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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles
Google Uses Its AI To Create Its Most Elaborate Relatively Useless Tool Yet
Google has been throwing gobs of AI features against the wall to see which would stick. Only a very few have. Their latest, Project Genie, is more than likely to join its long list of failures. It’s cool-sounding and looking, I’ll give them that – you can create your own interactive “world” with it. I might be missing something but, really, what value does it create? Can it be anything but an enormous time-suck? Do better, Google….      Sorry, I Had To Turn-Off Blog Comments Because Of AI-Powered Spam pixelcreatures / Pixabay
Alas, after seventeen years of accepting reader comments on this blog, AI-powered bots overpowered Edublogs spam filter and started leaving countless spam comments. So, I had to shut comments down – at least for now. However, there are many other ways to contact me, and you can still leave comments on social media where I share my posts.  Daylight Saving Time Begins On March 8th – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources congerdesign / Pixabay
You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning About Daylight Saving Time.  This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues
Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in seeing all my “Best” lists related to education policy here): How Texas School Vouchers Could Make Child Care More Affordable is from The NY Times.
I’m adding this next post to No, Virginia, It Appears That There May Not Be Any Miracles In Education, Including In Mississippi:
 
 
 Online Game Leaderboards & Zero Sum Thinking
Last September, I published a post about a study finding harmful student effects when playing online games showing “leaderboards” – the public ranking of where students stood (see This Research On “Leaderboards” Shows Why Blooket Is Now My Favorite Online Learning Game). I think that’s a good point, and is why I generally either had students play in groups or used tools like Blooket that allow players to “steal” points from others. Then, the public ranking has little to do with the number of questions answered correctly. Educator Peps Mccrea wrote a post about the same study. In it, he makes an interesting point that I hadn’t thought of – that leaderboards promote the idea of “zero-sum” games (I’ve written about this overall topic at The Dangers Of “Zero Sum Thinking” In The World, Including In Schools). He suggests these three alternatives: Track Personal Bests: Just as runners track their best times, have students track streaks of focused work, words written, or problems solved correctly. Highlight Then vs Now: Have students physically place a piece of work from three months ago next to a current piece to visualise their growth. Gap-Based Feedback: Focus on the distance travelled, not the position in the pack. Point out concrete improvements since the last piece of work.
These tend to promote the idea of “temporal comparisons,” which I write about in my book, The Student Motivation Handbook. Here’s a tweet I sent out about it during a bookchat soon have it was published:
All of these are good points to keep in mind.  More Recent Articles
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