Here's to 2025!

Neil Almond
December 31, 2024

Hello human,

If you unwrapped an Apple device at Christmas, I hope you found the info on Apple Intelligence useful! It is still the holidays here, so there are just some quick updates from me today. Normal service resumes next week.

📚 Knowledge builders

9,000 words → In an article for School Week, Oak National CEO, Matt Hood, reminds us to be cautious of off the shelf LLM AI tools. Given that Oak National have launched an AI tool called Aila recently, his caution of generic tools make sense. However, an interesting tidbit from the article is that the underlying system prompt for Aila is over 9,000 words long. The project is open source so other developers can use the code.

🤖 Industry updates

Arizona’s AI public School → The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools has given the go ahead for a virtual charter school for students between fourth and eighth grade (that’s upper key stage 2 to the end of Year 9 for us Brits). The academic side will last for 2 hours and be taught using AI and then teachers will teach life skills in the afternoon. A video about the model can be found here. Needless to say, I am hugely sceptical about such endeavours and struggle with the ethical side of such experiments.
No More Marking Feedback → We know that No More Marking have done a bit of a 180 on the use of AI, which I think is commendable. Daisy Christodoulou, the Director of Education, has given a sneak peak at what the feedback that their AI/human hybrid feedback tool will provide.

Remember, they are running a free demo webinar on January 20th for those interested.

✨ Fresh prompts

EEF Experiments → You may remember a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the EEF had recently conducted a small trial on the use of Chat GPT in schools. Linked in that update was the guide that the teachers received with some of the example prompts. I thought I would share some of those here for readers who missed it. I would appreciate your thoughts on the quality of the output.

I am teaching trigonometry to Year 11 students. Can you provide a worked example, finding the length of a side of a triangle, using SOH CAH TOA, explaining each step in detail? Can you include a real-life example which will be relevant to this group, to help put it into context?

Here is an example of the output.

Real-Life Context: Measuring the Height of a Tree

Imagine you're standing 15 meters away from a tree, and you want to find its height. You use a clinometer to measure the angle of elevation from the ground to the top of the tree, which is 40°. How tall is the tree? (Assume the ground is level.)

Why This Example is Relevant

Year 11 students might encounter similar tasks in geography fieldwork, such as measuring the height of objects in their environment, or in practical real-world situations involving measurements that are otherwise difficult to make directly. Linking this to an outdoor scenario they might experience makes the learning more engaging and memorable.

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