Talkin' 'Bout Image Generation

📚 Knowledge builders

• Will it save time? → This seems to be the question that Bridget Phillipson is asking of Edtech companies when demonstrating a wave of new AI Tools. This seems to be hint that the focus at the DfE is very much on how adults can utilise the technology, rather than understanding ways we can get pupils using AI directly to support learning. This is a good thing. The linked article mentions some interesting tools that could well save teachers time.

• The Presentation Effect → When a student’s handwriting is messy, their work is often graded more harshly than if it were written neatly—even if the content is exactly the same. A study by Graham et al. (2011) confirmed this, showing that poorly written responses received significantly lower scores (effect size = -1.03). To put this in context, an effect size of -1.03 is considered very large in educational research, meaning handwriting had a major impact on grading—comparable to the difference between an average student and one performing over a full grade level lower. This suggests that handwriting can unfairly influence how a student’s ideas are judged. If AI could bypass this bias

🤖 Industry updates

• 4o Image Generation → Now released to all users across all tiers (yes, events free ones), ChatGPT’s new image generation tool has improved in both the quality and control of the outputs. However, these are still far from perfect as you can see from the self-generated image below. This used the prompt:

  Create image Make an educational graphic that looks at the structure of the earth. The audience is a pupil in year 5 studying geography in England.

  

  I am sure we can all see the problem here.

  I do recommend you look through OpenAI’s highly curated examples in the link above to see the potential though.

• AI Marks Writing → A study by No More Marking tested AI’s ability to assess student writing using Comparative Judgement. AI’s evaluations matched human judgments 81% of the time, close to the 87% agreement rate among teachers. Discrepancies were often due to human error (one interesting example refers to AI marking more accurately due to the presentation effect), suggesting AI could be a reliable and time-saving alternative for writing assessment.

🪧Sponsored Post

Please see our Promise to Subscribers to see how we are making sure sponsored posts are relevant to you.

Introducing Skye: An AI Voice Tutor from Third Space Learning

In every class, there are pupils who need additional maths support to succeed. One-to-one support is one of the best ways to address gaps and help pupils catch up, but workloads are already high, and budgets are stretched thinner than ever.

You may have known that Third Space Learning have offered scheduled online tutoring for some time. Now, Third Space Learning have taken all the data and insights they’ve gained from teaching over 1 million lessons in primary and secondary schools across the country to develop Skye, a new, even more affordable AI voice tutor:

Here is how Third Space Learning describe the core components of Skye:

• Adaptive, dialogue-driven tutoring
  Skye’s been trained to talk to, listen, respond and encourage pupils through shared audio and a shared screen - not just ask questions and mark answers.

• Consistent, scaffolded lessons
  Skye uses the same curriculum of maths lessons as Third Space Learning’s community of tutors, each developed by former teachers to follow an “I do, you do, we do” approach.

• One-to-one support for every pupil that needs it

  With Skye, schools can support as many pupils as needed, with as many sessions as required, for one fixed low cost; schools are currently using Skye for up to 120 sessions per week.

• 90% more affordable

  Typical Skye use in a two-form entry school this equates to just 10% of the cost of other online one to one tutoring providers.

How much does tutoring from Skye cost and how does this compare to other providers?

The average cost of online one to one tutoring from other providers is around £45 per session. Assuming 10 sessions every week, this would cost over £16,000 for the year. With Skye, prices start from £3,500 per year for as many sessions as required by the school.

What safeguarding systems are in place?

Only school staff can schedule Skye sessions, which run under their supervision. Pupils interact with Skye via audio, with only lesson slides as the visual. Strict guardrails keep lessons on track so that pupils cannot derail the session, and Skye flags safeguarding concerns. All sessions are recorded for review and sharing with schools.

How has Skye been trained to teach?

Skye uses proven tutoring techniques, such as motivation, scaffolding, rephrasing, and encouraging verbal reasoning. Lessons follow the CPA (Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract) approach, ensuring gradual concept introduction and addressing misconceptions effectively.

What’s next?

The first newsletter of the month for May and June will look at the Skye platform in more detail to bring you important insights, including:

Does it meet the Teacher Prompt criteria for an Intelligent Tutoring System?

My experiences of using it as a learner and really putting the system through its paces in terms of pedagogy and safeguarding.

✨ Fresh prompts

1. AI Landscaper → Not strictly for educational use, but here’s one way I have utilised the new image generation feature from OpenAI - Ideas for designs. Now I have used the back garden, but you could definitely use this with a classroom or outdoor area to get some initial ideas. I then took the images and asked ChatGPT to come up with some estimates for the work.

   For this to work you need to do the following:

• Upload an image to ChatGPT. This can be done by clicking the ‘+’ button and selecting ‘photo’.

  
  

  The original photo that I used and uploaded to ChatGPT.

• Use ‘Create Image’ mode. To select this mode, type ‘/’ in the context window and select ‘Create Image’.

  

You are a landscaper take with coming up with ideas on how best to utilise this space so it looks nice but that it is low maintenance. The client definitely wants decking that double ups as storage but other than that the client would like to know your thoughts.

The output and the subsequent iterations can be found below.