WN #4

A Use Case for Everyone

K-12 curriculum giant HMH recently released the first part of their annual Educator Confidence Report, with this year’s version focusing on the use of AI. The data comes from 1200+ teachers and administrators surveyed from around the nation in May and June. The results show that only 10% of educators used generative AI in the classroom last year and just 1 in 5 feel equipped to harness these tools. These data points aren’t surprising given AI’s swift emergence onto the scene in the back half of the 2022-23 school year. The more surprising statistic is that only 56% feel that AI-generated content is helpful, which is a revelation worth digging into, and one that likely comes down to one key factor — familiarity.

There are a number of reasons why nearly half of surveyed educators may feel that generative AI isn’t very helpful. Some may worry about AI’s accuracy and bias, some may have a hard time embracing what they see as a tool for cheating, and others may not feel the need to branch out from traditional and trusted sources of content for their curriculum. However, once educators become more familiar with AI tools, everyone should be able to find a helpful use case, even if some lingering concerns persist.

One example of a use case that should be universally beneficial to educators is leveraging AI to seek out untapped opportunities:

• Try giving it something you are already doing and asking it how you can make it more interactive, authentic, engaging, inclusive, collaborative, accessible, innovative, student-centered, challenging, exploratory, etc.

• Try using it to help apply specific frameworks to your existing materials, such as asking it to find ways to implement principles of Universal Design (UDL), Culturally Responsive Education (CRE), or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS).

• Ask it to critique an idea or lesson, highlighting strengths, limitations, and opportunities for improvement.

• Find potential connections between the content in your class and your students’ other classes to foster a more holistic understanding of concepts, facilitate collaboration, deepen relevance and engagement, and promote reinforcement of skills and learning.

In all of the use cases presented above, AI is simply giving you ideas that you can choose to implement, modify, or ignore based on your own expertise and knowledge as an educator. All of us should be able to find value in that.

Major Universities Invest in AI

Top universities are making major investments in the AI space, with Johns Hopkins recently announcing the launch of a new institute dedicated to the study of data, machine learning, and A.I. systems, USC unveiling plans for a new Center for Generative AI and Society, and the University of Michigan rolling out custom generative AI tools to its entire campus community.

How AI is Impacting College Admissions Essays

Speaking of higher ed, college admissions offices are grappling with how to deal with admissions essays in the era of generative AI. While some schools haves begun issuing guidance for the use of AI on applications, many others have remained silent. Policies range from embracing AI as a tool to bring equity to the process, to the head-in-the-sand approach of “we expect applicants to write their essays themselves.”

The AI Guidance Revolution

School counselors have a lot on their plate, and their workload continues to increase in the wake of the pandemic along with a rising number of students in need of social and emotional support. AI presents an opportunity to ease some of the burden by assisting counselors in their role of providing college and career guidance, freeing them up to dedicate more time and resources to other aspects of their job.

📌 OpenAI’s Guide for Teachers

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has added a new a new section to its website dedicated to helping teachers use ChatGPT in their classrooms, including prompts, explanations, and a helpful FAQ page.

📌 An Image Generator That Can Handle Text

There are many AI image generators out there, but one common shortcoming has been their ability to generate text within images. Ideogram is a new image generator that provides a solution to this problem.

📌 Farewell to Language Barriers

Meta has announced its new multimodal AI model, SeamlessM4T, that can handle text-to-text, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech for nearly 100 languages (35 for speech output). ElevenLabs has also officially launched their new product which generates “emotionally rich” speech in more than 30 languages. Soon we’ll be able to say, “Remember when language barriers were a thing?”

Explanations Made Easy

Use AI to help explain things! You can use it to make explanations simpler, more concise, more detailed, more relevant, differentiated, etc.

Help with Spreadsheet Formulas

In today’s data-driven world, educators are finding themselves spending more and more time with spreadsheets. ChatGPT can be your helpful spreadsheet guru. In this example, I told it what I wanted to do and it not only gave me a formula I could use, but also explained the formula and gave me some helpful tips.

• Google is testing a digital watermark to identify AI images. It’s invisible to the human eye, but can be recognized by computers.

• All of those trendy .ai websites you are seeing from AI startups are providing a windfall for the tiny island nation of Anguilla (.ai is its country-specific domain).

• The voice chat feature of online video games like Call of Duty can be downright toxic. The newest CoD release in November will be equipped with AI moderation to combat this issue.

• Have you ever called a busy restaurant, but no one is available to pick up the phone? DoorDash wants to help.

That’s all for this week! If you appreciate the content in this newsletter, consider subscribing for free, or sharing with people in your network who may find value in it.