“I absolutely think you should experiment with AI as you write your recommendation letters this fall. The same advice applies to these letters as I provided for seniors writing essays. This is not a simple cut and paste, but instead a great tool for getting started, rephrasing, or discovering different ways to frame the content you are attempting to incorporate. Having done this personally for a few colleagues this summer, and after hearing from several college professors endorse the practice, I think you will find entering a few of your ideas or student provided details and specifics and then revising or “regenerating” in ChatGPT could save you precious time.”
“School administrators and leaders, boards of education, boards of trustees, teachers, parent teacher associations, state departments of education, and online learning platforms can all play a role. Develop a strategic plan for school connectedness and social skills with benchmark tracking… Build social connection into health curricula… Implement socially based educational techniques… Create a supportive school environment that fosters belonging…”
“By early afternoon, somewhere between 300 and 700 students were out of class. The bulk were at the sit-in, but a sizable number were milling around in groups, intoxicated by the intense emotions of the day and the sudden absence of restrictions. Outside, the news vans were lined up in front of the school. A news helicopter circled overhead.”
““Grading is evaluation, putting a value on something,” says Denise Pope, Ed.M.’89, a senior lecturer at Stanford who runs a project called Challenge Success. Pope stresses, however, that grades are not the same as assessment, and to really talk about grading, we have to make the distinction between the two terms.”
“An updated meta-analysis was published in July 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development. It was conducted by 14 researchers, the majority from Yale University, and it also found good results for SEL interventions in schools while simultaneously broadening the category of “social and emotional learning” to encompass even more non-academic skills. However, this latest research synthesis doesn’t really settle the debate over whether the evidence for SEL is strong or guide schools to which SEL interventions are most effective.”
“Reading a book or looking at an electronic device up close is bad for your eyes. True. Our eyes are not meant to focus on objects close to our face for long periods of time.”
“Over the last 50 years, there's been a vast outpouring of research about reading development, drawing on insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, educators and other experts. I'm sometimes asked to summarize, in plain language, what we've learned so far. These ten maxims represent my best attempt at doing that.”
“A group of young people in Montana won a landmark lawsuit on Monday when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional.”
“To discuss these issues we think it is helpful to begin with a short explanation of how the Large Language Models… work; what they are capable of; how they are similar/different to human brains; and what the implications might be for human learning and motivations to learn. This is the focus of Part One of the paper. In Part Two, we explore four different scenarios for humanity and in particular, what each of these scenarios might mean for the future of learning and education. Finally, in Part Three, we present 13 recommendations that we think will help to ensure that AI becomes our greatest success, rather than a tangled mess.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson