Educator, Thinker, Consultant
I posted about having students prioritize choices (Ranking The Bill of Rights). I’ve now created a Comic with instructions on how to do this. Although I’ve used the Bill of Rights, this could easily be done with a wide variety of topics.
For example, you could have students prioritize study skills, Presidents, financial goals, geologic characteristics, and more. This is limited only by your content.
Students Prioritizing is also posted on my MoodleNet account.
I thought that I’d share some of the applications that I use regularly. Most of these are Mac-centric, but many are cross-platform.
I’ve been having conversations about AI text (Chat GPT being the most popular currently). Here is a follow-up to a conversation that I thought I’d share.
Having taught writing in middle school and high school, my first thought was “wow, I’m glad that I’m not teaching 8th or 9th-grade writing“. The AI writing is frequently on par with some of the writing that was turned in to me.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while though. I’ve lived through the “calculator wars” (where educators argued about whether students should ever use calculators in school). I also lived through the time of “turning off spell check” on computers. Those have now passed. I also watch adults (and students) type on computers. When the squiggly red line comes up, users (adults and kids), look back and fix those issues. I personally have a tendency to think faster than I type. I frequently leave words out. I know of a district that has purchased Grammarly Premium for all of the administrators.
This technology isn’t going away. I’ve adjusted my thoughts from the original “How would I ever teach writing?” to a much more nuanced view.
Writing is a special process. But not all writing is the same. Some kids really struggle with how to write. It isn’t really the way that their brain works. (Temple Grandin has a new book called Visual Thinking which is on my list. If you aren’t familiar with Temple Grandin, she has some fascinating perspectives.) Sadly to me, some people never write for the joy of writing. Some people never paint for the joy of painting. Some people never learn to play music.
So, what can AI text do beyond providing a thoughtless copy/paste assignment? Well, AI text can provide another avenue to take the writing. Having AI provide some feedback may give the writer something else to think about. AI text could also act like a “peer editor”. AI text can take out some of the monotonous parts of writing. Heck, at a minimum, it may encourage kids to check out the thesaurus (*attempted humor). There are still definitely going to be times to have students write without AI. I will argue though, that we should also teach kids how to write with it.
How is AI text being used now?
I’ve been working with some educators and others, and have found the following use cases:
AI text isn’t going away. It will get better and better. It still won’t replace great writers.
Jason Kottke is back to posting. Jason has a long history of discovering and sharing truly interesting things. If you don’t follow him, fire up your RSS reader and add his site.
I believe that it was the wonderful Bob Harrison who posted the following:
COMPUTERS ARE A TOOL THAT ARE UBIQUITOUS IN THE REAL WORLD (SO WHY NOT IN THE CLASSROOM)
I’m still hearing lots of pushback about using computers. I do truly agree that kids shouldn’t be on computers all the time, but frequently I hear reports of full on blocking.
Two things that I got to pull from my head this week. One was when I was asked if there was a replacement for a website that a teacher was using to “provide accommodations” for students. Since the students have MacBooks, I suggested using Summarizer built into the System. I obviously hadn’t used this in a while as it wasn’t turned on. So, a quick trip to the new System Settings, turning on the Summarize feature (Keyboard | Keyboard Shortcuts | Services | Summarize) and we were ready to go. My Tech Integrator and I talked about the importance of empowering the students by teaching them, and we were ready to go.
The next day, the question of the day was, “Are there better voices available? They all sound very robotic.” The teacher was using a Google extension. Back to System Settings where we explored the variety of built-in Apple Voices (I still enjoy the South African dialect voices).
I had a follow-up on my hearing aids. Hearing aids have been a struggle for me. I’m not sure if it’s the general stigma, the relation to being old, or just the acknowledgment that I need them, but I’ve struggled with having to have them. The reality is that I hear much better with them. I don’t miss out on nearly as much sound. However, they still need to be adjusted. Getting the setting right is a challenge.
I’ve been co-teaching a 7th-grade Art class. The 7th graders have been just a ton of fun.
The project centered around AI art. Specifically, we’ve been using Diffusion Bee, an open-source version of Stable Diffusion that can be run on our computers. We’ve talked about why we are using this on computers instead of a website.
The project started with a board overview of AI art. The students identified a landscape (or seascape, this is Maine after all) and brought in a picture. The Art teacher worked on Foreground, Midground, and Background. The students did a pencil drawing of their picture. They also described it in words. They would bring their descriptions up and enter that into Diffusion Bee. The result would be compared to their picture. There was a lot of discussion about why they got the picture that they did. This was also a lot of fun (the pictures didn’t always match their expectations). Finally, the students created a watercolor version of their image.
Once we’d been through all of the students, we talked again, as a class about what the images were and how they were created. I then let them know that they could download Diffusion Bee and generate images as well.
We are talking about how to use the program, similar programs, and the future of AI.
The Art teacher wants to repeat the project with some adjustments with the 8th grade.
