AI in Edu: Stream of Consciousness Edition
I’m traveling this week and don’t have time to prepare my usual AI-in-edu “commentary” for Thursday and AI-in-edu news summary for Friday. So, instead, I offer a two-for-one “stream-of-consciousness” edition (i.e., my ramblings) on various AI-in-edu topics.
Did you see that viral video of AI interviewing people from the 1500s? Not only is it hilarious, but the characters look incredibly realistic. That video helped motivate me to write about history coming alive through AI last week. But I forgot to include it in the post!
Of course, there’s a scary side to this realism. Did you see the “We are not PROMPTS!” video? Okay, the characters might be a touch too shiny and geometric to fool everyone, but AI is not far off. I shudder to think about what will soon be passed off as “real” in social media circles.
AI Voice cloning is also becoming more powerful. Watch this demo from a new startup called Bland that can take a small audio snippet and mimic tone, cadence, and pronunciation. (Reminds me why my nephew’s investment company scrapped its voice-recognition security system.) Scary deepfake possibilities.
On a lighter note, do you love Napkin AI as much as I? So simple to use and so helpful. I’ve been using it to add illustrations to my various tomdaccord.com pages —see AI Tools for History Teachers — and for some AI-in-education guidebooks I’ve been developing. (More on that later this month.) But I’m convinced Napkin will not be free much longer. Nothing so simple and useful stays free for long. Reminds me of Padlet a decade ago. It was all the rage in edtech circles, then it went subscription, and teachers just dropped it.
I follow certain edtech magazine writers, and no one equals TCEA’s Miguel Guhlin. Not only does he understand the technologies he writes about, but he can also apply them pedagogically and thoughtfully. Follow this link to a series of Miguel’s TCEA articles.
I come across AI tools for education via edtech mags and blogs, general AI tools lists (Futurepedia, Toolify, Superhuman, etc), and more. But one steady source is Larry Ferlazzo. If you’ve never encountered Larry, he’s a long-time ELL teacher and the unofficial king of “Best of” lists. He’s been publishing his Website of the Day blog since 2007 and has lists of tools in all sorts of educational categories. Larry’s newsletter arrives in my box seven days a week, and though short on reviews, it provides a steady stream of AI and digital tools to consider.
I’m debating getting a NotebookLM subscription. A NotebookLM Plus plan allows up to 300 sources per notebook, instead of the usual 50, and I'm running up against limits in my various notebooks. But I wonder if I should go in another direction and try Mindgrasp, which specializes in summarizing PDFs, videos, articles, and more, and offers extensive tools for note-taking, flashcards, and quizzes — which NotebookLM doesn't focus on.
A friend of mine just became AI Director at his school, and he was telling me about teachers who are most worried about AI. I expected him to start with recalcitrant math teachers, overwhelmed ELA teachers, or maybe even computer science teachers unsure if they should continue to teach coding. But, no, he started with World Language teachers. Wait. World Language teachers?? C’mon, this is a glorious time to learn a new language. As I’ve written, multimodal AI is transforming world language learning, creating tremendous learning possibilities. Take Talkpal, for instance. It has great exercises and an excellent AI audio conversationalist that literally won’t let you stop talking in your targeted language. (You: “This has been a helpful conversation, but it’s late and I’m going to bed now.” Talkpal: “I understand and hope you have a nice rest. So, tell me, what are your plans for tomorrow?”) But, as my friend explained, World Language teachers are afraid that students won’t take the years of courses necessary to become proficient in a world language, but instead opt to use an AI simultaneous-translation system when traveling abroad. Maybe I’m naive, but are you telling me that students would rather not learn Italian, but instead parade through Italy with a device in their ear pretending to converse with Italians?
There are many thoughtful and eloquent AI-in-education bloggers; you can find several on the Substack platform. However, finding practicing K-12 teachers who write regularly about their experiences with AI in the classroom is more challenging. There are some who publish regularly —Vicki Davis, Larry Ferlazzo, Adam Mohler, and others — but you can find many other practitioners in Facebook groups. So, if you’re looking for colleagues experimenting with AI in the classroom, I’d recommend these groups: AI for Teachers, AI Tools for Education (AI4Ed), AI and LLMs in Education. You’ll have to sift through unsolicited edtech promotions, but there are plenty of posts and commentary from actual classroom teachers. And they are not shy about telling you what they really think.
Larry Cuban posted a piece recently about robot-teachers and basically discounted the whole idea. Understandably, Cuban points out that human-to-human interaction is at the core of learning. His post reflects a commonly held belief that robots can’t replace teachers since human interaction is vital to the educational experience. While I respect Cuban immensely, this sentiment, however noble, strikes me as wishful thinking. I wrote about this issue at length a while back, that students and their parents are increasingly open to being taught by machines and AI can increasingly understand humans. That said, too often the question of whether robots will replace teachers is framed as an “either-or” proposition: teachers or robots. The more likely scenario, I think, is that teachers will be forging collaborative partnerships with robots.
Okay, got to get back to playing with my neice and nephew. Thanks for sticking with me through this “special” edition. Back to our regularly scheduled program next week.
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