WN #10

A New Take on Lesson Planning

Many schools still require teachers to submit lesson plans on a regular basis. This requirement is often rooted in ensuring accountability and pedagogical fidelity, but teachers who are required to submit their lesson plans often see it as unnecessary extra work. While there are benefits to it, writing everything out and wrestling it into a specific format takes a lot of time and risks stifling creativity under the weight of structure.

Rather than requiring teachers to write up and submit lesson plans, I would suggest encouraging them to use that time to share their lessons and ideas with AI, in any form they prefer, and providing them with the skills they need to take control of and enhance their own planning process. It’s an approach where 'my way' is not only accepted, but encouraged. Maybe they want to talk out their thoughts, or type a list of notes, or maybe they want to use a more formal template that they prefer. AI then becomes a partner in planning, critiquing, questioning and assisting. This values the teacher's style and expertise, allowing them to lead the process with AI as a supportive tool, while offering an instant feedback loop that doesn't draw on colleagues' time. It respects both the individual's rhythm and the collective's resources. And with customized tools like OpenAI's custom GPTs, schools and districts can still offer their support and guidance throughout the process.

In addition, you are simultaneously helping staff develop their AI literacy. As teachers become more familiar with AI's strengths and limitations through their lesson planning sessions, they can better leverage it to support other teaching & administrative tasks, as well as to help students develop AI literacy of their own.

The biggest obstacle to implementing AI is starting the conversation (literally). Give teachers a reason to engage by transforming lesson planning into a dynamic and interactive experience that respects and uplifts the human element of teaching.

“The Black GPT” and Other Efforts to Combat Bias

Much has been written about AI’s bias problem. If there is bias in the sources on which a model is trained, then that bias will be evident in the model’s responses. This is especially problematic for groups whose voices and perspectives have been historically underrepresented. Enter Latimer, “the Black GPT,” an LLM (Large Language Model) built to “reflect the experience, culture, and history of Black and brown people more accurately.” Along these lines, OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT) announced a new initiative last week to partner with third party organizations to help build more representative data sets that better reflect human society.

A New Approach to the School Day

A private school in Texas is taking a bold new approach to education with the help of AI. The school uses AI app-based tutoring to condense core subject instruction to the first two hours of the school day (teachers serve as “guides''). The rest of the school day is reserved for “life skills.” It will be interesting to see if more schools adopt innovative approaches as AI continues to improve.

Educators Can’t Sit This One Out

A top US Department of Education official reminded educators that they can’t “sit out” when it comes to AI. He cites the need to prepare students for an AI-driven future, and students agree. According to a recent report from the Center for Democracy & Technology, 72% of students said they would find it helpful to learn how to use generative AI responsibly, while just 44% said their schools have given them any sort of AI guidance. At the state level, only California and Oregon have put out official AI guidance for this school year (if those PDFs seem too daunting to sift through, this is a good opportunity to upload them into ChatGPT (paid users only), Bing (if using Microsoft Edge browser), Claude (free), or Perplexity (free), to see how you can summarize and interact with them).

📌 GPT-4 Turbo

If you were hoping to sign up for ChatGPT Plus to take advantage of all of the new features, you are going to have to wait a little bit. For those who do have access to ChatGPT Plus, GPT-4 Turbo is now live. The update extends the knowledge cutoff to April 2023, allows for longer inputs (roughly 300 book pages), is cheaper for developers to use, and is better at following detailed instructions. Don’t forget you can still access some ChatGPT Plus features (like vision, image generation, and GPT-4) for free using Bing Chat.

📌 Animate Your Drawings

Meta has an awesome AI tool that lets you easily animate your drawings. The tool isn’t new (it’s been around since before ChatGPT), but it’s worth a try nonetheless!

📌 LLM Hallucination Scorecard

Vectara has released an LLM hallucination scorecard. Keep in mind that they were only testing a model’s ability to summarize a specific source without making up or adding any additional info (factual or not), so this doesn’t apply to all uses. Check it out below, or read more about it here.

Canva’s “Grab Text” Feature

Canva for Education gives educators free access to several of Canva’s new AI tools, one of which is the “Grab Text” feature. Using “Grab Text,” you can pull text right off of an image to repurpose in a document or other creation. Here is an example of how you can use it to grab text from your whiteboard:

Here’s how to do it: Upload an image in Canva, then click "Edit photo,” then "Grab Text," then just pull the text off of the image and adjust the font and size as needed.

Breaking Down Learning Standards

Like it or not, many of us are required to have on display the learning standard(s) connected to our lessons. Might as well use AI to quickly make them more accessible to students.

• AI can diagnose diabetes using 10-seconds of your voice; It has also been helpful in identifying signs of a rare form of cancer and helping stroke survivors communicate.

• Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? A robot dog is now a talking tour guide thanks to ChatGPT.

• Google Maps has some awesome new AI features.

• A new AI model claims to be able to create 3D models from 2D images in 5 just seconds.

That’s all for this week! Note that there will be no newsletter next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. In the meantime, feel free to check out the archive to catch up on any you may have missed.

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