THOUGHTS
Posts, perspectives, and occasional wisdom.
Totally new information that already had me thinking about ways to change our slides for current development efforts.
✅ Consider politics: deepfakes are already influencing elections. 👩🎓 Consider education: I recently showed a team of teachers how to generate an entire term paper with Gen AI. (Chicago-style citations and all.) 🎭 Consider industries: OpenAI‘s Sora videos, or Midjourney‘s images, or Anthropic‘s Claude AI writing. Then consider Gen AI has been in the public …
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 …
Psychologically safe working environments should include stress (meaning pressure to perform and grow). They shouldn’t be overly stressFUL (meaning an overload of nerves). Too much stress reduces productivity and becomes counter-productive. So how do we productively leverage stress? We take a lesson from great teachers! 👩🎓 Students don’t learn by doing easy work, and they …
One of my earliest supervisors berated us when things went wrong. I found myself constantly watching my back, afraid to make a mistake and get yelled at. Sure, there were benefits. I still think of her when I diligently follow up on my tasks. But she also taught me that trying unfamiliar things carried the …
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 …
No, ChatGPT isn’t dead yet. But this weekend was chaos weekend at OpenAI, the company that created it. (CEO Altman was out! Then maybe he wasn’t! Then he was hired by Microsoft! And then most of OpenAI’s employees were ready to follow him! Wheeee!!!!!) OpenAI may survive, but the sharks are circling. Now’s a perfect …
My edu-geekery dial went to 11 last week when OpenAI announced custom GPTs. And here I’ve been talking about how you can use ChatGPT for learning! 🤓 I’ve been building an AI tutor ever since. Turns out it isn’t easy. Here are a sampling of the things I wanted it to do:🤔 Start by evaluating the …
I’ve been thinking a lot about the below since I posted it. The risk of trusting AI to get pseudo-human interaction right, the difficulty of knowing just how to balance AI’s advantages with the necessity of a human touch, the cognitive reward of human interaction that’s missing from AI. I released a podcast episode with …
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