Her program is part of a company called Prenda, which last year served about 2,000 students across several states. It connects home-school families with microschool leaders who host students, often in their homes. It’s like Airbnb for education, says Prenda’s CEO, because its website allows customers – in this case, parents – to enter their criteria, search and make a match.
An explosion of new options, including Prenda, has transformed home schooling in America. Demand is surging: Hundreds of thousands of children have begun home schooling in the last three years, an unprecedented spike that generated a huge new market. In New Hampshire, for instance, the number of home-schoolers doubled during the pandemic, and even today it remains 40 percent above pre-covid totals.
From DSC: This is another great example of the morphing going on in the PreK-12 learning ecosystem.
Kwaneta Harris, who is incarcerated in Texas, writes about helping the young women who live next to her in solitary confinement learn how to read. This essay was co-published with Slate.
I visited Employer Day at San Quentin, where 30 incarcerated men sit down with Bay Area employers and apply what they learned during a four-month job readiness program.
Job interviews can be daunting, especially if you’ve never done one before. But even more so if you’ve been incarcerated. I visited Employer Day at San Quentin in March to learn more.
The Mass Exodus of Teachers — from educationoneducation.substack.com by Jeannine Proctor Understanding Why Educators Are Fleeing the Classroom and How to Bring Them Back
Stemming the tide will require nuance, empathy, and listening to what teachers say they need. While pay raises are indispensable, they alone won’t be enough. Districts must take an integrated approach that also addresses unmanageable workloads, lack of resources, and toxic school cultures.
Some best practices include utilizing multi-classroom teaching models, providing duty-free “coverage” periods, and hiring support staff to shoulder non-instructional burdens. Investing in mentoring and leadership opportunities can stem the turnover of principals and administrators too. Public recognition and appreciation can also go a long way.
Most importantly, we must work to restore teacher well-being, purpose, and passion.
From DSC: The primary things that would help this very troubling situation:
Dee’s analysis found that since the pandemic the number of students who were chronically absent nearly doubled to about 13.6 million, with 1.8 million of them in California.
Compared with before the pandemic, Dee found that about 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent in 2021-22, including more than 1 million in California.
The idea of default is also an important idea. If we do it by invitation, what we have noticed is that those who know about it know to say yes to the invitation. If it is a default schedule, and then you have to opt out, then our ability to address equity and enrollment for our low-income students and students of color, it makes us much more successful.
The number of people studying for careers in education has been declining for years. At the same time, schools have struggled to hold on to new teachers: Studies indicate that about 44 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.
Then the pandemic came along, hammering teachers and the profession as a whole.
“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. So for teachers who entered the teaching profession at any point during the pandemic, “this has been a helluva ride.”
A study from World Remit shows that the cost of school supplies in the United States has increased by over 25% compared with 2022.
Though inflation is the lowest it has been since March 2021, high prices are still stressing shoppers and increasing their reliance on local and national back-to-school drives. The nonprofit organizations that sponsor those drives, in turn, are struggling to meet the growing demand.
Excerpt from Tom Barrett’s Dialogic #329:The Transformative Power of Compassionate Leadership
Your Next Steps: ?Commit to action and turn words into works
Reflect on your current leadership style and identify opportunities to incorporate more compassionate practices. Consider the Appreciative Inquiry model to guide this process.
Develop an empathy-driven approach to problem-solving and team dynamics, focusing on fostering a culture of understanding, collaboration, and mutual respect.
Revisit your feedback mechanisms and explore how they can be made more compassionate. Consider how critique can be delivered with kindness to empower, rather than tear down.
Against that backdrop, Ken Montgomery, co-founder of Design Tech High, known as D-Tech, and Keeanna Warren, who just became the CEO of the Purdue Polytechnic High School network, joined me to talk about their school designs, in particular the importance of:
helping students connect to something bigger than the school itself;
offering competency-based learning pathways with a transformed assessment system;
allowing students to find their creative purpose aligned to the common good;
and building a more permeable school that is connected to the community and offers a deep sense of belonging.
They also talked about the role of AI (artificial intelligence) and the anxiety that their students feel around its emergence, as well as the barriers that arise to building school models that break the traditional molds—from policy to human capital.
As the 2024 campaign season begins, AI image generators have advanced from novelties to powerful tools able to generate photorealistic images, while comprehensive regulation lags behind.
Why it matters: As more fake images appear in political ads, the onus will be on the public to spot phony content.
Go deeper: Can you tell the difference between real and AI-generated images? Take our quiz:
The Chief AI Officer is a relatively new job role, yet becoming increasingly more important as businesses invest further into AI.
Now more than ever, the workplace must prepare for AI and the immense opportunities, as well as challenges, that this type of evolving technology can provide. This job position sees the employee responsible for guiding companies through complex AI tools, algorithms and development. All of this works to ensure that the company stays ahead of the curve and capitalises on digital growth and transformation.
