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.
EdSurge connected with Talbert to hear what he uses in his classes now, and why he argues that reforming how grading works is key to increasing student engagement.
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.
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.
The Future of Teaching and Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm, with new AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT opening up new opportunities in higher education for content creation, communication, and learning, while also raising new concerns about the misuses and overreach of technology. Our shared humanity has also become a key focal point within higher education, as faculty and leaders continue to wrestle with understanding and meeting the diverse needs of students and to find ways of cultivating institutional communities that support student well-being and belonging.
For this year’s teaching and learning Horizon Report, then, our panelists’ discussions oscillated between these seemingly polar ideas: the supplanting of human activity with powerful new technological capabilities, and the need for more humanity at the center of everything we do. This report summarizes the results of those discussions and serves as one vantage point on where our future may be headed.
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!
A few current categories of AI in Edtech particularly jump out:
Teacher Productivity and Joy: Tools to make educators’ lives easier (and more fun?) by removing some of the more rote tasks of teaching, like lesson planning (we counted at least 8 different tools for lesson planning), resource curation and data collection.
Personalization and Learning Delivery: Tools to tailor instruction to the particular interests, learning preferences and preferred media consumption of students. This includes tools that convert text to video, video to text, text to comic books, Youtube to notes, and many more.
Study and Course Creation Tools: Tools for learners to automatically make quizzes, flashcards, notes or summaries of material, or even to automatically create full courses from a search term.
AI Tutors, Chatbots and Teachers: There will be no shortage of conversational AI “copilots” (which may take many guises) to support students in almost any learning context. Many Edtech companies launched their own during the conference. Possible differentiators here could be personality, safety, privacy, access to a proprietary or specific data set, or bots built on proprietary LLMs.
Simplifying Complex Processes: One of the most inspiring conversations of the conference for me was with Tiffany Green, founder of Uprooted Academy, about how AI can and should be used to remove bureaucratic barriers to college for underrepresented students (for example, used to autofill FAFSA forms, College Applications, to search for schools and access materials, etc). This is not the only complex bureaucratic process in education.
Educational LLMs: The race is on to create usable large language models for education that are safe, private, appropriate and classroom-ready. Merlyn Mind is working on this, and companies that make LLMs are sprouting up in other sectors…
This week I spent a few days at the ASU/GSV conference and ran into 7,000 educators, entrepreneurs, and corporate training people who had gone CRAZY for AI.
No, I’m not kidding. This community, which makes up people like training managers, community college leaders, educators, and policymakers is absolutely freaked out about ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and all sorts of issues with AI. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of this. But the frenzy is unprecedented: this is bigger than the excitement at the launch of the i-Phone.
Second, the L&D market is about to get disrupted like never before. I had two interactive sessions with about 200 L&D leaders and I essentially heard the same thing over and over. What is going to happen to our jobs when these Generative AI tools start automatically building content, assessments, teaching guides, rubrics, videos, and simulations in seconds?
The answer is pretty clear: you’re going to get disrupted. I’m not saying that L&D teams need to worry about their careers, but it’s very clear to me they’re going to have to swim upstream in a big hurry. As with all new technologies, it’s time for learning leaders to get to know these tools, understand how they work, and start to experiment with them as fast as you can.
Speaking of the ASU+GSV Summit, see this posting from Michael Moe:
Last week, the 14th annual ASU+GSV Summit hosted over 7,000 leaders from 70+ companies well as over 900 of the world’s most innovative EdTech companies. Below are some of our favorite speeches from this year’s Summit…
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard—AI is infiltrating the lives of billions.
The 1% who understand it will run the world.
Here’s a list of key terms to jumpstart your learning:
Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.The current AI systems are already very good at figuring out your intent, and they are getting better. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer. In fact, it already isn’t in GPT-4 and Bing. If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel, what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far.
