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

Topic: tech/AI: education

A.I. Updates

    • AI & Education
    • 01/09/25
    “It’s evident that AI is not just advancing technology – it’s prompting fundamental questions about society and humanity. The questions we face aren’t just technical but deeply human: how do we harness AI’s potential while preserving what makes us uniquely human? How do we ensure this technology creates equal access to the future for ALL?”
    • AI EduPathways
    • 01/05/25
    “One promising solution is evaluating student interactions with AI. This concept has faced some skepticism due to workload and feasibility concerns. Transcripts can, after all, be quite long. But those concerns represent a misconception regarding the approach itself.”
    • Open Praxis
    • 11/29/24
    “At this point in history, it is difficult to argue whether GenAI will ultimately be a disruptive or sustaining technology, a catalyst or blocker, or something else that we cannot foresee. However, its public emergence at the end of 2022 undeniably sparked substantial speculation, hype, and even hope. In such uncertain and speculative times, it […]
    • AI for Education
    • 11/26/24
    “At the elementary level, GenAI tools should be used primarily by teachers for lesson planning, preparation, and selective modeling… Until there is compelling evidence of positive impacts on learning through direct student interaction with GenAI tools at the elementary level, as well as adequate safeguards in place to completely eliminate the risk of exposure to […]
    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 11/21/24
    “What’s particularly exciting for us instructional designers is that when GPTs are custom-trained for specific instructional design tasks (like writing learning objectives), they show significant improvements in reliability and accuracy…”
    • OpenAI
    • 11/15/24
    “Used thoughtfully, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to help students develop skills of rigorous thinking and clear writing, assisting them in thinking through ideas, mastering complex concepts, and getting feedback on drafts. There are also ways to use ChatGPT that are counterproductive to learning—like generating an essay instead of writing it oneself, which deprives […]

ADMISSIONS

ADOLESCENCE

ASSESSMENT

ATHENA

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

HUMANITIES

LEADERSHIP

    • Leon Furze
    • 05/01/24
    “This first post lays out a general strategic framework that any faculty leader can adapt to bring discussions of this technology into their domain. In subsequent posts, I will be inviting faculty leaders from across a range of disciplines to contribute ideas on how AI can be used in their disciplines.”
    • Rooted
    • 03/21/24
    “It’s safe to say that AI is exactly the kind of “emergent novel reality” that brings new structural uncertainties to our schools and beyond, structural uncertainties that no oracle or expert system could predict with complete accuracy. That’s why the topic demands a systems-thinking approach (like the 5 P’s framework), or a new mental model […]

PD

PEDAGOGY

    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 11/08/24
    “Spoiler: my findings underscore that until we have specialised, fine-tuned AI copilots for instructional design, we should be cautious about relying on general-purpose models and ensure expert oversight in all ID tasks.”
    • Carmel Schettino
    • 11/03/24
    “We need to make it so that what students are being asked to learn is not how to factor, but why you might factor a polynomial. Instead of focusing on how to graph trigonometric functions, questions should focus on what affects the graph and why.”
    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 09/29/24
    “Imagine the possibilities if we could use AI to simulate learner responses during the instructional design process. What if you didn’t need to conduct endless interviews, waiting for learner feedback that sometimes never arrives? What if you could have instant conversations with virtual learners and rapidly generate reliable data to inform your design?”
    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 08/22/24
    “The big question I’ve been exploring this week is: what should a partnership of human instructional designer and AI look like in practice, and what does this mean for our key skills, roles and responsibilities? …According to a lot of research published in the last few years, there are a number of tasks which are […]
    • Dan Meyer
    • 04/17/24
    “The skilled teacher, one who loves kids and loves math, will ask, “What does this student know about this one big mathematical idea?” Khanmigo asks, “What does this student not know about these many small mathematical ideas?””
    • EdWeek
    • 01/03/24
    “One of the big challenges of providing teacher feedback at scale has been instructional coaches’ caseloads. While AI can’t replace that human contact, it can tag and process classroom transcripts much faster than humans. So coaches potentially can use data from AI tools to tailor their feedback to teachers, if they can’t themselves observe teachers […]

READING/WRITING

    • Chronicle of Higher Ed
    • 12/12/24
    “This time, she fed PowerPoint slides, self-produced YouTube videos, and course notes from previous iterations of the class into an AI platform called Kudu, which consolidated them into one text that she reviewed. Nothing in the book is actually written by AI. “It’s my words, my writing,” she said. The images in the book, like […]
    • AI for Education
    • 11/26/24
    “At the elementary level, GenAI tools should be used primarily by teachers for lesson planning, preparation, and selective modeling… Until there is compelling evidence of positive impacts on learning through direct student interaction with GenAI tools at the elementary level, as well as adequate safeguards in place to completely eliminate the risk of exposure to […]
    • EdWeek
    • 10/08/24
    “About half of the 130 teachers who said they used AI to help with their recommendation letters did so to take the stress out of the task, according to foundry10’s survey. And about a third of the 130 said they believed AI tools improved the quality of their letters. Far more teachers, 267 in all, […]
    • The 74 Million
    • 09/15/24
    “Rebind, a new, AI-assisted digital publisher, is betting that interactive, personal guidance and expert commentary will revive a love for reading.”
    • The Mind File
    • 08/24/24
    “This term, the highest and lowest marks I awarded were to AI-augmented submissions. The worst one was a depressing stack of LLM list outputs, complete with Title Case Subheadings. Although there was no declaration of AI use, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine how the student might have prompted a bot with key words from […]
    • Marc Watkins
    • 08/09/24
    “The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and […]

STEM

TECH

    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 11/08/24
    “Spoiler: my findings underscore that until we have specialised, fine-tuned AI copilots for instructional design, we should be cautious about relying on general-purpose models and ensure expert oversight in all ID tasks.”
    • Dan Meyer
    • 10/16/24
    • AI and Education
    • 07/24/24
    “Claude AI recently introduced a free feature called Artifacts, which enables users to create standalone content such as interactive games, diagrams, websites, and more using simple prompts. It goes beyond generating code but also allows you to view and interact with what you generate.”

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

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

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