🙋‍♂️ Google’s Gemini 1.5, writing prompts, macOS Safari, and more – Of bits and bytes for February 26, 2024
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
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Apps
One week after debuting the next generation AI of Ultra 1.0, Google then announces Gemini 1.5 Google’s next-generation AI model has a very large context size, which means it can handle very large inputs, such as documents with several hundred pages or video reaching almost an hour in length.
If you’re a Google Keep user, check out this list of tips & tricks on Google Keep from The Verge.
Pedagogy
These are listed as 34 Transformative prompts to unlock your writing, but they’re a lot more than just prompts. They’re almost little puzzles to solved.
Here are two articles from the computer world that are interesting in the fact that their main idea has implications across a variety of situations, including education. The first is a twist on those that don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, while the other one is all about programming initiatives, but could be about any initiative and how it succeeds or fails based on getting the right people involved, starting small, iterate often, and move fast.
Coming as no surprise to anyone in education, new research shows the standardized test only measure the socioeconomic status of the students.
Science & Research
If you’ve read about social media, you’ll probably read about the “dopamine rush” and how it can be addicting. Well, dopamine also has a role in reversal learning.
Technology
A lot of schools are putting in check-in systems for school visitors, with some of them performing background checks. However, these background checks aren’t very reliable.
Excessive screen time leaves children unfit to learn – teachers
You’ll probably never come across the term “Lacros Chrome Browser” on the Chromebooks, but you’ll benefit from it. The Lacros Chrome browser is back and is being tested in ChromeOS on Chromebooks. It is a separate browser instead of being built in on Chromeos, making Chrome on Chromebooks work more like Chrome does on the desktop operating systems. The biggest benefit will be that the browser will continue to get updates after Chromebooks reach the end of their Auto Update policy.
Tips
Something I learned this week, you can drag and drop from the notifications on a Chromebook.
For all you Safari users, here’s a nice list of features that you may not know about.
Sure, there are other password generators on the net, but how many of them let you pick your password by catching characters in a basket?
Pop Culture
When AI is creating everything, will curation save us from ourselves?
If you’re of a certain age, you remember Highlights magazine from the dentist office, along with cursing the kid who circled all of the items in the hidden drawing. For fans of Highlights, they are partnering with Google on an internet safety initiative.
Potpourri
I clicked on the article because the analogy intriqued me, How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome in Academia When You’re Six Raccoons Living in a Fjällräven Parka, but the article is great about how not to sell yourself short as an educator.
The ever awesome Ars Technica takes a look at our linguistic roots.
Extra Credit
Here are extra links that I found interesting that may or may not be education related or interesting to you and I didn’t want to lose them.
- TikTok – Make Your Day
- Literacy crisis in college students: Essay from a professor on students who don’t read.
- Seemingly Innocent Phrases You Shouldn’t Say To Kids | HuffPost Life
- SWOT Analysis of ChatGPT in Computer Science Education
- Harvard IBM Mark I – Language | The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
- The big idea: this simple behavioural trick can help you get more out of life | Psychology | The Guardian
- A historian drowning in source documents turns to AI – The Verge
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