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Scooped by
Jim Lerman
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AI art is becoming more advanced, and part of that includes becoming more accessible. Midjourney is one such example. This tool generates images based on your text prompts through the power of AI and machine learning.
This is similar to other AI art generators such as OpenAI's DALL-E. Once you really know how to use Midjourney, you'll have no trouble creating some truly unique pieces of art.
In a profession at times encumbered by rigidity and repetition, discovering whatever small changes the school made over the holidays was a momentary relief of excitement. A swipe card access system at the main foyer – wow! The replenished stationery cupboard – look at all those colours!
Amid catching up with my colleagues to hear their embarrassing holiday mishaps, and welcoming the latest recruits before students barge back into our classrooms later in the week, those first few days created the unfamiliar yet fleeting atmosphere of newness.
This year, however, the feeling of newness will hit fever pitch for schools across the country. ChatGPT, a freely accessible AI chatbot designed to generate human-like responses to virtually any question, is on the brink of shaking up almost every aspect of the teaching and learning lifecycle, and will be on the lips of the majority of educators and principals from day one.
Via Edumorfosis, Jim Lerman
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Scooped by
Jim Lerman
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Is there anything artificial intelligence can't do? It seems like every month, there's a mesmerizing new technological breakthrough. The trending breakthrough is how AI can now take a sentence you type and turn it into a painting or an image. And you can try it right now with these free apps.
Google recently announced its Imagen AI tool that takes simple sentences and turns them into photorealistic graphic designs. It's scary-cool how good the pictures look. You can try a small demo on their website, but you would only be choosing from preset prompts already fed by Google. If you want to create AI art from your writing, here are some of the best free AI text-to-image generators.
If you’re like most people, you use your smartphone as your primary camera, and there’s no shame in that. Many smartphones these days take better photos than entry-level digital cameras from just a few years ago.
Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement regarding the picture quality coming out of your phone, especially if you plan on sharing photos with family and friends or posting them on your social media accounts.
Here are 11 ways to ensure that the photos you take using your smartphone camera turn out clean, crisp, and sharp.
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Scooped by
Jim Lerman
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No matter how you search Google, you always get to the same place. And if the standard search results page isn't doing it for you, you're out of luck. Unless you're using these extensions designed for improving your search.
The following Chrome extensions make Google's search capabilities more powerful in a variety of ways. Some give you better results. Others let you navigate more quickly to what you're looking for.
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Scooped by
Jim Lerman
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"Inspired by lighthearted New York Times features from across sections, these exercises can help students get to know one another."
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Scooped by
Jim Lerman
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When considering whether a lesson qualifies as STEM vs. STEAM vs. Arts Integration, it can seem a little overwhelming. Each approach has similarities, and often, these similarities are enough to use these terms interchangeably. However, each of these methods has its own set of characteristics and purposes for use. In this short guide, we’ll share how each method approaches a set of foundational elements, as well as the similarities and differences between each method.
Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Monet’s Water Lilies. These well-known works of art use visual design principles that contribute to the viewer’s deep feelings, sense of cohesion, and understanding of the dynamics depicted. Learning and development professionals, too, can use such principles to help learners remember key points, empathize, and stay engaged with the training.
Via EDTECH@UTRGV, michel verstrepen, Jim Lerman
Hundreds of thousands of students from around the world have participated in our contests over the 13 years we’ve been running them, creating podcasts, writing editorials, making videos, reviewing arts and culture, composing narratives, investigating scientific phenomena, and more.
Teachers tell us they value these challenges because they invite students to take the skills they learn in school and use them to create for an authentic audience. Students tell us they like the variety of ways they can express themselves — and, of course, the confidence boost when they are recognized for their efforts. For us, these contests deepen our daily mission: to help teenagers engage with what’s happening in the world, and prove to them that their voices and ideas matter.
But every year we rethink our calendar to keep it fresh. We try to create a balance that responds to the needs of our audience, but also promotes a range of expression, appeals to a broad group of students, and draws inspiration from features across The Times.
Via Jim Lerman
Integrating SEL Skills into an Arts-Integrated Lesson
It is a challenge to integrate two subject areas, much less add a third! To help, next, you’ll find an example of how you might incorporate a social skill with an arts-integrated ELA lesson.
