Montage of screenshots of some webpages discussed in article

School

Magic Tools – MagicSchool.ai

MagicSchool is your AI assistant for all things teaching. We think #TeachersAreMagic – and we are on a mission to fight teacher burnout with Artificial Intelligence.

Limitations
May occasionally produce biased or inaccurate information
Only has knowledge up to the year 2021
Cannot search the internet or produce images (yet)

A large set of AI tools for teachers, I’ve only tried one so far. I wonder how they will make money. Sign up for fee is the only thing I can see. I’ve used ChatGPT is a fairly casual way, making crosswords questions and cloze procedures for H2P.

Kevin’s Meandering Mind | Generative AI and the Writing Classroom: WMWP Workshop

Overall, our intentional message was not “the world is ending so ban AI” but more, “this is our new reality, so how can we start to think of AI as a partner to help us as teachers and maybe help our students as writers?” and I think that theme really resonated with the educators who joined us last night.

Also from Kevin, Write Out: Gathering Sensory Details for Haiku which if the weather permits and we can get to the woods I’ll try next week.

Holiday rabbit hole

This

02 Mississippi River Sheet 15 Landscape

from Tom Woodward

lead to a collection of links including: Dan Coe Carto – The Community Library 2023—Rivers Revealed

Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a technology that uses laser light pulses to create intricate three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface. These models can be used to create stunningly detailed images of rivers and floodplains. These depictions often reveal previously unseen channels where rivers have flowed in the past and invite viewers to visually meander along these pathways through both space and time.

And some local data Scottish Remote Sensing Portal makes me wonder how difficult this would be, it would be nice to do from places I know.

Glow Blogs

I also spent a fair bit of time in the wet weather on Glow Blogs help. Although the classic editor is default on Glow Blogs, we are getting ready for using Blocks. I’ve been updating information and using the blocks editor to do so. I’ve tried all the blocks and am now a lot happier using it.

Featured image: a montage of screenshots of some of the lined pages, my previous script had a few problems with cookie banners, so this one used Safari & takes screenshots. Not as elegant and I think there are a few daft decisions, but it works.

Read The change of the seasons by vasta
The tree in our front yard starts turning yellow in late August. By the end of September, it has shed almost all of its leaves, leaving a dusting of golden...

Nice to see this newsletter pop into my inbox infrequently. Always interesting links, ideas and poems.

Of course it is really a blog with a RSS feed 😉

This link, might be fun for schools.

Listened Radio #EDUtalk 5-12-12: Dylan Wiliam by David Noble from edutalk.info
Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Education: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom, and From Teachers to Schools: Scaling Up Professional Development for Formative Assessment. Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) on Twitter Welcome to…

I was thinking of Dylan Williams the other day and remembered David Noble, my partner in Edutalk partner had interviewed him back in 2012. This was the second round of AIFL in Scotland.

I gave it a listen on the way to work this morning. It is a great interview. Dylan is very positive about teaching, makes some great points and David asks great questions. I think it is still relevant 11 years later!

Well, I think that Scotland did a very good job of kicking off this process right at the end of the 1990s, the early 2000s.
So I think that the original focus was very welcome, the idea of assessment is for learning. I think people got slightly seduced by the tips and techniques rather than thinking about this as being a vehicle for teacher learning. So I think it got rather, and this may be inevitable for any innovation, it got rather packaged as being a thing that schools could do. And many schools think they’ve done assessment is for learning, and so they’re moving on to the next thing.

“inevitable for any innovation” – My emphasis.

Aiko

After listening to this I though I might like to grab some quotes so remembered I’d downloaded the free app Aiko, which is an AI-powered audio transcription, and ran the audio through it. After a hiccup when the app though the language was Welsh it seemed to do a great job. I’ve added it to the original post. David & I alway regretted not being able to provide accessible transcriptions of our broadcasts/podcasts. I am wondering about picking out some other episodes to transcribe. The audio is not attributed to the two different speakers, but I think it is easy enough to understand.

Radio Edutalk

Radio Edutalk is a project I am extremely please to have been part of. We were a bit ahead of the podcast curve, but it gave me an amazing opportunity to talk to all sort of amazing educators. It ran from 2009 till 2019 starting as an open to any contributor, mobile podcast and developing to include regular internet radio broadcasts which were archived as podcasts. About EDUtalk has a bit more information.