😱 Jump scary tabs, generative AI for reading assignments, and more – Of bits and bytes for February 3, 2025
Internet Travels
Of bits and bytes is my weekly round up of interesting links and ideas I discovered on the internet. It is published on Mondays for the previous week
Wow, it’s February already! Hard to believe the first four weeks of 2025 are now in the past, only 11 months until Christmas. Next week I’ll be attended the Ohio eTech Conference in Ohio, so if you are attended, hunt me down and say hi!
I’ll be presenting once, Google Sheets Glow Up on Wednesday, February 12th at 3:30pm-4:30pm in A214/215 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Come and see all of the ways you can make your Google Sheets look better and be more useful when analyzing data.
Apps
Brad Dale wrote about VoiceGenerator.ai, a website that will take text and create an audio file for you.
When you are trying to be productive on the computer, the temptation to open time-wasting sites is pretty great, but that is where the Chrome extension TabBoo comes in. Once added to Chrome, you can tell it the sites you want to avoid, and instead of just blocking access to those sites, it adds random jump scares if you visit them. I don’t know how useful it would be in the classroom because it seems like it would just seed chaos, it may be a fun little extension for students to use when they’re NOT in a classroom.
Pedagogy
Here’s a lookg at how Ted Curran uses generative AI for reading assignments. He goes all in with several examples at creating reading assignments in a variety of ways with generative AI, tailoring the assignments not only to a student’s interests, but also their reading level. This article is a must read for those looking at using AI to help their students.
Delayed ADHD diagnosis in adults maybe caused by maladaptive daydreaming. Maladaptive daydreaming is the compulsive act of daydreaming, sometimes taking hours of the day and interfering with daily tasks. This daydreaming may mask symptons of ADHD due to reduced activity, decreased impulsivity, and less disuptive behavior.
Tips
I’m still learning about Google Docs Tabs, and here’s a great way to get started with them from Alice Keeler. Tabs in this context are an organizational tool for Google Docs that shows on the left side of the document. One area we’ve been using tabs is our Daily Action Items document. This document is a journal of activities in the tech department, and in the past we’ve had to break it up into two documents because Google Docs starts to bog down on long documents. Now we have a tab for each month, and the performance isn’t affects as the document gets longer.
A new source of public domain images at the Public Domain Image Archive has been announced. These images are free from copyright and can be used for any purpose, which makes them great for students creating multimedia and helping them steer clear of copyright issues.
Wes Fryer created a web app to share lists on Mastodon with the help of AI. Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform much like Bluesky, but it doesn’t offer a way to share any lists you have created. So he got to work and with the help of AI was able to code a web app to facilitate the sharing of Mastodon lists. Coding with AI is my biggest AI activity, but with some caveats. If you know nothing about coding, adding AI to the mix may be the cause of headaches. For example, one project I was working on kept crashing. I tried several different ways of help AI fix the issue to no avail. I dug into the code and realized it was a simple boolean mistake. AI’s code used a less than comparison, when it needed to be using a less than or equal to comparison.
Potpourri
It takes more than 21 days to create healthy habits, busting a popular myth. New habits can begin to form in two months, but may take almost a year to become firmly established.
Thank you!
Major props if you’ve made it this far, you are a rockstar! Feel free to contact me with questions, ideas, concerns, or your thoughts on the next Marvel movie. In fact, I love to discuss about any topic and then wonder how it intersects with education, so fire away!
“Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery, but Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” – Oogway, Kung Fu Panda
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