Identifying and naming emotions is a crucial social skill to teach. Some students have trouble self-regulating because they haven’t learned strategies for doing so. Some aren’t able to recognize or name emotions, which makes it extra hard. In turn, this makes it difficult to respond appropriately to others’ emotions.
This is a perfect place to integrate the arts. The following lesson is an example that integrates the arts, social skills, and ELA. It fits well during a morning meeting or as a language arts lesson. And it will assist in creating that positive classroom culture.
Via Jim Lerman
988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
On July 16, 2022, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) transitioned from its previous 10-digit phone number to just calling or texting "9-8-8.” When you do, at the other end of the Lifeline is a network of 200+ independent crisis centers across the United States and its territories. These centers are staffed by trained crisis counselors who are supervised during every shift by a licensed mental-health professional. They adhere to evidence-based protocols to de-escalate feelings of crisis. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline also features national back-up centers, Spanish language centers, and centers answering chats and texts.
Via Jim Lerman
Teaching children in a way that encourages them to empathise with others measurably improves their creativity, and could potentially lead to several other beneficial learning outcomes, new research suggests.
The findings are from a year-long University of Cambridge study with Design and Technology (D&T) year 9 pupils (ages 13 to 14) at two inner London schools. Pupils at one school spent the year following curriculum-prescribed lessons, while the other group's D&T lessons used a set of engineering design thinking tools which aim to foster students' ability to think creatively and to engender empathy, while solving real-world problems.
Both sets of pupils were assessed for creativity at both the start and end of the school year using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: a well-established psychometric test.
The results showed a statistically significant increase in creativity among pupils at the intervention school, where the thinking tools were used. At the start of the year, the creativity scores of pupils in the control school, which followed the standard curriculum, were 11% higher than those at the intervention school. By the end, however, the situation had completely changed: creativity scores among the intervention group were 78% higher than the control group
Via Edwin Rutsch
Jim Lerman's insight: Recommendations from one of the best sources of free help for educators, Richard Byrne. You can count on him for quality selections and excellent video tutorials. Mind Maps are outstanding tools to support creative work by individuals or groups.
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The truth is, if leveraged well, AI has the potential to greatly enhance students’ abilities to think critically and expand their soft skills. And for skeptics who are worried kids will stop learning basic skills, avoid practicing, and forget general facts if they can rely on an AI to answer for them, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan posit in their self-determination theory that humans are intrinsically driven by autonomy, relatedness, and competence—that is, they will continue to learn regardless of any shortcuts thrown their way. The creation of Wikipedia is a great example. We didn’t stop learning history or science just because we could now quickly look up dates and formulas online. Instead, we simply gained an additional resource to help us fact-check and facilitate learning.
Via Edumorfosis, Jim Lerman
Palette.fm is a free artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can turn black-and-white photos into color. Thanks to machine learning, it can identify what is in an image and take a good guess at applying the right color. If you've never colorized black-and-white photos before, the results will blow you away!
Unlike other AI colorizer tools, the image can be fine-tuned using a text prompt or by selecting a different color palette. If you have some old black-and-white family photos, this is how you can bring them to life in a matter of minutes.
Via Jim Lerman
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Scooped by
Jim Lerman
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o celebrate the season, we’ve rounded up 25 haunting photos and illustrations from around The New York Times that you can use as prompts to write your own terrifying tales. Choose an image and then use your imagination to write a short story or a poem inspired by it — or tell us about a memory from your own life that the picture makes you think of.
You can use these images however you like, but if you need more guidance, here are four prompts, as well as articles with advice from horror writers and experts, to get you started:
Make new connections and strengthen your current relationships with these apps designed to spark engaging conversations. Whether you need to get the discussion going on a Zoom call or liven up your dinner party, great conversation starters are often needed.
From icebreakers to meaningful discussions, these apps give you something to chat about. You might spark a new friendship or learn something new about someone you've known forever. Jim Lerman's insight: Many of these are good for writing prompts as well.