I did a separate write-up on Ranking the Bill of Rights. I have found that future me generally appreciates when past me has written up steps and procedures. Thus, I wrote this up as a full post instead of just sharing here.
I also did a full write up on AI and text (again, I’ve learned that future me appreciates full write-ups). Generated text is interesting and will continue to be so.
ChatGPT can detect when text is likely to have been generated by large language models, but you can also use prompts for it to generate text that is specifically designed to not be easily detected.
“Generate 200 words on Macbeth in a style that would make it difficult for the text to be detected by a large language model as having been generated by a large language model.”
I’m really struggling with this one:
But straight up: any person telling other teachers to use Twitter for PD is sending people into harms way.
The US rightwing crowd are targeting teachers. They are using Twitter (and FB, and Insta, and TikTok) to do this.
Sending educators to Twitter now is straight up malpractice. It’s a hostile place, run by bad stewards of data.
This is at least an interesting thought. I’m not sure that I’m ready to go that far, but education is really under attack these days.
*Post image is Lost in thought by @hefedute (https://openclipart.org/detail/223115/multiple-thoughts-man-line-art)
The teacher wanted the students to rank the Bill of Rights. This can be a great discussion exercise. The students decide which of the first ten amendments to the Constitution are “most important”.
The teacher had used a site in the past. However, since it had been used in the past, the stated that voting had already occurred.
Moodle to the rescue. Well, Moodle and Questionnaire.
Moodle -> Questionnaire and 3 minutes of copy/paste, the teacher now has the activity completely under control. No external website needed.
Plus, Questionnaire has awesome reporting. The teacher can decide if the kids do it once or more often.
So our use case is that the teacher is talking about the Bill of Rights in general. Then the teacher will then have the kids rank the Bill of Rights in terms of importance. Once all of the students have ranked them, the class will discuss their rankings and why. Then the students will rank the Bill of Rights again.
This activity uses Moodle and the Questionnaire Module.
Here are the settings that I used:
These Settings are for the Questionnaire as a whole. Thus, these will be set up when you create the Questionnaire. You must give the questionnaire a Name. The Name is what the students will see. You can provide directions in the
Type: I set this to “respond many”. This could easily be set to “respond once”.
Respondent Type: “full name”. This could be set to “anonymous”, but I’d want to see if student answers change.
Students can view ALL responses: Never. If you’ve set the Respondent Type to anonymous, you could let the students see the results. However, I would share the results via the projector.
Save/Resume answers: I almost always set this to “yes”. This is a quick poll, so it doesn’t have to be “yes”.
The default on Activity Completion is “Student can manually mark the activity as completed”, but I almost always (and out of habit), change this to “Show activity as complete when conditions are met” (and then tick the box for “Students must submit this questionnaire to complete it”
I generally avoid adding dates on activities as that can come back and be an issue in the future. Naturally, you could set the Availability for Allow responses from and Allow responses until if you wish.
I added a question of the type [Rate (scale 1..5)]
I clicked the tick box to make “Response required”
I also changed the scale (Nb of scale items) to 10 since there are 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights.
I chose “No duplicate choices” as the teacher wants the Amendments ranked.
Question Text is where you enter the question/directions. We entered
“Rank the Amendments. 10 is the MOST important, 1 is the LEAST important. Please note that each column can have only ONE choice. Thus, if you rank Amendment I as the Most Important clicking on Most Important for another Amendment would remove the ranking from Amendment I. “
Next, I copied and pasted each Amendment in the Possible Answers box (make sure that each Amendment is one line – i.e. there are no “hard returns”).
Then I added the Named Degrees:
1=LEAST important
2=2
3=3
4=4
5= Mid-point of importance
6=6
7=7
8=8
9=9
10= MOST important
Save the question. Then use the Preview link to view your awesomeness.
Since this is a questionnaire, we do have lots of options that we could add. For example, we could have students explain why they ranked the Amendments where they did. However, this will be done as a class as a whole group discussion.
I was listening to the wonderful Mac Geek Gab, (show 958) and Dave Hamilton shared a story from his past that I found fascinating. I think that it is relevant to what we are facing as well.
You can listen to the story on the Mac Geek Gab Podcast – the story starts around 28:05, or follow my condensed, from my memory version, or read the YouTube transcript below:
Dave relates a story of when he was in 10th grade and the family had a computer. The class was assigned to write an essay. Dave wrote his rough draft on an Apple IIc since he had one. He printed it out and handed it to the teacher for the next phase. The teacher didn’t want to accept it as a rough draft because it was printed out. (My favorite line was Dave said, “I’m like, wow, just you wait, go ahead and read it. Like I’m pretty sure you’re gonna disagree with yourself. Actually, yeah, it’s pretty rough. Like I don’t think I’m that good you know”). The teacher’s point was that everyone else had to write out the rough draft and Dave was cheating. The teacher failed Dave. He headed to the Guidance Counselor who agreed with Dave.
