Category Archives: wwwd

Mostly stuff to do with the classroom & Teaching and learning. Posts that fit with the site’s description: “Teaching, ict, and suchlike”

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Webpage with description and image of a European Goldfinch on a branch against a blue sky.

Image Accessibility Creator · Streamlit

Impressive ai generated descriptions and alt text from images. I found adding even a one word helped.

Via Doug Belshaw: How to easily generate image descriptions and alt text | Thought Shrapnel

After taking a screenshot I fed it back to the webpage (too tempting) and got:

Image Description: A screenshot of a webpage with the header “asuo-ai-labs.streamlit.app” shown in the top center. The screen is divided into two main sections. On the left, under the heading “Image and Details,” there is a section for uploading an image. A placeholder box labeled “Drag and drop file here” or “Browse files” is visible. Below it, there is a thumbnail of an image labeled “IMG_9865.jpeg” which is 2.8 MB in size. The image thumbnail shows a European Goldfinch perched on a budding branch against a clear blue sky. Below the thumbnail, there is a toggle switch labeled “Add details about the image,” which is turned on. A text box is filled in with the word “Goldfinch.”

On the right side of the webpage, there is a section labeled “Image Description.” Below it, a detailed description of the image is provided, as well as a short alt text. The image description reads: “The image features a European Goldfinch perched on a budding branch against a backdrop of a clear blue sky. The Goldfinch displays vibrant plumage with a distinctive red face, a mix of black and white on its head, a warm beige chest, and brownish wings with yellow accents. The branch, adorned with small, white buds and green leaves, stretches horizontally across the bottom right of the image, while the bird is slightly right of center. The serene sky comprises soft, light blue gradients without any visible clouds.”

The alt-text reads: “European Goldfinch perched on a budding branch against a clear blue sky.”

Alt-Text: Webpage with description and image of a European Goldfinch on a branch against a blue sky.

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AI in action

In the vast sea of educational blogs, The Learning Hub shines as a beacon of insightful content and valuable resources. With a dedication to excellence and a passion for learning, this blog has become a go-to destination for educators, students, and parents alike.

 

This was posted in response to a post on the Glow Blog help: Glow Blogs Start of Session FAQ 2022.

I’ve been generating a bit of text for example sites recently and this text has the same smell I get from ChatGPT and co-pilot.

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Read Generative AI and Creative Learning: Concerns, Opportunities, and Choices by Mitchel Resnick
As each new wave of technology ripples through society, we need to decide if and how to integrate the technology into our learning environments. That was true with personal computers, then with the internet, and now with generative AI technologies.

I just listened to the generated audio rather than read this.

Really powerful summary between the instructionist and constructionist approaches to AI in education. Resnick is of course the father of scratch, so is firmly on the constructionist side.

There are powerful ideas and examples of the ways AI could support a constructionist approach to learning and the 4Ps projects, passion, peers, and play.

I started to pull out quotes, but it easier to suggest you just read the whole thing.

 I worry that inertia and market pressures will push the educational uses of generative AI in this direction.

This would be the worry.

The piece finishes with

The choice is up to us. The choice is more educational and political than technological. What types of learning and education do we want for our children, our schools, and our society? All of us—as teachers, parents, school administrators, designers, developers, researchers, policymakers—need to consider our values and visions for learning and education, and make choices that align with our values and visions. It is up to us.

I do wonder if, in the mainstream, we have much choice. I don’t think that many decisions about educational technology have been very pure, the power of the big companies is massive. We should be thankful that the more open, non-commercial like scratch exists.

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My class joined in the ‘ AI Wonderland: Unleash Creativity with Make it hAPPen (P4-P7)’ webinar on Monday. It was a useful introduction for their age group on a topic we had not explored in class. In Teams I noticed this TeachMeet1 too. I finally signed up for it on Wednesday.

Given it started at 3:30 on Thursday and school finished for the easter holidays at 2:30, it was a bit of a rush.

I had planned, the night before, to talk a bit about using ChatGPT for creating H5P content in Glow Blogs. I knocked up a quick keynote of screenshots to avoid the danger of live.

ChatGPT can quickly produce information which, once checked, can be used to create H5P content. What is especially useful is that it can format the information to work with HP5 textual inputs. I’ve put some instructions on the Glow Blogs H5P examples site.

The TeachMeet was quite quiet, 3:30 on the last day of term was probably tricky for most folk. I enjoyed the other things shared, although I didn’t grab any links, except for Diffit. I hope to get the rest when the recording is released.