Via Jim Lerman
This week we’ve rounded up 445 prompts for narrative and personal writing on everything from family, friendships and growing up to gender, spirituality, money, school, sports, social media, travel, dating, food, health and more. We hope they inspire students, whether they’re entering our new Tiny Memoir Contest later this month or just want to improve their writing skills. Like all our Student Opinion questions, each links to a related Times article, which is free to read if you access it from our site.
Via Jim Lerman
How do you know if your school is ready for STEAM? Many K-12 schools are making the shift from STEM to STEAM, citing the many benefits of integrating the arts across content areas. But this approach is more than simply adding creative activities or maker spaces to your program.
As with any initiative, there are many moving parts to STEAM education. Each school brings unique assets to the approach, including but not limited to:
Background knowledge in STEAM methods and strategies
Tools and resources that already exist or have been purchased
Partnerships with local community members and organizations
Buy-in from teachers, students, and parents
Previous programs that may support a shift to STEAM
Passionate and strategic leadership for STEAM implementation
Via Jim Lerman
When starting a STEAM program, there’s so much to consider as a leader. As with any other initiative, it can feel overwhelming at first when you think of everything that needs to be done. Deciding which tasks to tackle first becomes both daunting and a necessity.
Often, we see schools who follow one of two approaches: all or nothing. Schools either go all-in and try to do everything at once, or they stall out when they look at what needs to be addressed and don’t gain any forward traction.
To help make this a bit easier, we’ve outlined 6 elements for success when starting a STEAM program. These elements break down the biggest considerations and then outline specific tasks to be done within each. You can take these elements one at a time for a slower rollout, or layer them for a faster but more comprehensive approach.
Podcasts are definitely a hot ticket item right now. It seems like everyone has a favorite podcast to listen to, or even podcast they produce! Why not bring this medium into the classroom this year? In this video, Susan Riley walks you through several podcast ideas for the classroom that will enhance your curriculum and get students some hands-on podcasting experiences. For more extensive details on how to produce a podcast, be sure to check out this podcasting guide for teachers.
Via Jim Lerman
"Learn how to use these fun, free digital storytelling tools with students in all elementary grades. Bonus: No student account creation is required! ..."
Via Leona Ungerer, Jim Lerman
Creativity is a major source of innovation, growth, adaptability, and psychological resilience, making it a top priority of governments, global corporations, educational institutions, and other organizations that collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually into training. The current foundation of creativity training is the technique known as divergent thinking; yet for decades, concerns have been raised about the adequacy of divergent thinking: it is incongruent with the creative processes of children and most adult creatives, and it has failed to yield expected downstream results in creative production. In this article, we present an alternative approach to creativity training, based in neural processes different from those involved in divergent thinking and drawing upon a previously unused resource for creativity research: narrative theory. We outline a narrative theory of creativity training; illustrate with examples of training and assessment from our ongoing work with the U.S. Department of Defense, Fortune 50 companies, and graduate and professional schools; and explain how the theory can help fill prominent lacunae and gaps in existing creativity research, including the creativity of children, the psychological mechanisms of scientific and technological innovation, and the failure of computer artificial intelligence to replicate human creativity. Jim Lerman's insight: This is dense, but vital information.
Via Jim Lerman
No more actors and cameras - make AI spokesperson video by clicking & typing! TalkingAvatar is the cutting-edge no-barrier video creation platform empowering anyone to make professional spokesperson videos with diverse choices of AI avatars. via Nik Peachey
Via Nik Peachey, Jim Lerman
Helen Demetriou obtained her PhD in developmental psychology from the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London in 1998, where she also worked at the Centre for Social, Genetic and Developmental Research. Since then, she has worked at the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge as Research and Teaching Associate. Helen is the author of, Empathy, Emotion and Education. She has performed many studies about empathy, creativity and education, including the recent study, Empathy is the mother of invention: emotion and cognition for creativity in the classroom.
"we argue that a very important aspect that influences invention and creativity is the empathy factor... Such exploration and immersion through perceptual openness, role-taking and flexible ego-control characteristic of empathy correlate and lead to creativity and thence to constructive evaluative reflection: explore, create, evaluate.
Empathy and open-mindedness in the real world: all these form the vital ingredients for the creative process to thrive and for encouraging the designers of tomorrow."
Via Edwin Rutsch
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