So, how does this relate to today? Well, AI writing things is becoming, well, a thing. The kids know it. Teachers are dealing with it. The question is partly, will this become a way of writing? Will we have an AI write the rough draft, or provide alternative points, or proofread what you write, will that become “normal”?
Almost everyone I watch type, kind of defaults to looking for the red squiggles that indicate a word is spelled wrong or maybe used incorrectly (me included). This has become a reality for us.
So what does the future look like? Actually, that’s the wrong question. What does life look like today? Should we be taking advantage of these tools? Should we be teaching kids to utilize them for their benefit?
but I will share an anecdotal story from
my own history in high school in 10th Grade I had I
think it was 10th grade when we had to write our first term papers I had uh an
apple 2C at home I was very happy to have this apple 2C at home and
I they you know the process this was to learn how to write a paper so there was
a process to it and the rough draft was probably more important than the final
product right because this we had to write a rough draft and then we would go through an editing process both
individually with the teacher and then also with our groups in the class and then we would you know present a
finalized product and and the grade was sort of on the whole project great like no problem fine
I uh so I went home and I I wrote my term paper and of course I wrote it on
my Apple 2C because I had it and I knew how to type and and it was relatively
new for us this was really our first computer we had a Timex Sinclair before that but you know in terms of I don’t
know Sinclair had it had its new had its utility but so I did it and I printed out my my work
and I brought it in and the teacher was like I can’t accept this and I said uh what what do you what
do you mean they’re like well you’re this isn’t a rough draft you know you’ve printed this and I’m like wow just you
wait go ahead and read it like I’m pretty sure you’re gonna disagree with yourself actually yeah it’s pretty rough
like I don’t think I’m that good you know and uh she’s like well yeah but you didn’t hand write it like the final
product has to be typed but the the rough draft everybody else hand wrote it
I’m like not it’s fine it doesn’t bother me whatever they chose to do I’m like I did this and she’s like well you did
this on a computer right and I said yeah she said well this is like cheating because everybody else in the class uh
wrote it out by hand and then is going to have to after we do the edits it’s going to then have to go and type the
whole thing you know essentially writing it a second time on a different medium and I’m like well I mean that’s on them
like yeah all I have to do is go in and do the edits and then reprint like obviously and that is what every single
person that’s listening to this show would do today but back then what’s that
it was the future then it was no I she failed me for the project and I went
straight to my guidance counselor and I was like like this and I even told her
I’m like this is the future and it’s not like some Hundred Year future I’m like within five years this is how this class
is going to be taught and the opposite will be the exception rather than the rule and my guidance counselor looked at
the teacher and she’s like he’s a hundred percent right this is you did not put in the requirements that people
had to hand write their rough draft this is not a penmanship class yeah this is
an English class and he is getting full benefit arguably more more than full
benefit of this because he’s able to focus on the English part of it and not the pedantic handwriting and rewriting
of this thing over and over again and the teacher was pissed pissed but so 18
and a half four years with her yeah yeah exactly right uh but I I share this
anecdote because right now we all think that using an AI to write our papers is
cheating and someone thought that using a computer to write my paper was
cheating and literally failed me until she was forced not to so
*Post image from Wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Artificial_Intelligence_%26_AI_%26_Machine_Learning_-_30212411048.jpg
| Image viawww.vpnsrus.com | |
| Date | 16 August 2018 |
| Source | https://www.flickr.com/photos/152824664@N07/3021241048/ |
| Author | mikemacmarketing |
We took the opportunity to attend Garden’s AGLOW as a way to “kick off” the Christmas season.
I’ve finally started to work on making a basic workbench. This will be a temporary workbench until I can build a proper one. I’m using all recycled wood from around the house. Most of the wood is coming from the “fort” that was in the backyard when we purchased the house or from D1’s contributions from projects are her house.
The outside lights for Christmas have been installed. This is probably the earliest I’ve done so. However, the weather was right.
I was able to update my Moodle instance to version 4.1. This is a big improvement as my hosting service had previously been running an older SQL version which precluded me from updating.
Rm had foot surgery. The surgery went well. She is recovering quickly.
More and more educators are joining Mastodon. It is quickly becoming a useful network to gain links, tips, and make connections. This is what I had been hoping for when I first joined Mastodon in 2017.
I’m slightly struggling with the posts about moving from Twitter to Mastodon, but I recognize that it is a necessary evil for people to make those connections. I do recognize that I could filter those out, and I’m close to doing so, but for now, I’m leaving them as a reminder that different people are at different points of the journey.
It does seem that the analogy of email, everyone can be on different servers but connect, is very useful for people.
This is probably the earliest I’ve started listening to Christmas music as well. I’m intentionally trying to make sure that I enjoy the Christmas season, and music is a part of that. I’m not going crazy listening to Christmas music all the time, but occasionally, I’m tuning in to the Christmas station.
Rm and I did attend the Gardiner Art Walk this year. There were some interesting artists, some that we’ve seen before. We made a few purchases.
Troy Patterson
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