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.

MU geoscience camp uplifts girls in STEM

Middle school girls from the Columbia area attended Geoscience Summer Camp for Girls on July 10-11. The camp focused on natural disasters and how geoscientists are able to provide data and aid during these events. The camp is the brainchild of Aída Guhlincozzi, who started it during her grad school …

Deciding to Learn in spite of #AI #education

“…the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting” (Plutarch). Assessment in the face of AI continues to be such a huge concern. This article suggests assessment has been flawed from the beginning and relying on the most convenient approach. That …

Time Saved, An AI Illusion

Will AI really save time overall or just push us to complete tasks more quickly so we can do more tasks without saving time? If you have eight hours, you finish 20 tasks instead of the usual ten, but you still work your full eight hours or more. No time is saved unless you hold to the same total …

Assessment in the Age of AI

This piece in Forbes by Dan Fitzpatrick makes some interesting points about assessment, quoting several educators. I admit that I have not given assessment as much thought as I should when considering AI. A simplistic perspective is that we write to learn and think through ideas. If you take a …

Yikes, AI is Coming for Your Data

We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy. Via When the Terms of Service Change to Make Way for A.I. Training - The New York Times

Claude.ai Lets You Organize Chats into Projects

Woohoo, as you can see above, Claude now lets you organize your chat support documents, or whatever you want to call them, into “Projects.” Here’s an explainer video from Claude.ai on the subject. An explanation from Claude: Projects help organize your work and leverage knowledge …

Quote: Books

For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game “Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of …

3-2-1: The Unknown Toll of AI

This morning, while reading this response on Threads on my new, consolidated account, I found myself wondering, “How many resources does Perplexity, or Claude or ChatGPT, consume when I ask a simple question, like, ‘What’s the scientific consensus on XYZ?” And, should I even …

Texas’ Teacher Org, ATPE Data Breach

This is crazy, shocking, even if data breaches are the new inevitable normal: More than 400,000 have data leaked in cyberattack on Texas education organization, ATPE …the incident affected 426,280 people — including members of the organization, employees and their dependents. …Social Security …

3-2-1: Need to Teach on a Global Hot Topic #ClimateChange #science #ShowYourStripes

New survey info shared today (with me) via the National Center for Science Education, Inc. email: “Eight in ten (80 percent) of people globally called on schools in their country to teach more about climate change, while just 6 percent of people globally said schools should teach less about …

Embracing The Experience in the Face of AI Ease

This piece about AI in education is one I find myself agreeing with. Whether you call it “friction” or “productive struggle,” there IS value in the experience of learning slow. Consider these quotes: The question has left me wondering if in our pursuit of reducing the time it takes to do things, …

AI in Education and Environment

This was an interesting article that dealt with more than AI’s impact on the environment. See included table for what other topics. For now, I found this the most compelling. Impact on Environment AI is reliant on a chain of extractive processes that are resource-intensive and with deleterious …

Print over Tech

This ought to make edtech advocates pause on pushing ebooks into children’s hands…as an avid reader, anecdotally, I can say there is a difference if I don’t take notes by hand in notebook. I prefer nonfiction in print, fiction in digital. AI Summary A study examined how middle-school students …

Concealed Handguns in TN Schools

What do you think? More guns in schools or not? My opinion is simple. Given the choice of being unarmed and facing an active shooter, it would be better to be armed. But most active shooters arrive well-armed with assault rifles. Would a pistol be sufficient? Tennessee Passes Bill to Allow Teachers …

Anthropic AI Agents

Over at The Verge, Kylie Robison writes: Anthropic is releasing a new feature for its AI chatbot Claude that will let anyone create an email assistant, a bot to purchase shoes, or other personalized solutions. It’s called “tool use” (or the nerdier “function calling”), and it hooks up to any …

Thinking, Fast and Slow

I love Abir Haddoud’s post about the book, so I am reposting it from social media (LinkedIn) below: Quote I’ve read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman twice. It has profoundly changed the way I perceive decision-making and human behaviour. Here are some …

Teacher Use of AI for Grading

I loved this response to an educator’s question about AI use by teachers vs students. It is concise, to the point: You have a sound rationale for discouraging your students from using A.I. to draft their essays. As with many other skills, writing well and thinking clearly will improve through …

Revisiting Rusty Rivers and Streams #ClimateChange

Source: Projected changes in the water cycle. Source: USGCRP 2009 Ugh. This had almost slipped from my mind until I read this article: Mountain rivers in the US state of Colorado are going rusty and the warming climate is to blame, according to research. An increase in toxic heavy metals has also …

Flow Chart: Should I Go or Stay? #Mermaid

This was the Mermaid code that Perplexity.ai generated for me, introducing me to Mermaid: Code Displayed In Image Above graph TD A[Do you have any prior commitments on the day of the event?] -->|Yes| B[Can you reschedule or delegate those commitments?] A -->|No| C[Do you want to support your …

Joplin App for Notes and Mermaid for Diagrams and Flowcharts

After struggling with Dropbox as my sync home for Joplin App notes, I finally plunked down the 3.99 euros needed to cover the cost of Joplin Cloud. All the problems, of course, went away and I’m now synching my Joplin notes without long delays or headaches. It’s astonishing to me how …

3-2-1 Brain Science and Effective Teaching

Interesting article, What Brain Science Says about Teaching Teens via EdSurge, on teenage brains. More details on effective teaching appear afterwards. Here’s an AI generated 3-2-1 summary: Summary of Key Ideas from the Article 3 Facts: Adolescent Brain Development: The article highlights that the …

AI: Going Nuclear for Energy

building water- and energy-hungry datacenters to fuel the AI boom comes at the expense of our already overburdened planet. . .the AI industry may require an energy breakthrough in fusion or another technology Read more via Futurism

MyNotes: Writing by Hand

The verdict is in…again? it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type. That’s a good thing for our brains. Not so much for the edtech industry which counts on selling devices to schools. My Notes Writing by hand…improves memory and recall of words, …

3-2-1: Four Day School Week

I heard or read about this topic in news earlier this week. I was hopeful because 4-day work weeks are great in my own experience. But, yikes! This research on the topic was not what I was hoping for schools. That feeling aside, it’s good to see more research on this. It should discourage schools …