THOUGHTS
10 posts
How best to appreciate a teacher during National Teacher Appreciation Week? Tell them! 🧑🏫 My Latin teacher in 7-8 grades was Dr. Paul Pietrow. (He was Mr. Pietrow then — not yet a doctor, just a recent college graduate finding his way.) He only taught for three years before going to medical school and likely …
(I haven’t lost my mind. Allow me to explain.) Math and math-adjacent fields faced a crisis in the 1970s when digital calculators arrived in students’ hands. These were just basic versions, nothing close to scientific or graphing calculators (just go look up the TI-30!), but they were a quantum leap ahead of the slide rule …
That question was at the heart of the professional development session I ran last week for Horace Mann School‘s History Department. I think the teachers left a little less certain about the answer. (Which was one of my goals. Sorrynotsorry.) I showed them how, with just a few minutes of prompting, Generative AI can create …
Yet 60% of teachers still don’t use it. 🤔Spoiler alert: it’s not their fault. Plenty of past EdTechs have claimed they will revolutionize teaching. Most have failed. Remember filmstrips? Interactive whiteboards? The list goes on and on. The difference with AI, as I’ve argued in past posts, is that no other EdTech can replace thinking. …
But… what if you can’t use AI? 😰 My last few posts used AI assists to illuminate what your learners need to learn next.🦾 First we predicted learning gaps with AI to help build your lesson plans.🦾 Then we built individualized assessment using AI to show exactly what each person needs to learn next. Now …
You’ll learn best if the learning is targeted to your personal needs. 😎 (This isn’t about learning styles. Don’t get me started on learning styles.) What if, every time you learned something, it started at exactly the right place for you based on what you already know? There would be no need for background research …
But… how do you know what’s needed? 🧐 I had high school classes where the teacher said “We were on page 87 yesterday, so today we’ll start at the top of page 88”? I’m sure you’ve had the same. Wait. Why is that wrong? Page 88 is the next page, after all! Here’s the problem: …
Teaching is way more than telling. A great teacher unearths their learners’ misconceptions and misunderstandings, and then targets them to fill gaps and build higher quality knowledge. In other words, you don’t just teach what’s next; you teach what’s NEEDED. One of the more challenging elements of teaching is figuring out what our learners need …
Another notable voice has spoken against banning ChatGPT in schools. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, was interviewed by Education Week yesterday. He says banning ChatGPT and other AI technologies will leave students at a disadvantage: “The same week that New York City public schools banned ChatGPT, Anthropic [an AI safety and research company] posted a prompt engineer …
Fine, it’s a provocative title. Of course we do. But here’s a real question for those in a school or professional learning environment: how are you preparing for a world in which AI writing is indistinguishable from human writing, what are you doing regarding AI/ML and evaluating student learning, and how are you considering incorporating …
