A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

LearnLM: Google’s Education-Specific Model, With Prompts

“LearnLM is an experimental task-specific model that has been trained to align with learning science principles when following system instructions for teaching and learning use cases… When given learning specific system instructions, LearnLM is capable of: Inspiring active learning: Allow for practice and healthy struggle with timely feedback, Managing cognitive load: Present relevant, well-structured information […]

“20 Things You Didn’t Know About Google Scholar”

“We physically delivered files at first. In the early days of Google Scholar, slow, flaky internet speeds made it hard to gather research to build this online research library. As a workaround, the team embraced a low-tech solution dubbed the “Sneakernet.” Instead of relying solely on slow downloads, publishers would load articles on physical hard […]

Google Achieves Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

“Achieving human-level speed and performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics research community. This work takes a step towards that goal and presents the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur human-level performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport which requires human players to undergo […]

Google’s Full Paper On Designing LearnLM, For AI Tutoring

“Recent advances in generative AI (gen AI) have created excitement about the potential of new technologies to offer a personal tutor for every learner and a teaching assistant for every teacher. The full extent of this dream, however, has not yet materialised. We argue that this is primarily due to the difficulties with verbalising pedagogical […]

Google Makes Bard Appropriate For Teens

“Before launching to teens, we consulted with child safety and development experts to help shape our content policies and an experience that prioritizes safety. And organizations like the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) advised us on how to keep the needs of teens and families in mind.”

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

Subscribe

* indicates required