Happy 2024!

Author

Neil Almond
January 02, 2024

Happy 2024 human, For some, this was the first day back - we salute you going back so early and hope that it was not a terrible first day back. 2024 is going to be another big year for AI, so grab some snacks and catch up on what happened last week in AI and enjoy a new prompt.

Knowledge builders 📚

  • Prefix Prompts → Prefix prompts are prompts that require the language model to generate a textual string by continuing a given input and a prefix string. For example, if the input is “What is the capital of France?” and the prefix is "The answer is ", the language model should generate “The answer is Paris.” as the output.

Industry updates 🤖

  • Microsoft Copilot launches on App Stores near you → Previously only accessible through the Edge browser, you can now download Microsoft Copilot as a standalone app for iOS and Android. Just search you App Store of choice for ‘Microsoft Copilot’. Remember this gives you access to DALLE-3 and GPT4 models from OpenAI for FREE!

  • New York Time Sues Microsoft and Open AI → Data is king in the AI world, and an epic David-vs-Goliath battle is about to commence. The short of it is that to train the Large Language Model (LMM) open AI used all available data from the internet without the permission of the companies that created that data in the first place. The New York Times believes that they should be paid for having their data as part of the LMM’s training data, but OpenAI believes that as it is freely available on the internet, that it has done nothing wrong.

Who do you think is in the right over the use of the data?

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Tools 🛠️

  1. Microsoft Reading Progress → Teachers can set texts for that can be used to measure pupils' decoding accuracy, fluency and expression. If you wanted to get a snap shot of the reading fluency of pupils in your school, this is the tool to help you do that. It is a free within Microsoft Teams for Educators.

  2. PowerPoint Speaker Coach → Looking to improve the delivery of some instructions to your class? Want to nail that complex explanation while images to support learning at the right time? Speaker Coach is built into PowerPoint and can help you with these and more. Best of all? Any license has this built in!

Zooming in 🔬 

🎙️ How I is AI? → The Infinite Monkey Cage team are joined by guests as they discuss the pros and cons of AI and try to answer the question of ‘just how intelligent is it, anyway?’

📑 Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts → Perhaps a New Year’s resolution for 2024 is to think about how your students could use AI sensibly and in a way that will support what we know about the learning process, rather than using it to simply find the answers. This paper provides 7 examples of how pupils could utilise AI to support learning.

Fresh prompts ✨

  1. Professional Development Brain Storm → I would never advocate using this if you had zero knowledge about a topic, but sometimes you just need a starting point to go from. If you need to brain storm some ideas for future PD, try this.

    You are an expert in the delivery of planning and delivering professional development that aligns with the EEFs Effective Professional development guidance. Generate ideas for structuring professional development on the topic of [topic]. There should be a focus on: [chosen focus]. The audience is [audience]. There should be time built in for deliberate practice at the end. Provide links for further reading where relevant. Use in Copilot. 

You are an expert in the delivery of planning and delivering  professional development that aligns with the EEFs Effective Professional development guidance. Generate  ideas for structuring professional development on the topic of interleaving to support retention. There should be a focus on: what interleaving is and the evidence behind it, why teachers should be using it and some examples across multiple subjects. The audience is  secondary teachers. There should be time for deliberate practice at the end.

Here is the output.

Hello, this is Bing. I’m happy to help you with your request. Here are some ideas for structuring professional development on the topic of interleaving:

1. Introduction (15 minutes)

  • Welcome and overview of the session.

  • Brief introduction to the concept of interleaving and its benefits for learning and retention.

2. Understanding Interleaving (30 minutes)

  • Detailed explanation of what interleaving is and how it differs from blocked practice.

  • Discuss the cognitive science behind interleaving and how it helps learners to discriminate between similar concepts and problems.

  • Present evidence from research studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of interleaving in various domains, such as mathematics, history, and language learning.

3. Importance of Interleaving (20 minutes)

  • Discuss why teachers should incorporate interleaving into their teaching practices and curriculum design.

  • Highlight the advantages of interleaving for long-term retention, transfer of skills, and metacognition.

  • Discuss potential challenges and misconceptions about interleaving and how to overcome them.

4. Interleaving in Practice (45 minutes)

  • Provide examples of how interleaving can be implemented in different subjects and topics, such as:

    • Maths: Instead of focusing on one type of problem or skill in a session, mix different types of problems or skills that require different strategies or calculations.

    • History: Instead of teaching the history of one country or region in a block, interleave the history of different countries or regions that share common themes or events.

    • English: Instead of teaching one grammar rule or vocabulary topic in a session, mix different grammar rules or vocabulary topics that are related or contrasted.

  • Discuss how to plan lessons using interleaving and how to manage the pacing and difficulty of lessons.

5. Deliberate Practice (60 minutes)

  • Participants work in subject-specific groups to design a lesson plan that incorporates interleaving.

  • Each group presents their lesson plan and receives feedback from the other participants and the facilitator.

6. Conclusion (10 minutes)

  • Recap the main points from the session.

  • Discuss next steps and how teachers can start to implement interleaving in their classrooms.

  • Q&A and session evaluation.

For further reading on interleaving, you can check out the following links:

Have a great rest of the week back. We are hoping to have some exciting updates on TeacherPrompts to share with you soon!

Mr A 🦾