iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

AI Text Classifier is a new tool from Open AI, the makers of ChatGPT, that will detect whether or not a passage of text has been written with ChatGPT and similar AI writing tools. To use AI Text Classifier you do need to have registered for a free account on Open AI. Once you have an account you can use AI Text Classifier. To use AI Text Classifier you simply have to paste a block of writing (at least 1,000 characters, roughly 175 words) into the text field and click the submit button. AI Text Classifier will then rank the writing as very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely written by AI. For the record, AI Text Classifier classified my article about detecting writing created by AI as very unlikely to have been written by AI. 

A flexible, seven-unit program based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and informational essays.

When you’re the big fish, it’s not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can.

That’s an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it’s wrong to bully others.

The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. “You felt like you were in that story,” she said. “By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn’t good, and why you shouldn’t act this way.”

The puppeteer’s show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students’ compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students’ scores on writing tests.

Putting students in the driver’s seat includes having them assess their writing, which also eases the teacher’s grading load.

ome parents and teachers despair as they witness the erosion of sustained reading, particularly fiction, with today’s screen-obsessed youth. Whether this genuinely heralds an intellectual Armageddon, or merely marks a benign transition into a new phase of the life of the mind, remains to be seen. Whatever the future holds, those who wage a pitched battle under the standard of literacy may find a valuable ally in an old nemesis.

“Dungeons & Dragons is a gateway drug to reading,” said York University professor Ian Slater, who runs Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for schools and events. “Children who do not read regularly or read for pleasure will start reading the gaming books almost as soon as they sit down, and they carry that outside of the game.”

Worldbuilding is no small task, and there are literally thousands of physical and online pages dedicated to the nuances and minutia of bringing the encyclopedic Dungeons & Dragons universe to life. Once kids are bitten by the bug, they spend hours pouring over the reference guides, web pages and forums, and some even turn to fantasy novels. They often don’t realize that an unintended consequence of their game play is that they become better readers and writers. This, however, has not been lost on many parents and educators.

Mention robots to many English teachers and they’ll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there’s a robot at all, it’s located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It’s not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills.

“For someone like me who teaches literature by lots of dead white guys, teaching programming adds relevance to my class,” said Jessica Herring, a high school English teacher at Benton High School in Arkansas. Herring first experimented using Sphero, essentially a programmable ball, when her American literature class was studying the writing of early settlers. Herring pushed the desks back and drew a maze on the floor with tape representing the journey from Europe to the New World. Her students used class iPads and an introductory manually guided app to steer their Spheros through the maze.

Jeopardy! has been on the air, in one form or another, since the 1960s. The modern Alex Trebek-hosted incarnation of the show—whose famous theme song is now in your head (sorry!)—began in 1984 and still airs about 230 episodes every year.

There is an art to a Jeopardy! clue. Its answers-in-search-of-questions exude a certain tone and tenor that’s different from trivia offerings from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, HQ, The Weakest Link, or even a throwback like You Bet Your Life. But the writer’s room is also a factory, one that must churn out 61 clues per episode, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of clues aired during the show’s long run.

Coding and computer science have yet to make their way into every school curriculum in the U.S. But the country isn’t short on initiatives—such as Google’s Code Next program or the White House’s Obama era Computer Science For All campaign—which aim to change that.

And while these programs attempt to arm students will the ability to code, they sometimes overlook a critical skill that developers, computer science scholars and tech recruiters say is key to landing a job in their field: writing.

That you probably use Wikipedia but tell your students not to is why we’re here.

Wikipedia has long been the bane of educators–a poster child for the ‘don’t believe everything you read on the internet because anyone can publish anything’ movement. While making for wonderful subject matter in teaching credibility, authority, source citations, and more, the idea of actually using Wikipedia to teach explicitly teach research for an entire unit is lesson common.

Luckily, the good folks at Wikipedia Education have you covered with the following (very long) unit. In the unit, students will create, edit, expand, and otherwise immerse themselves in the surprisingly complex world of public-knowledge-article editing.

Over the last few days, I’ve tried out dozens of writing platforms, cloud-based and locally installed. I’ve downloaded apps to my devices, played with features, wondered at how each tool might change the how of my work and also the shape of the work itself.
I found a handful of tools I’m going to recommend here. Most work well for collaboration. Not all of them allow for the kind of dynamic synchronous writing sessions that Google Docs enables. What I found is that testing tools and thinking through their features forced me to ask questions about how I do the work of writing and how (and where) I want to do that work going forward. These are in no particular order. (Except you can skip to the end if you want to see the tool I’m using to write this post.)

A flexible, seven-unit program based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and informational essays.

If you’re like me, you’ve done much of your reading and learning through some kind of digital publishing platform—because it’s easy, accessible and often free. Whether text, video or something else entirely, each of these mediums encompasses a form of writing.

The ubiquity and impact of digital writing can’t be ignored. Nearly 70% of Americans get some of their news from social media; world views—impacting presidential campaigns and more—are shaped by these platforms. Yet most high school and middle school students are illiterate when it comes to online texts, and can’t discern real information from fake news.

We can not omit digital literacy from our curriculum.

