Ed Tech I’m Using
This week a bunch of people posted some SAMR posters that have been online for a while. Having some free time on my hands as it is the summer vacation, and feeling the need to do something other than procrastinate, I give the SAMR model a little redesign, heavily influenced by E Schein’s Iceberg.
AI I’m Exploring
Recraft.ai is a text-to-vector AI web app. You have to create an account before you start using it, but once you get signed up, it is really simple to create an image, and they are pretty impressive. My favourite part about Recraft is the amount of options that it gives you when creating images. You can change the style from 5 different vector arts to photorealism. Moreover, you can adjust the level of detail, colour palette and level of detail. You can also save your art as SVG, or PNG etc. Check out what I created with the input of “scuba diver, diving below an iceberg’ below and my brief video walkthrough here.
Teaching Practice I’m Trying (or will be when vacation is over)
It is not just any teaching practice, but rather my approach to change that I am considering this month. For this enter Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Although this was initially designed for the adoption of consumers to new technology, I would argue that this can be applied in education as well, along with a bunch of things. For example, when I was trying to persuade faculty to try out a new technique or app, I would target smaller groups first, those I had good relationships with and in turn they have credibility and potential impact upon others. They were my early adopters. I thought that if I could convince them, then the early majority would follow. As is often the case, this sounded a lot easier in my head and didn’t quite pan out how I expected.
Media I’m Consuming
In this Ted talk the speaker advocates for AI personal tutor for every single child in education on the planet. He says, references to Bloom, accelerate the learning of learners. He goes on to show how the new AI bot can help learners with math problems. The bot assumes the role of a personal coach, able to give constructive feedback and coach the learner to the correct answer. There are other different coaches and counsellors. The chat with the bot in Khan. As with the co-founder of Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, Khan also talks about allowing AI to think before it delivers an answer, just like us humans; not to overly anthropomorphism AI though. His reason is that it will enable the AI to become more accurate.
Towards the end, he addresses ethical issues of AI, and how the breakers (shout out to my guy Joel Abercombie and the breakers in A Little Hatred) could take advantage of the opportunities of AI, but that the optimists also need to put in regulations in AI, but to still champion the positive use cases of AI; which is to accelerate HI – human intelligence!
Things I’ve Learned
That inertia is the bedfellow to procrastination. Every day I jump into what I need to do as soon as I awaken, which always starts with coffee!
The String I’m Pulling
Based on my last read, Newport’s ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’, and his amazing Deep Work, I am going back to deliberate practice after getting myself out of being perpetually busy, and not advancing much in any direction. I applied this first to my treading water technique of learning Indonesian, and this is how it was before and after:
- Before = 10 minutes every morning of Duolingo, no reflection or practice, trying to get through as many exercises as possible.
- After = Two sessions of 20 then 15 minutes every day, taking care to read out loud the words from Duolingo and record them in Quizlet so that I can practice in the second session.
Quote, I’m Pondering
“That procrastination inertia’s lazy cousin.” – David H