Most of the sharing mirrored mine in that they involved creating resources, quizzes and the like. One idea that stood out, and one I intend to use, was taking an interesting phrase from pupils’ writing and using it as an image prompt in Bing (I believe). This was demonstrated to the whole class and sounds like it would generate interesting discussions.

I’ve used some of the free AI tools, mostly ChatGPT, for a while now. Mostly for simple text generation and some JavaScript or AppleScript help. I don’t doubt that, despite some glitches, that it is potential useful and interesting.

Is that an Elephant?

There are a lot of difficult and awkward questions around the use of GPT in teaching & learning. I’ve read a fair bit of discussion around the ethics at both ends of the process, but not much discussing the primary school level.

Things that worry me, beyond my knowledge, time, brain power or pay grade2:

  • The obvious, ethics around where the data comes from, scraping possible copyrighted works.
  • The bias of the data, racial bias is the one I’ve read about most, but I imagine there are many others.
  • Possible breaches of pupil/student data, safeguarding issues.
  • The commercial nature of the tools. A lot of these services seem to be freemium, with either a limited or time limited resource set.

I’ll keep using AI in a casual way with minimum risk (I hope), but it feels like education is stepping into a can of worms in the same sort of way we have adopted most technology, in a rather haphazard way.

Feature image is an old gif I made from a public domain photo a few years ago.

  1. I’ve not been to a TeachMeet for a while so this intrigued me as much as AI ↩︎
  2. Over the time it has taken me to type this post I see this: Women’s faces stolen for AI ads selling ED pills and praising Putin – The Washington Post, this AI – two reports reveal a massive enterprise pause over security and ethics. I also asked ChatGPT to give me 400 words on the pros and cons of using AI in education. I’d say there is a lot of confusion about. ↩︎

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gif of kidpix 'bomb' rummer

This is a blast from the past. This was one of the first applications I saw first apps when I first used computers. My classes at the time really enjoyed using this.

The other apps I remember from those days included Claris Works1 and HyperCard2
Amazing to see a Mac with kid pix running in emulation at archive.org. It feels snappier than the LCs we had back then.

A pity I can’t get it going on iOS as I’d love to see my current class using it. The is a dialogue to input your name and I can’t type in it on iPad. Workarounds welcome.

The featured image is of the ‘bomb’ eraser ,which my pupils would use endlessly.

  1. I really enjoyed teaching with Claris Works, the drawing documents were great for teaching about layers, rotation etc and could be compared to the paint docs. ↩︎
  2. First as a source of clip art, then as everything. ↩︎

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I’ve mentioned the app Aiko a couple of time. Until now I’d used it to transcribe podcasts to quote. Today noticed that it could export transcriptions as subtitle .srt files and I gave it a couple of wee videos that I had to remove1 from the Glow Blogs2 help site to comply with accessibility guidelines. Suffice to say I was very impressed with the results. Aiko is free and available for mac and iOS. Cute icon too.

Aiko app icon

  1. The plan was to add subtitles, but I ran out of time. ↩︎
  2. I am please to say I am back working on Glow Blogs on a part time basis. ↩︎

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ipod classic screen with Radio Sandaig podcast episodes listed.

I found my old iPod last night, took a while to get it to boot, but I recorded a microcast just for nostalgia. I use this quite a lot around 2005-9 to record podcasts with my primary classes. There seem to be some interesting crackles added this time.

Suprisingly it mounted on my mac, I could drag the wav file to the desktop and convert to mp3, no other editing.
Continue reading →

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I’ve now been running blogs with & for my classes since 2005. I still find them a really useful tool for teaching and learning. The focus and content has changed continually over the years.

Back in the noughties I was keen on having my class blog kept up by pupils (archive.org link).

I find this harder to organise now, not sure if it is my age, the demands of the curriculum or something else. Pupils in my class now post to their e-Portfolios1 and add pieces of work to the class blog which I collate into posts. I also pinch quotes from their e-portfolios for the class blog2.

Like my own blog here I still find my class blog a great resource to remember & review. Of course it is a curated view. Much depends on what I am finding most interesting at the time. I both enjoy reading back and use it as a tool when asked for feedback or a record of some sort.

I was somewhat cheered up by Matt Mullenweg’s birthday. Sometimes it feels like WordPress is focused on content management. Matt’s post show that blogging is still loved.
While content management is a main focus of Glow Blogs my love is blogging. I still think we are only scratching the surface of the use of WordPress in school3.

Posts Last Term (Oct 2023 – Dec 2023 on my class blog )

  1. Glow Blogs – WordPress blogs for Scottish Education ↩
  2. example of quote collection↩
  3. H5P for example ↩