Hello. Operator? Yes, I'll have the...

Afternoon, human,

If you have seen the news, you’ll know that the AI race is certainly heating up. Dive in to find out why this is the case so you can casually mention it to your colleagues, particularly those involved in IT or teaching computing…

📚 Knowledge builders

• Canvas → Unlocking the Power of ChatGPT’s Canvas for Teaching and Learning

  OpenAI has introduced a powerful new feature in ChatGPT called Canvas, designed to enhance writing and coding collaboration. Unlike the standard chat interface, Canvas provides a structured editing space where users can draft, refine, and develop text or code interactively with ChatGPT. This makes it particularly valuable for educators looking to streamline lesson planning, provide feedback on student work, and create engaging learning resources.

  Where to Find Canvas

  Canvas is accessible within ChatGPT when using GPT-4o. To activate it:

  • Open ChatGPT and ensure GPT-4o is selected.

  • Start a writing or coding task.

  • Click on the ‘Open in Canvas’ option, which launches a dedicated editing workspace alongside the chat.

This split-screen approach allows for real-time refinement, making it easier to collaborate on structured content such as lesson plans, assessment materials, or admin work such as policy creation.

Canvas has a few tools that built into the Canvas user interface that are design to perform quick actions without having to go back and edit the prompt.

Some of these are definitely more useful than others for teachers. From the top we have the following actions:

1. Add emoji - takes what is written and adds emoji to each main point, change words for emoji or mark sections.

2. Final polish - A final look over to check for any glaring errors

3. Reading level - Probably the most useful for educators. Clicking this provides a scale from Kindergarten to Graduate and you can fine tune the text in Canvas to a rough stage. From my experience giving it lexile codes works better.

4. Adjust length - Provides a scale from longest to shortest to go into more detail on the topic.

Here is an example of changing those parameters to longest and graduate level.

How Teachers Can Use Canvas in Education

Canvas provides a structured space to co-develop content, making it ideal for lesson planning, resource creation, and assessment design. Here’s a practical example:

• Lesson Planning: A teacher planning a lesson on fractions can draft an initial outline in Canvas. ChatGPT can then provide additional examples, suggest activities, or refine explanations to ensure clarity and engagement.

• Assessment Design: Teachers can draft quiz questions or problem sets, asking ChatGPT to review them for difficulty level, clarity, or alignment with learning objectives.

• Report Writing: When writing student reports or feedback, teachers can use Canvas to refine phrasing, ensuring constructive and personalised feedback. The obvious caveats around being mindful around student data apply here.

🤖 Industry updates

• The Agents are Coming → I talked about how the next big thing for AI is agents. This is when you can use AI tools to stitch multiple actions together which can then be completed independently of you, including using web browsers to complete actions. OpenAI introduced Operator over the last week, and it is the beginning of that process. I strongly suggest you watch the first 6 minutes where an employee books a table at a restaurant just by typing into ChatGPT.

Things like getting certain reports from your MIS or adding house points/merits could soon be as simple as asking an ‘Operator’ to do those for you while you crack on with something else.

•  $600 Billion → A number that Dr. Evil could only dream of… With the launch of DeepSeek, an open source LLM from China, NVIDIA lost $600 Billion in market cap. Why? Well there model is just as good as those models from OpenAI/Google, but at a fraction at the cost due to them focusing on optimisations rather than pure compute power.

✨ Fresh prompts

1. Presentation support → We know that supporting explanations with appropriate imagery can support learning, but this only works when the images and the explanations complement each other. Sometimes that can be tricky, particularly for novice teachers who need to master the explanation, proceed to the next slide/animation and monitor pupils. I have found that being explicit in the notes of slide decks when to move on has really helped me make sure that the words and images I present to students really to match up.

You are an expert in explaining educational content utilising dual coding theory. In this instance you are teaching a group of [10 year olds] about [the Tudors]. The explanation is around [the Tudor family king]. This is an overview so we do not need lots of detail. In this case, it is when the kings were born or became king and when the Queens became queen and when they died and how, and if they had children.You have decided to use a family tree to help support your explanation to make the relationship between the people really clear. The screenshot is the complete family tree, but you are going to built it up branch by branch. Build your explanation up bit by bit. Write *CLICK* to direct the teacher when they should begin the animation.

As ever, thanks for reading and keep on prompting! Mr A 🦾