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The best way to use AI systems is not to craft the perfect prompt, but rather to use it interactively. Try asking for something. Then ask the AI to modify or adjust its output. Work with the AI, rather than trying to issue a single command that does everything you want. The more you experiment, the better off you are. Just use the AI a lot, and it will make a big difference – a lesson my class learned as they worked with the AI to create essays.
From DSC: Agreed –> “Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.” The User Interfaces that are/will be appearing will help greatly in this regard.
From DSC: Bizarre…at least for me in late April of 2023:
FaceTiming live with AI… This app came across the @ElunaAI Discord and I was very impressed with its responsiveness, natural expression and language, etc…
Feels like the beginning of another massive wave in consumer AI products.
The rise of AI-generated music has ignited legal and ethical debates, with record labels invoking copyright law to remove AI-generated songs from platforms like YouTube.
Tech companies like Google face a conundrum: should they take down AI-generated content, and if so, on what grounds?
Some artists, like Grimes, are embracing the change, proposing new revenue-sharing models and utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts for royalties.
The future of AI-generated music presents both challenges and opportunities, with the potential to create new platforms and genres, democratize the industry, and redefine artist compensation.
The Need for AI PD — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Educators need training on how to effectively incorporate artificial intelligence into their teaching practice, says Lance Key, an award-winning educator.
“School never was fun for me,” he says, hoping that as an educator he could change that with his students. “I wanted to make learning fun.” This ‘learning should be fun’ philosophy is at the heart of the approach he advises educators take when it comes to AI.
At its 11th annual conference in 2023, educational company Coursera announced it is adding ChatGPT-powered interactive ed tech tools to its learning platform, including a generative AI coach for students and an AI course-building tool for teachers. It will also add machine learning-powered translation, expanded VR immersive learning experiences, and more.
Coursera Coach will give learners a ChatGPT virtual coach to answer questions, give feedback, summarize video lectures and other materials, give career advice, and prepare them for job interviews. This feature will be available in the coming months.
From DSC: Yes…it will be very interesting to see how tools and platforms interact from this time forth. The term “integration” will take a massive step forward, at least in my mind.
A New Era for Education — from linkedin.com by Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS and Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
It’s not every day you get to announce a revolution in your sector. But today, we’re doing exactly that. Together, we are setting out to overturn 117 years of educational tradition. … The fundamental assumption [of the Carnegie Unit] is that time spent in a classroom equals learning. This formula has the virtue of simplicity. Unfortunately, a century of research tells us that it’s woefully inadequate.
From DSC: It’s more than interesting to think that the Carnegie Unit has outlived its usefulness and is breaking apart. In fact, the thought is very profound.
If that turns out to be the case, the ramifications will be enormous and we will have the opportunity to radically reinvent/rethink/redesign what our lifelong learning ecosystems will look like and provide.
So I appreciate what Amit and Timothy are saying here and I appreciate their relaying what the new paradigm might look like. It goes with the idea of using design thinking to rethink how we build/reinvent our learning ecosystems. They assert:
It’s time to change the paradigm. That’s why ETS and the Carnegie Foundation have come together to design a new future of assessment.
Whereas the Carnegie Unit measures seat time, the new paradigm willmeasureskills—with a focus on the ones we know are most important for success in career and in life.
Whereas the Carnegie Unit never leaves the classroom, the new paradigm willcapture learning wherever it takes place—whether that is in after-school activities, during a work-experience placement, in an internship, on an apprenticeship, and so on.
Whereas the Carnegie Unit offers only one data point—pass or fail—the new paradigm willgenerate insights throughout the learning process, the better to guide students, families, educators, and policymakers.
I could see this type of information being funneled into peoples’ cloud-based learner profiles — which we as individuals will own and determine who else can access them. I diagrammed this back in January of 2017 using blockchain as the underlying technology. That may or may not turn out to be the case. But the concept will still hold I think — regardless of the underlying technology(ies).
For example, we are seeing a lot more articles regarding things like Comprehensive Learner Records (CLR) or Learning and Employment Records (LER; examplehere), and similar items.
Speaking of reinventing our learning ecosystems, also see:
