There's a new AI ChatBot on the block... and its name is Grok

Hey human, our first newsletter of November also co-insides with everyone now being back at school. I hope that these updates and tips will give you something to try this half term. As it is the first newsletter of the month, we are spotlighting a research paper, podcast and some new tools in addition to the weekly good stuff, so load up your favourite ChatBot and give give those prompts a try!

Knowledge builders 📚

• Reinforcement Learning → Machine learning paradigm where an agent interacts with an environment, taking actions (through trial and error) to maximise a cumulative reward.

• Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) → A class of neural networks used in machine learning to generate new data samples that are similar to the trained dataset

Industry updates 🤖

• X’s Grok is here → Elon Must has begun to role out Grok, X’s AI ‘humorous’ ChatBot. Its USP is that it has been tuned to be a tad sassy in its replies, and it can access live data/posts from X.

• OpenAI Dev Day 2023 → OpenAI hosted its first developer conferences in SanFran yesterday. Over 2 million developers are using GPT-4, GPT-3.5, DALL·E, and this conference will inform them of the latest features that are being built into these tools.

Tools 🛠️

1. Pedagogical - For me the stand out feature is its ability to turn text into a mind map or flow chart. While far from perfect, not many tools are creating diagrams such as this that can be used in the classroom.

2. Microsoft Paint → One for those that has Windows 11. Microsoft Paint has been injected with some AI smarts curtesy of OpenAI’s DALL-E. You can now use Paint Cocreator to generate AI art, and isolate the subject from the background. Common tasks that previously would require Photoshop.

Zooming in 🔬 

🎙️ Convince Me AI has a place in Education - I join Kieran Mackle, host of Thinking Deeply about Primary Education, to persuade him that AI does have a place in education and will be useful for teachers.

📑Practical and Ethical Challenges of Large Language Models in Education: A Systematic Scoping Review - Research has explored using large language models to automate educational tasks, but practical and ethical concerns exist regarding the readiness and implications of these AI innovations. More open, transparent, and human-centred development is needed to create ethical innovations that support teaching and learning.

Fresh prompts ✨

1. Foundation level: Infinite Maps → Finding appropriate maps when I was teaching geography has always been a pain, but Bing does a decent job of creating outline maps of individual countries. The deep structure of the prompt is: Generate a simple line drawing of the outline of [insert country].

Generate a simple line drawing of the outline of [the United Kingdom].

Here is what that map looks like:

2. Expert level:  Resource Curation → When I began teaching and my subject knowledge wasn’t strong, I would spend ages looking across websites for a variety for appropriate resources. Now Chat-GPT can create a table of different types of resources that are appropriate to use with pupils, while also getting some subject knowledge enhancers for me as the teacher. The deep structure of the prompt looks like this.

   You are a lesson design expert. Generate a list of online resources for teaching the [concept] for pupils who are in [year group and nationality]. [Detail about pupils prior experience of the concept]. Create a table that uses these headings: educational websites, articles, online videos. One additional heading should 'subject knowledge'. This should provide some articles that are appropriate to the teacher to read to increase their subject knowledge.

You are a lesson design expert. Generate a list of online resources for teaching the [periodic table of elements]for pupils who are in [Year 7 in England]. [It is the first time that they will be formally learning this, so keep this in mind when you are curating these resources]. Create a table that uses these headings: educational websites, articles, online videos. One additional heading should 'subject knowledge'. This should provide some articles that are appropriate to the teacher to read to increase their subject knowledge.

The key thing here is not that these resources will be perfect, but that through one prompt I have saved some time in collating these resources into one place. Here is a sample of the output:

We would love to hear what you are prompting. Any prompts that you think everyone needs to know about? Tweaked a previous prompt to perfection for your context? We want to hear about it. Reply to this email or post it on X (Twitter) using #TeacherPrompts.

Keep on Prompting!

Mr A 🦾