills — from timeshighereducation.com by Amir Ghapanchi and Afrooz Purarjomandlangrudi
Assignments that focus on exploration, analysis and authenticity offer a road map for university assessment that incorporates AI while retaining its rigour and human elements

Rethinking traditional formats

1. From essay to exploration 
When ChatGPT can generate competent academic essays in seconds, the traditional format’s dominance looks less secure as an assessment task. The future lies in moving from essays as knowledge reproduction to assessments that emphasise exploration and curation. Instead of asking students to write about a topic, challenge them to use artificial intelligence to explore multiple perspectives, compare outputs and critically evaluate what emerges.

Example: A management student asks an AI tool to generate several risk plans, then critiques the AI’s assumptions and identifies missing risks.


What your students are thinking about artificial intelligence — from timeshighereducation.com by Florencia Moore and Agostina Arbia
GenAI has been quickly adopted by students, but the consequences of using it as a shortcut could be grave. A study into how students think about and use GenAI offers insights into how teaching might adapt

However, when asked how AI negatively impacts their academic development, 29 per cent noted a “weakening or deterioration of intellectual abilities due to AI overuse”. The main concern cited was the loss of “mental exercise” and soft skills such as writing, creativity and reasoning.

The boundary between the human and the artificial does not seem so easy to draw, but as the poet Antonio Machado once said: “Traveller, there is no path; the path is made by walking.”


Jelly Beans for Grapes: How AI Can Erode Students’ Creativity — from edsurge.com by Thomas David Moore

There is nothing new about students trying to get one over on their teachers — there are probably cuneiform tablets about it — but when students use AI to generate what Shannon Vallor, philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, calls a “truth-shaped word collage,” they are not only gaslighting the people trying to teach them, they are gaslighting themselves. In the words of Tulane professor Stan Oklobdzija, asking a computer to write an essay for you is the equivalent of “going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.”


Deloitte will make Claude available to 470,000 people across its global network — from anthropic.com

As part of the collaboration, Deloitte will establish a Claude Center of Excellence with trained specialists who will develop implementation frameworks, share leading practices across deployments, and provide ongoing technical support to create the systems needed to move AI pilots to production at scale. The collaboration represents Anthropic’s largest enterprise AI deployment to date, available to more than 470,000 Deloitte people.

Deloitte and Anthropic are co-creating a formal certification program to train and certify 15,000 of its professionals on Claude. These practitioners will help support Claude implementations across Deloitte’s network and Deloitte’s internal AI transformation efforts.


How AI Agents are finally delivering on the promise of Everboarding: driving retention when it counts most — from premierconstructionnews.com

Everboarding flips this model. Rather than ending after orientation, everboarding provides ongoing, role-specific training and support throughout the employee journey. It adapts to evolving responsibilities, reinforces standards, and helps workers grow into new roles. For high-turnover, high-pressure environments like retail, it’s a practical solution to a persistent challenge.

AI agents will be instrumental in the success of everboarding initiatives; they can provide a much more tailored training and development process for each individual employee, keeping track of which training modules may need to be completed, or where staff members need or want to develop further. This personalisation helps staff to feel not only more satisfied with their current role, but also guides them on the right path to progress in their individual careers.

Digital frontline apps are also ideal for everboarding. They offer bite-sized training that staff can complete anytime, whether during quiet moments on shift or in real time on the job, all accessible from their mobile devices.


TeachLM: insights from a new LLM fine-tuned for teaching & learning — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Six key takeaways, including what the research tells us about how well AI performs as an instructional designer

As I and many others have pointed out in recent months, LLMs are great assistants but very ineffective teachers. Despite the rise of “educational LLMs” with specialised modes (e.g. Anthropic’s Learning Mode, OpenAI’s Study Mode, Google’s Guided Learning) AI typically eliminates the productive struggle, open exploration and natural dialogue that are fundamental to learning.

This week, Polygence, in collaboration with Stanford University researcher Prof Dora Demszky. published a first-of-its-kind research on a new model — TeachLM — built to address this gap.

In this week’s blog post, I deep dive what the research found and share the six key findings — including reflections on how well TeachLM performs on instructional design.


The Dangers of using AI to Grade — from marcwatkins.substack.com by Marc Watkins
Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

AI as an assessment tool represents an existential threat to education because no matter how you try and establish guardrails or best practices around how it is employed, using the technology in place of an educator ultimately cedes human judgment to a machine-based process. It also devalues the entire enterprise of education and creates a situation where the only way universities can add value to education is by further eliminating costly human labor.

For me, the purpose of higher education is about human development, critical thinking, and the transformative experience of having your ideas taken seriously by another human being. That’s not something we should be in a rush to outsource to a machine.

 

Making Retrieval Practice a Classroom Routine — from edutopia.org
By regularly working in activities that get students to recall content they’ve learned in the past and apply it, teachers can ensure deeper understanding.

Also see:

  • The Teaching Tips section out at RetrievalPractice.org
    Retrieval practice is a simple research-based teaching strategy that dramatically raises students’ grades. When students retrieve and bring information to mind, this mental challenge produces durable long-term learning. Easy learning leads to easy forgetting. Stop cramming, reviewing, and re-teaching. Instead, simply ask students what they remember. No prep, no grading, just powerful teaching. The science of learning exists. It’s time to unleash it.
 

7 Teaching Practices that Nurture Student Voice — from cultofpedagogy.com by Jennifer Gonzalez

In our efforts to improve school, especially in the United States, student voice has really gotten lost. We focus on test scores, top-down curriculum, and measures of success that never quite get to the humanity of our students. Not only have these efforts not succeeded in raising test scores (Schwartz, 2025), they haven’t given us much satisfaction in other ways, either: In a recent survey, nearly half of educators reported that student behavior was worse than before the pandemic, and that number had grown since teachers were surveyed just two years earlier (Stephens, 2025).

Although there are most certainly individual schools where great things are happening, too many schools are still missing the mark. Too many schools keep trying to address these problems without hearing from the very people who are impacted most: the students. 

But there is another way. Four years ago, I started talking a lot about a new book I’d read called Street Data


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

 

The World’s Classrooms Are Short 44 Million Teachers — from edsurge.com by Nadia Tamez-Robledo
It’s not just pay that’s a problem in retaining and recruiting educators, experts say.

K-12 education worldwide is facing a two-pronged dilemma: A global shortage of 44 million teachers by 2030 and not enough funding to train or retain them, according to a report released by UNESCO and the International Taskforce on Teachers for Education 2030 following the summit. Countries around the world risk not having enough teachers — or not enough high-caliber teachers — for the rising number of students expected to enter primary and secondary school within the next five years.

The report’s findings reflect what some school districts and states have been grappling with in the United States, where research has consistently shown that teachers face lower rates of well-being and satisfaction with pay than similarly employed workers in other fields.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian