🎼 You Can Learn Your Way (Learn Your Own Way)!

Author

Neil Almond
September 23rd, 2025

Hey human,

What’s been happening in education / AI this week:

📚 AI+education news

  • Oxford University Gives Students Access to ChatGPT Edu > The university aims to leverage AI to enhance research, innovation, and education. Additionally, the university will offer training on ethical AI usage and critical thinking to ensure responsible application.

  • Can AI Help With Formative Assessment? > Professor Becky Allen has summarised her researchED talk on whether AI can help with formative assessment. My favourite part is the prompt that she used and shared.

  • Learn Your Way > This is Google’s attempt at creating personalised digital textbooks based on AI and Google’s pedagogical principles: Inspire Active Learning, Manage Cognitive Load, Adapt to Learner, Stimulate Curiosity and Deepen Metacognition. They tested their textbook against a regular pdf textbook in a randomly controlled study of 15-year-olds. In both the immediate and retention assessment those that used the Learn Your Way textbook performed better than the control. There is a technical paper here and an example of an output here.

🌍 Wider AI updates

  • First Use of AI by a Judge Recorded > Tax expert, Dan Neidle, believes that this case is the first of a judge using AI in an English Court. Scroll down to point 48 to see how it was used.

  • Perplexity Email Assistant > I read a Twitter thread by Sam Crome about the ‘noise’ a headteacher gets in terms of the emails that they receive on a daily basis. Then I saw that Perplexity have launched an email assistant which prioritises emails, helps schedule meetings and even drafts replies based on your style. So perhaps, AI can help heads get through all the noise.

  • Make AI Work for You > How to Talk to Robots and BBC studios are looking for people to trial a bootcamp concept for a new TV format around AI use. There are dates in Cambridge, London and Manchester if you are interested.

🎯Prompt

  • What would I do as Ed Sec? Here is a fun activity to use with the LLM that you think knows you the best.

Based on what you know about me, imagine I was made Secretary of Education for the UK government. What would my top 5 initiatives be?

Here are my 5:

  1. Curriculum reform

  2. A Framework to be a CPD provider for schools

  3. Scale Intelligent Tutoring Systems

  4. Early Career Teacher Excellence Programme

  5. Motivation, Well-being and Behaviour Hubs.

Till next week.

Mr A 🦾

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