“Ultimately, sustainability in teaching came down to discussions about energy budgets. Teachers’ energy reserves are finite, and concerns about teacher agency, endless cycles of curriculum adoption, and limited time and resources wear on these energy reserves. Conversely, solutions like bolstering learner agency, creating collectivist school cultures where teachers collaborate regularly, and incorporating minimalist planning practices offered practical solutions for maintaining high quality instruction while distributing the energy demands of learning so teachers aren’t doing it all on their own.”
“In my three years of teaching this powerful text, this was the most rewarding. I had a mixture of creative sequels, vocabulary journals, research on thematic topics like censorship and control, and character analysis… Then, I asked it: Write a 500 word dystopian story taking place in Newark, New Jersey for 800 Lexile Level. I’ve even unpacked my units with it – gathering summaries, creating culminating projects of choice, and generating vocabulary from texts. Not only has this been informative for schema building, I’ve really been able to harness engagement from all learners. ChatGPT is my new recipe for differentiation.”
“[ChatGPT:] Write a college essay explaining why stubbing my toe in 4th grade gave me the desired character to become a neurosurgeon. Make it a good essay, not too stuffy, and mention my background as a child of carnies as a reason why I have overcome adversity.”
“Unfortunately, the word “middle” implies that the person in that spot is on the way to somewhere else—ideally, the top. That thinking is misguided. Instead, we need to view middle managers as being at the center of the action. Without their ability to connect and integrate people and tasks, an organization can cease to function effectively. That’s why we think the best middle managers are best off staying exactly where they are.”
“How will generative AI affect our industry and company in the short and longer term? …Are we balancing value creation with adequate risk management? …How should we organize for generative AI? …Do we have the necessary capabilities? …They will also want to direct a preliminary, fundamental question to themselves: Are we equipped to provide that support?”
“The bill is a comprehensive attempt to protect young people on social media, prioritizing stronger age verification practices and placing a ban on children under 13 using social media altogether. But there was one provision of the bill that was particularly alarming to this group of students: a prohibition on social media companies using the data (what they watch and swipe on) they collect on kids to build and fuel algorithms that spoon-feed individualized content back to users. These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.”
“When VaNessa Thompson wants to truly focus on doing homework for her doctoral classes at Oakland University near Detroit, she gets out her smartphone, props it on her desk, and starts streaming live video of herself on TikTok… One key goal, she and others using the hashtag say, is to try to put social pressure on themselves to stay on task and keep up with studying for a set time period. “It’s holding me accountable,” says Thompson, who has more than 13,000 followers on TikTok.”
“Researchers have tried for more than half a century to design computer programs to make medical diagnoses, but nothing has really succeeded. Physicians say that GPT-4 is different. “It will create something that is remarkably similar to an illness script,” Dr. Rodman said. In that way, he added, “it is fundamentally different than a search engine.””
“Train a computer to recognize your own images, sounds, & poses. A fast, easy way to create machine learning models for your sites, apps, and more – no expertise or coding required.”
“Detection tools for AI-generated text do fail, they are neither accurate nor reliable (all scored below 80% of accuracy and only 5 over 70%). In general, they have been found to diagnose human-written documents as AI-generated (false positives) and often diagnose AI-generated texts as human-written (false negatives).”
“The model will consider the instructions every time it responds, so you won’t have to repeat your preferences or information in every conversation. For example, a teacher crafting a lesson plan no longer has to repeat that they're teaching 3rd grade science… Grocery shopping for a big family becomes easier, with the model accounting for 6 servings in the grocery list.”
“Most telling is how few educators say they have received any professional development on how to incorporate AI into their work in K-12 education: Eighty-seven percent said they had received no such PD at the time of the survey.”
“Over the past seven months, AI has come to mean chatbots… We got used to AI that was restricted in what it could know about the world. Its knowledge was limited to before 2022. It couldn’t surf the web. It could only know what you typed into a chatbox. And it could only produce text. One-by-one, these assumptions have changed. Connecting AI to the internet made it much more powerful. Giving AI the tools to write and execute code made it much more powerful. And, now the capabilities to watch and listen are going to do the same.”
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