NVIDIA-related items
SIGGRAPH Special Address: NVIDIA CEO Brings Generative AI to LA Show— from blogs.nvidia.com by Brian Caulfield Speaking to thousands of developers and graphics pros, Jensen Huang announces updated GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, NVIDIA AI Workbench, updates NVIDIA Omniverse with generative AI.
Nvidia announced a new chip designed to run artificial intelligence models on Tuesday .
Nvidia’s GH200 has the same GPU as the H100, Nvidia’s current highest-end AI chip, but pairs it with 141 gigabytes of cutting-edge memory, as well as a 72-core ARM central processor.
“This processor is designed for the scale-out of the world’s data centers,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday.
The advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) has paved the way for a new era in warfare. Gone are the days of manned ships and traditional naval operations. Instead, the US Navy’s Task Force 59 is at the forefront of integrating AI and robotics into naval operations. With a fleet of autonomous robot ships, the Navy aims to revolutionize the way wars are fought at sea.
From DSC: Crap. Ouch. Some things don’t seem to ever change. Few are surprised by this development…but still, this is a mess.
Altman, who has become the face of the recent hype cycle in AI development, feels that humans could be persuaded politically through conversations with chatbots or fooled by AI-generated media.
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups. This special summer edition (while we’re producing the State of AI Report 2023!) covers our 7th annual Research and Applied AI Summit that we held in London on 23 June.
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Below are some of our key takeaways from the event and all the talk videos can be found on the RAAIS YouTube channel here. If this piques your interest to join next year’s event, drop your details here.
Gen AI, however, eliminates the lengthy search. It can parse a natural language query, synthesize the necessary information and serve up the answers the agent is looking for in a neatly summarized response, slashing call times dramatically.
Not only do its AI voices sound exactly like a human, but they can sound exactly like YOU. All it takes is 6 (six!) seconds of your voice, and voila: it can replicate you saying any sentence in any tone, be it happy, sad, or angry.
The use cases are endless, but here are two immediate ones:
Hyperpersonalized content.
Imagine your favorite Netflix show but with every person hearing a slightly different script.
Customer support agents.
We’re talking about ones that are actually helpful, a far cry from the norm!
[NEW] – Joshua Avatar 2.0 ??. Both of these video clips were 100% AI-generated, featuring my own avatar and voice clone. ???
We’ve made massive enhancements to our life-style avatar’s video quality and fine-tuned our voice technology to mimic my unique accent and speech… pic.twitter.com/9EgxRA69dg
For Wiese, it was all a big, expensive gamble — and, in one form or another, is one millions of people with criminal records take every year as they pursue education and workforce training on their way to jobs that require a license. Yet that effort might be wasted thanks to the nearly 14,000 laws and regulations that can restrict individuals with arrest and conviction histories from getting licensed in a given field.
Are we on the frontier of unveiling an unseen revolution in education? The hypothesis is that this quiet upheaval’s importance is far more significant than we imagine. As our world adjusts, restructures, and emerges from a year which launched an era of mass AI, so too does a new academic year dawn for many – with hope and enthusiasm about new roles, titles, or simply just a new mindset. Concealed from sight, however, I believe a significant transformative wave has started and will begin to reshape our education systems and push us into a new stage of innovative teaching practice whether we desire it or not. The risk and hope is that the quiet revolution remains outside the regulator’s and ministries’ purview, which could risk a dangerous fragmentation of education policy and practice, divorced from the actualities of the world ‘in and outside school’.
“This goal can be achieved through continued support for introducing more new areas of study, such as ‘foresight and futures’, in the high school classroom.”
Four directions for assessment redesign in the age of generative AI— from timeshighereducation.com by Julia Chen The rise of generative AI has led universities to rethink how learning is quantified. Julia Chen offers four options for assessment redesign that can be applied across disciplines
Direction 1: From written description to multimodal explanation and application
Direction 2: From literature review alone to referencing lectures
Direction 3: From presentation of ideas to defence of views
Direction 4: From working alone to student-staff partnership
If you are just back from vacation and still not quite sure what to do about AI, let me assure you that you are not the only one. My advice for you today is this: fill your LinkedIn-feed and/or inbox with ideas, inspirational writing and commentary on AI. This will get you up to speed quickly and is a great way to stay informed on the newest movements you need to be aware of.
My personal recommendation for you is to check out these bright people who are all very active on LinkedIn and/or have a newsletter worth paying attention to. I have kept the list fairly short – only 15 people – in order to make it as easy as possible for you to begin exploring.
Understanding the nature of generative AI is crucial for educators to navigate the evolving landscape of teaching and learning. In a new report from the Next Level Lab, Lydia Cao and Chris Dede reflect on the role of generative AI in learning and how this pushes us to reconceptualize our visions of effective education. Though there are concerns of plagiarism and replacement of human jobs, Cao and Dede argue that a more productive way forward is for educators to focus on demystifying AI, emphasizing the learning process over the final product, honoring learner agency, orchestrating multiple sources of motivation, cultivating skills that AI cannot easily replicate, and fostering intelligence augmentation (IA) through building human-AI partnerships.
Have you used chatbots to save time this school year? ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have changed the way I think about instructional planning. Today on the blog, I have a selection of ChatGPT prompts for ELA teachers.
You can use chatbots to tackle tedious tasks, gather ideas, and even support your work to meet the needs of every student. In my recent quick reference guide published by ISTE and ASCD, Using AI Chatbots to Enhance Planning and Instruction, I explore this topic. You can also find 50 more prompts for educators in this free ebook.
Professors Craft Courses on ChatGPT With ChatGPT — from insidehighered.com by Lauren Coffey While some institutions are banning the use of the new AI tool, others are leaning into its use and offering courses dedicated solely to navigating the new technology.
Maynard, along with Jules White at Vanderbilt University, are among a small number of professors launching courses focused solely on teaching students across disciplines to better navigate AI and ChatGPT.
The offerings go beyond institutions flexing their innovation skills—the faculty behind these courses view them as imperative to ensure students are prepared for ever-changing workforce needs.
That’s a solid report card for a freshman in college, a respectable 3.57 GPA. I recently finished my freshman year at Harvard, but those grades aren’t mine — they’re GPT-4’s.
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Three weeks ago, I asked seven Harvard professors and teaching assistants to grade essays written by GPT-4 in response to a prompt assigned in their class. Most of these essays were major assignments which counted for about one-quarter to one-third of students’ grades in the class. (I’ve listed the professors or preceptors for all of these classes, but some of the essays were graded by TAs.)
Here are the prompts with links to the essays, the names of instructors, and the grades each essay received…
The impact that AI is having on liberal-arts homework is indicative of the AI threat to the career fields that liberal-arts majors tend to enter. So maybe what we should really be focused on isn’t, “How do we make liberal-arts homework better?” but rather, “What are jobs going to look like over the next 10–20 years, and how do we prepare students to succeed in that world?”
The great assessment rethink — from timeshighereducation.com by How to measure learning and protect academic integrity in the age of ChatGPT
We’ve known for a long time that higher education can play a huge role in helping people who serve time in prison get back on their feet. Research shows that higher-ed attainment is directly correlated with a lower likelihood of being reincarcerated, as is stable employment.
But people getting out of prison face many obstacles in finding jobs, and lack of educational opportunities is just part of the issue. A patchwork of more than 14,000 federal, state and local laws and regulations restricts individuals who have arrest and conviction histories from getting licensed in certain fields. Here’s some of what my reporting found about how pervasive this problem is and why it matters:
For centuries, constitutional conventions have been pivotal moments in history for codifying the rights and responsibilities that shape civilized societies. As artificial intelligence rapidly grows more powerful, the AI community faces a similar historic inflection point. The time has come to draft a “Constitutional Convention for AI” – to proactively encode principles that will steer these transformative technologies toward justice, empowerment, and human flourishing.
AI promises immense benefits, from curing diseases to unlocking clean energy. But uncontrolled, it poses existential dangers that could undermine human autonomy and dignity. Lawyers understand well that mere regulations or oversight are no match for a determined bad actor. Fundamental principles must be woven into the very fabric of the system.
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
The Evolution of Public Libraries — from designinglibraries.org.uk by Ayub Khan Designing Libraries Director, Ayub Khan, looks at the evolution of public libraries – and the implications for library design
Reinvention
Public libraries have always adapted and reinvented themselves to the changing needs and preferences of their users – and they continue to do so. Books and reading remain central to what libraries do but – it’s a bit of a cliché to say so – they are not just about books nowadays. They are social places at the centre of their communities.
Having worked on the initial design concepts for the new Library of Birmingham, earlier in my career, I know books were only part of the plans. When I started out as a librarian around 75% of library spaces were for books and 25% for other activities and events. Now it’s the other way round.
Improving Access to Justice: One significant advantage of AI in the legal profession is its potential to improve access to justice. The high costs associated with legal services have traditionally created barriers for individuals with limited financial means. However, AI-powered solutions can help bridge this gap by providing affordable and accessible legal information and guidance. Virtual legal assistants and chatbots can assist individuals with legal queries, empowering them to navigate legal processes more effectively and make informed decisions. By leveraging AI, the legal profession can become more inclusive and ensure that legal services are available to a broader segment of society.
Also relevant/see:
Law Unlimited: Welcome to the re-envisioned legal profession — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong Will Generative AI destroy law firms? Only if lawyers are too fixed in their ways to see the possibilities that lie beyond who we’ve always been and what we’ve always done.
Excerpt:
The immediate impact of Gen AI on legal services will be to introduce unprecedented efficiency to the production of countless legal documents and processes. For most of the last century, lawyers have personally performed this work, spending and billing hours or parts of hours to accomplish each task. Law firms have used this production method to provide on-the-job training for inexperienced lawyers and have leveraged those hours to generate profits for their partners. But LLMs can now do the same work in seconds, as effectively as lawyers can today and much better in the near future. This is, among other things, a very serious problem for law firms’ business models and talent development practices, not to mention a real challenge to lawyer education and training and potentially a revolution in access to justice.
