Another Think Coming

Dawn of AI Era Report

Our new report, “The Dawn of the AI Era: Teens, Parents, and the Adoption of Generative AI at Home and School” – out today – shows that teens are quickly adopting generative AI, similar to how they embraced social media. But many parents are behind on how often their kids …

Free AI Audio Transcription and YouTube Script Generator

For another blog focused on Ed Tech, I explore the answer to a question a lot of educators are asking. That is, how does one generate questions for videos they want to show their students? While we wait for that blog entry to appear, I thought it might be fun to highlight one of the tools I cover in …

Handwriting and the Brain

“The most surprising thing was that the whole brain was active when they were writing by hand, [while] much smaller areas were active when they were typewriting,” van der Meer says. “This suggests that when you are writing by hand you are using most of your brain to get the job done.” Moreover, …

AI Summarizer: Roundup on GenAI

An AI summary of Paris Marx' article, ** Roundup: Will generative AI have many long-term benefits?** 5 key points • ChatGPT may harm students' math learning by acting as a crutch rather than improving skills. • AI assistants in medical imaging can significantly reduce radiologists' accuracy when …

AI Summarizer: 3 AI Trends That Will Impact Your Job In 2024

The following is summarized by AI from Rachel Wells' article, ** 3 AI Trends That Will Impact Your Job In 2024** Five Key Points • AI is expected to automate routine tasks, allowing workers to focus on more complex and creative aspects of their jobs. • Personalized AI assistants will become more …

Infusing Biblical Teaching into Texas Public Schools

“Teaching about the influence of religion in our history is an important part of a well-rounded education, but this error-riddled curriculum risks turning public schools into Sunday schools, with parents of diverse religious beliefs left in the dark,” said Val Benavidez, president of the TFN …

AI Humanizers and AI Bias

Want to sneak your AI generated text in under the radar? Try UndetectableGPT, an AI Humanizer that’s available for free online. That’s kinda funny, right? An AI making something sound more human. So I decided to give UndetectableGPT a try with a real response. First, let me give you some …

Alas, Meta

It appears that two days after being suspended from Facebook, I have been permitted back on, all without any explanation or rationale given.

Smartphone Bans Make Sense to Someone

Over on Mastodon (which I’m spending even MORE time on since Meta cancelled me for posting…K-12 education content and reposting pictures of cats and dogs doing silly stuff?), TeachPaperless makes this point: Sweden’s schools are buzzing with change: phones banned for ages 6-16 …

AI Coded Game - Tower Defense

What fun to use AI to design a Tower Defense game (ASCII). It’s been a few thousand versions. The creation started in Claude, but quickly overwhelmed its limits (I HATE those limits, Claude). The bulk of the work has been done in ChatGPT, which handles updates to the code that take too long …

Proton Docs: A New Word Processor

A longtime user of Proton’s version of secure, encrypted Mail, Proton Drive storage, as well as the original Google Docs (even before Google acquired it), I was pleased to see this announcement: What? Proton now adds word processor to their stable of products? Great! I can’t tell you how …

AI-Coded ASCII Star Trek Game

Well, wow. My mind is blown. Ever since I was 13 years old, I have wanted to play this Star Trek game I enjoyed at the time. The game was hosted on pre-Internet technology, electronic Bulletin Board Services (BBSs) and it was my first ever Star Trek game. It was played in ASCII with letters to …

Hasta la Vista! Facebook and Meta (Update)

Oh oh, goodbye Facebook. Time to bid my education Facebook account, Instagram, Threads adieu. Good riddance. Since I only post education stuff, who knows how I offended the Facebook daemons. Update 8/29/2024 Two days later, it appears I am allowed back on Facebook: In a surprising turn, I’ve …

My AI Breakthrough

This was a really interesting set of pie graphs from a SectionSchool webinar featuring Greg Shove I attended this week. It’s based on a survey from April, 2024 of 1300+ knowledge workers in the US, UK, and Canada. Special thanks to my boss for suggesting it. AI Usage This first one refers to …

Passive Oppression

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being …

Fences, Not Ambulances

From Dr. Pamela Snow: Fences at the top of the cliff, not ambulances at the bottom. Every. Time.

Student Use of AI

…when students rely on a generative A.I. tool like ChatGPT to outsource brainstorming and writing, they may be losing the ability to think critically and to overcome frustration with tasks that don’t come easily to them. …what troubles Martin more than some students’ shrewd academic …

3-2-1-: Cell Phone Bans in Texas Schools

This is sure to be a hot topic for many of us in ed tech spaces. This online publication frames the issue as one between teachers vs parents. For the teachers, it’s about eliminating distractions. For the parents, it’s about staying in contact with their children in an environment rife …

Handwriting And Paraphrasing

support students in generating high quality notes and help them to engage in paraphrasing, for example, by supplying them with graphical organizers or pre-questions in advance of the lecture to help students organize their thoughts and focus their attention Via …

Free AI Survey course Available

Announced a few days ago… A free survey course on LLMs, taught by practitioners…[on] Mastering LLMs, a set of workshops and talks from practitioners on topics like evals, retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG), fine-tuning and more. Learn more

MyNotes: Strategies To Apply Post-PD

Summary by Perplexity.ai The article “Just Did Some Professional Development – Now What?” by Rick Wormeli, hosted on the AMLE website, outlines several strategies educators can use to effectively process and apply the content and skills acquired during professional development (PD) …

AI’s Impact

This chart is a great tool for reflection as all of us use AI and other technology. Via axbom.com/aielements

Belief or Delusion?

How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word – The Marginalian The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

Not that anyone cares except myself and a few friends, but I added to, and updated, my list of Windows programs, iOS smartphone apps, and browser extensions. Find it online.