Kottke
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.
Thoughts
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.
Summarizer & Voices
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).
Hearing Aids
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.
7th Grade Art
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.
Amendments
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.
ChatGPT
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.”
Social Media & Teachers
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)
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