Ask Jee... Jarvis

👋 human,

I know it is half-term for many of you, so let’s get straight to it!

📚 Knowledge builders

• NotebookLM Tutorial → I know that Google’s NotebookLM has been popular in the education circles thanks to Peps Mccrea and Craig Barton sharing their use on X. There is a useful YouTube video here that goes through its uses. It covers the following areas:

1. Getting Started with NotebookLM

2. Analysing PDFs

3. Audio Overviews

4. Formatting Content

5. Generating Social Media Posts

6. Improving Technical Guidance

7. Improving Lectures.

My two cents on NotebookLM are that as a research tool it acts as a good screener to see what you may want to look at in more detail. The podcast function, while an excellent demo, is still capable of hallucinating. In the context of NotebookLM, this means that it can still provide incorrect information or it makes decisions to highlight/reference aspects that it thinks are important and may not be, while missing out on details that are important.

A solid use case for it would be to upload relevant school policies so that you can interrogate those, rather than manually searching through them individually.

🤖 Industry updates

• Project Jarvis → Google is rumoured to be working on an AI project called Jarvis (of Iron Man fame) to help out with day-to-day tasks. Its USP, similar to the announcement from Anthropic regarding agents, is that this AI will be able to directly control computer software by itself. This could open up a load of automations for teachers and school leaders as you could ask ‘Jarvis’ to complete tasks that you would use a browser to complete. For example, I could, theoretically, ask it to assign a certain quiz to a particular class on the Carousel Learning platform instead of having to do it myself. Leaders could use it to navigate the government gateway to get results when they open and begin an analysis of these.

• Man jailed for Indecent AI image creation → I was hesitant to include this, but in the end I felt that it is worth bringing this to the attention of teachers and leaders on the grounds of safeguarding. While we can embrace the use of AI to support the work that we do, it would irresponsible to ignore the potential risks that this new technology comes with.

  In a first of its kind, a man in the UK has been jailed for using GenAI software (Dax 3D) to create indecent images of children. This particular piece of software did not contain any guardrails (instructions provided by the software developer to tell the AI what to do and, crucially, what not to do) which is why he was able to create the images.

  We know pupils will use AI, and we also know that adolescents will experiment with this technology without considering the repercussions. I do not imagine it will be long until the media reports of pupils using this software to create inappropriate images of classmates or teachers under the guise of it being a ‘prank’. Leaders should consider what they can put in place to ensure pupils are aware of the legality of such situations and update behaviour, e-safety and any AI policies accordingly so that all stakeholders are clear what to do should this situation occur in schools.

Wishing those on half-term a good rest and those that are back a good first week. T

hanks for reading and keep on prompting! Mr A 🦾