Click here to read this mailing online.
"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
Google Unveils An AI Game-Creating Tool That MIGHT Be Useful To ELLs, But It’s Certainly Not A “Game-Changer”
Google has a decidedly mixed track record in applying its AI capabilities towards something useful educationally. In fact, as many educators know, they actively using it to harm students by refusing to let schools turn-off its AI search capabilities for students in school. Apart from that terrible move, they’ve created lots of pretty useless AI tools. However, some of their attempts haven been exceptionally beneficial to English Language Learners, and I’ve written about them. Those include: Google Just Created A New AI Tool That Is Perfect For Teachers Of ELL Newcomers Google Now Makes It Easier To Create Songs With AI – Here’s How I Might Use It With ELLs Google’s New “Learn Your Way” Could Be Very Useful In Making Boring Textbooks More Accessible Google Translate Announced Improvements Today – It Just Keeps Getting Better And, of course, NotebookLM, now renamed Gemini Notebook can be useful to teachers (see The Best Resources For Teachers, Especially Those Teaching ELLs, To Learn About Google’s NotebookLM).
Today, Google announced a new AI tool called Playground. In theory, it lets you tell it the kind of online game you want and it will create it for you. I thought it might be useful to ELLs if they could create a game of their choice to practice whatever English vocabulary or grammar they might be studying at the time (similar to how researchers found that students using AI to create stories of their choice promoted reader engagement – see Who’d Have Thought? Students Who Prompt AI To Create Texts They’re Interested In Are More Likely To Want To Read Them). I tried creating games with specific prompts, like “Create a soccer game to teach English Language Learners the differences between has, have, and had.” It failed miserably. Finally, I just told it “Create a game to teach English Language Learners a game to teach the differences between has, have and had.” Success! Of course, that defeats the whole purpose of having students create a game of their own choice. Plus, there doesn’t seem to be anyway to embed the game. If students needed to go to Google Playground to play it, I’m sure they’d be distracted by all the other games other people had made. Once Google works out all the kinks and makes it more responsive, and once they make the games embeddable, it could be something to try in an English Language Learner classroom. Maybe.      World Food Day Is On Oct. 16th – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources
The United Nations has declared that Oct. 16th is World Food Day. You might be interested in: The Best Sites To Learn About World Food Day The Best Resources For Helping Beginner ELLs Learn About Food The Best Sites For Learning About Nutrition & Food Safety  I’ve Created Five Free Chatbots For Teachers & Others, And Some Have Become Quite Popular – Here Are Links To All Of Them
I have created several free AI chatbots. Each of them draw only from a knowledge based of resources I have vetted, and I am open to hearing suggestions of others who should be added to them. All you have to do is ask them which experts are in their knowledge base, and they will also tell you how to suggest additions. Here they are: Parent Engagement In Schools Expert Companion Classroom Instruction Expert Companion Creating Change Expert Companion Education Policy & Research Expert Companion  It Seems To Me That Anyone Who Says They Are “Data-Driven” Should Read This Article
Being “data driven” seems to be a mantra for many in education. Personally, I’m more for being “data-informed” (see The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven”). And I think you will be, too, if you take the time to read this Harvard Business Review column, Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong.  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: For all the accusations that the right-wing has made about schools being sites of leftist brainwashing, the only way they actually envision education (and by extension ed-tech) is as a system of behavioral engineering and ideological adherence. It’s no surprise then that in all these private tech-heavy ventures, there’s a total rejection of the shared experience of school, in all its messy flaws — school as civics, school as democracy, schools as us. “We’re at the beginning of a redefinition of what an author is,” said Mr. Allary, adding that writers would start using A.I., much as Renaissance artists worked with entire teams of people. This reimagining, he said, would mean doing away with “the romantic image of the writer alone with his pen.” Instead of thinking of teaching as an isolated activity that is “delivered,” we should think of the ability to teach someone an entirely new and novel concept as a superpower. Effective teachers naturally do things when explaining a concept that nonteachers don’t. U.S. teachers, in particular, tend to work both longer hours overall each week and dedicate more time to classroom instruction than the OECD average. Several experts also said that schools should think beyond test scores and focus on making learning less boring and more engaging — less passive listening and memorizing for tests, for example, and more open-ended research and project-based learning. “How do we get an education system that promotes high academic achievement, but is also a place where kids really want to be?” said Chris Torres, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. The effect of high screen time on children is as significant as parental behaviour and premature birth, if not greater, a global study has found. But to improve these schools we cannot succumb to fatalism, throw up our hands, and declare the whole system rotten because it didn’t perfectly serve the needs of our child. The problem is that cultures that celebrate exceptional intelligence eventually begin to mistake intelligence for infallibility. Anything worth remembering came from a person who did not know where she or he was going until arriving. No shortcut gets you there: the process leaves a trace. “I don’t know,” Angel replied before bursting into tears. He stared ahead stoically and continued to cry, eventually saying: “I have no one. I have nothing.”
 More Recent Articles
|