In addition learning how to read and consume digital texts, our students must know how to author and publish in the digital realm. What’s at stake is our students’ ability to become thoughtful citizens, and their ability to write and publish perspectives and information that will be crucial for their career success. The National Association for Media Literacy in Education has defined media literacy as being able to analyze digital texts as well as create them.

This month I started a maker-enhanced writing workshop with a group of gifted 3rd through 6th grade students. As with all of my lessons, I strive to practice what I preach in my blog posts – being interdisciplinary; using technology to enhance their work; and making, creating, innovating, and inventing.

At last count, there were over 80,000 educational apps available to teachers. There are apps for everything: literacy, STEM, productivity, audiovisual, etc. There are apps which improve accessibility for students with different learning challenges, i.e. text to voice, voice to text, etc.

While many of these may be a dream come true for educators, the dizzying array of choices is also a nightmare. Teachers just don’t have time to filter through thousands of apps to find the one that works best for the needs of their students. To help, we started to create curated lists of the best apps in a variety of education related categories. In this installment, we will present the best grammar and writing apps for middle school students.

Over 50 million k-12 students will go back to school in the US this month. For many of them using a school computer, every word they type will be tracked.

Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like Gaggle, Securly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators.

These Safety Management Platforms (SMPs) use natural-language processing to scan through the millions of words typed on school computers. If a word or phrase might indicate bullying or self-harm behavior, it gets surfaced for a team of humans to review.

In an age of mass school-shootings and increased student suicides, SMPs can play a vital role in preventing harm before it happens. Each of these companies has case studies where an intercepted message helped save lives. But the software also raises ethical concerns about the line between protecting students’ safety and protecting their privacy. 

“A good-faith effort to monitor students keeps raising the bar until you have a sort of surveillance state in the classroom,” Girard Kelly, the director of privacy review at Common Sense Media, a non-profit that promotes internet-safety education for children, told Quartz. “Not only are there metal detectors and cameras in the schools, but now their learning objectives and emails are being tracked too.”

As a fan of the digital writing workshop, I believe that when teaching writing teachers should focus primarily on the process and only secondarily on the product. Such a focus can help students develop the required know-how and skills applicable to different genres of writing. And because technology is almost indispensable in the writing process, I want to draw your attention to these web tools that you can use with your students in different writing stages. I have basically arranged them into the following categories: Digital storytelling tools,  Comic strips tools,  Mind mapping tools, story starters, Writing mechanics (grammar and style), Graphic organizers,  and Tools for publishing students writing.

The best writing apps for iPad, like any concept of ‘best,’ is subjective and further based on need and circumstance.

Are you a poet drafting when inspiration strikes? A student taking notes and writing essays? A novelist that usually uses a desktop, but needs their new iPad Pro to do work on the go?

While the idea of writing more than a few hundred words on an iPad may seem crazy, using the iPad as a powerful portable writing tool allows you to take advantage of inspiration whenever and wherever it strikes. And with iPad screens now approaching 13″ and capable of supporting USB connections to enable standalone keyboards, it’s easier and more comfortable than ever to draft a masterpiece while away from your desk with the help of an app, an iPad, and a good idea.

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

I’ve spent much of the summer working with teachers who are eager to integrate making and writing but uncertain where to begin.

This is what I tell them: 

I tell them that making must elevate writing, otherwise it will merely replace it. And writing matters.

I tell them that we need frameworks that help us see how making and writing can connect inside of our classrooms and workshops. Making writing looks like play, but it’s purposeful. Intentional.

I tell them that we need tools and strategies and protocols that inspire complex, creative, and high quality work.

I tell them that for all of these reasons, planning matters.

Planning really matters. So, this is where my return to blogging will begin.

This school year we added a new feature to our daily lineup of student activities. Called “Picture Prompts,” these short, accessible, image-driven posts feature photographs and illustrations from The Times, and invite a variety of written or spoken responses — from creative storytelling to personal narrative to constructing an argument or analyzing what a work of “op-art” might be saying.

Teachers tell us they use these prompts to inspire student writing — whether in their journals, as a timed opportunity or to practice inferring meaning “without worrying about getting the right or wrong answer.”

They also use them with a variety of learners, from high school to middle or elementary school students to English Language Learners of all ages. As one teacher put it, she uses them “for helping teenagers to start talking to each other.”

Below, we’ve categorized the 160+ prompts we published during the 2016-17 school year based on the type of writing they primarily encourage students to do. All are still open for comment. Plus, we have a lesson plan on how to teach with Picture Prompts, along with other Times images, in case you’re looking for more inspiration.

The best writing apps for iPad, like any concept of ‘best,’ is subjective and further based on need and circumstance.

Are you a poet drafting when inspiration strikes? A student taking notes and writing essays? A novelist that usually uses a desktop, but needs their new iPad Pro to do work on the go?

While the idea of writing more than a few hundred words on an iPad may seem crazy, using the iPad as a powerful portable writing tool allows you to take advantage of inspiration whenever and wherever it strikes. And with iPad screens now approaching 13″ and capable of supporting USB connections to enable standalone keyboards, it’s easier and more comfortable than ever to draft a masterpiece while away from your desk with the help of an app, an iPad, and a good idea.