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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom geralt / Pixabay
At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM: Zuno Tales lets teachers create virtual classrooms for AI-powered “educational” stories. There’s a limited free plan. AI and Showing Our Work is from Practical Theory. I’m adding this next post to THE “BEST” IDEAS FOR USING CHATGPT, BARD, & OTHER FORMS OF AI WITH STUDENTS:
Can AI Really Personalize Learning?
       “Rethinking ‘What Works’ in Education”Rethinking ‘What Works’ in Education is the headline of one of my recent Education Week columns, a guest post. How the question “what works” is defined misses too much of what matters in schools. Here are some excerpts:
 A Look Back: New Study Finds That Pretty Much All Teacher Evaluation “Reforms” Have FailedFor the next several months, each week I’ll be republishing posts from the past that I think readers might still find useful. This post first appeared in 2021.
It’ll come as no surprise to most teachers, but a new study finds that all the time, money and effort spent on “reforming” teacher evaluations resulted in zero positive impact on student achievement. Efforts to Toughen Teacher Evaluations Show No Positive Impact on Students is the headline of a lengthy Education Week article about the summary, and it’s worth reading the whole thing (and, if you don’t have an Ed Week subscription, you definitely want to make it one of the two or so articles you can access for free each month). Unfortunately, the article doesn’t actually link to the study itself, and I wasn’t able to find it while searching online. I’ll add a link to this post whenever I do come upon it. Many of the issues researchers find that caused the problems are similar to points I raised in a post titled A Look Back: “Evaluating Teachers In Order To Fire Them?” years ago. Trying to implement a “top-down” change is prime among them. I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments. You might also be interested in: The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation The Best Resources On The Idea Of Evaluating Teacher “Input” Instead Of Student “Output” The Best Posts & Articles On The Florida Teacher Evaluation Fiasco UPDATE:Here’s the link to the study itself:
UPDATE:The authors just came out with a final version, and I’ve shared some tweets below about it (and I’ll be adding those tweets to that original post):
 Sentences Of The Week geralt / Pixabay
I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful. Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful. And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education. I may also include my own comments or related links. This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts. Here are this week’s sentences: The invention of writing emancipated humanity from enslavement to memory. Societies without vibrant writing cultures are timid, hidebound, uncurious…. Written, ideas can be “analysed, challenged and improved.” AI bans might be the rare equity issue that privileges the have-nots more than the haves. The good news for educators who already feel out of their depth with AI is that fixing the widening trust gap between teachers and students requires relationship, not technical, skills, the report says. Some promising interventions such as investing in modern HVAC systems, which I wish had made the cut for the survey, are VERY easy to implement with fidelity. They are technical solutions that require very little human behavioral change. Other promising interventions, like tutoring, are much harder to scale because they require hiring or training personnel, organizational change, and difficult resource tradeoffs. One of the really basic problems with using A.I. in education is that it is designed to make tasks easier and to reduce friction, and friction is how learning happens. To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. I would like to see more from those who are pushing back on “AI” and ed-tech in schools what their vision and goals are for what should happen instead. Libraries are one of the few places in this surveillance economy that are not trying to collect and sell your data to come and use our facilities. Of the day’s 17 acts, spanning a two-hour-long program, the only women who were set to grace the stage were singers. The message couldn’t have been clearer. Women were fit to entertain, but not to lead. Perhaps the biggest reason I failed, however, was that I focused on telling teachers exactly what they needed to do without taking the time to listen to their ideas and suggestions. See The Best Resources On “Instructional Coaching” By claiming that an excess of compassion is in fact a social blight, Saad’s book and others offer a theoretical framework for selfishness. “We learned nothing from social media,” said Nataliya Kosmyna, a visiting researcher at Google with a doctorate in human-computer interactions. “Attention is messed up, and in years we are going to have the same cases with LLMs with children and teenagers.”
 Halloween & Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) Are Coming Up – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources cocoparisienne / Pixabay
Halloween and The Day Of The Day are coming up this month. You might be interested in: The Best Websites For Learning About Halloween & Day Of The Dead (I’ve just done a quick update and removed a fair number of “dead” links). The Best Movie Scenes For Halloween. The Best Resources For Helping Beginner ELLs Learn About Halloween & The Day Of The Dead The Best Teaching Resources For The Movie, “Coco”  More Recent Articles
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