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Celebrate Easter and transform the world of storytelling for your students by turning their written stories into vivid, beautiful pictures. Even handwritten stories!
The Imaginator...
🎨 Inspires Creativity: encourages students to write more by visualising their stories.
💡 Enhances Learning: sparks rich conversations about language and storytelling techniques.
🚀 Builds Confidence: lets students see the power of their words in creating visual narratives.
Here’s a story from Alex (12) to celebrate Easter… and its Imaginator picture…
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This week for The AI Educator:
This coming week is mostly a planning and writing week, although on Wednesday I will be jumping on a live FETC webinar with Jenn Womble and Monica Burns to discuss The Future of Assessment Leveraging Artificial Intelligence.
What was said last week about The AI Educator:
"An amazing talk from Dan today at our Colchester Institute AI conference. Thanks for sharing your valuable knowledge." Suzanne, Colchester Institute, March 28 2024.
I used to think being a great teacher meant helping students ace exams.
After all, that is the biggest impact I could have on the rest of their lives, right?
I was wrong.
Exams are an end point assessment. So we have set ourselves up with an A to B process.
We need students to leave us at point B, being able to write the correct answers into a paper booklet.
I want to start by saying that, obviously, there are some schools and teachers who go way beyond this.
However, the pressures of the system plus low budgets means that many schools have no choice but to put all their resources into getting from A to B. Getting students to a point where they can answer a set of arbitrary questions correctly.
I don't necessarily blame the individual schools. This is the competition they have been placed in by the system. A decent result in that competition means survival.
But AI could help change this, if we let it.
The Hidden Curriculum
To explore how AI could change the system, I am drawn to John Taylor Gatto's work.
Gatto was a New York schoolteacher for 30 years who became disillusioned with the compulsory education system. In 1991, he wrote an essay titled "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher," outlining the hidden curriculum he believed schools teach.
Looking through the lens of Gatto's 7 lessons, we can examine how AI might help facilitate the changes we need.
1. Confusion
2. Class Position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional Dependency
5. Intellectual Dependency
6. Provisional Self-Esteem
7. Constant Surveillance
These lessons are baked into the DNA of traditional schooling.
AI alone is not the saviour of education. We need strong leadership, a culture change and for many countries a willingness from government. However, the advances we expect to see in AI in the coming months and years could force change.
If not, then I predict more and more parents and students will become wiser to the 7 lessons of schooling and explore other options for education.
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