📁 PBL, ChatGPT, help with phishing and more – Edcerpts for January 30, 2023

Is this getting too long for one day? I’ve been debating on whether to turn it into a Monday and Friday sort of thing. What do you think?

Internet Travels

Edcerpts are my weekly round up of interesting links and ideas I discovered on the internet. It is published on Mondays for the previous week

Apps

First up is two apps for the week. The first one, AI Writing Check is a free site designed by Quill.org and CommonLit.org to help educators detect content submitted by students. To use it, you copy up 100-400 words into the text box and click the Check Text button.

For all you poem teachers and writers out there let me introduce Versepad. With this site you can select different poem styles and it will help you show if you are writing in that style based on syllables, number of lines, rhyming schemes and more.

Pedagogy

I don’t think there is much argument for project based learning, but in case you need some convincing, check out The Nerdy Teacher. Teaching with vertical whiteboards can be a great way to assess your math students while keeping them engaged in their work. Keeping students engaged is a good thing, and goes along with making school learning replayable.

ChatGPT seems to be the only thing anyone is talking about! From using AI to teach English to newcomers to a teacher who adopted an open ChatGPT policy, it is everywhere. One important aspect of using ChatGPT is in the creation of the prompts. I’m seeing more and more Tik Tok videos on tips and tricks to getting ChatGPT to output something useable. Teaching in the age of AI means getting creative means more pressure on educators to learn what AI can do. The cat is out of the bag, and can’t be stopped, so don’t panic.

What does ‘deeper learning’ for elementary and middle school students look like?.

Technology

And if you thought you wouldn’t have to change your assessments, you may want to read about how ChatGPT passed a Wharton MBA exam. Sure, the writing may be plain and somewhat robotic sounding, but how good is ChatGPT’s writing?

Tips

Staying safe on the internet is a full time job, and here is an annotated field guide to identifying phishing emails.

Looking for art to reused? The Smithsonian has opened up 4.4 million works licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means you are free to do anything you want with them.

Pop Culture

Have you wondered why some of your friends share bizarre things on Facebook? It could be more for the thrill of sharing and less about the content. A deep dive into people who don’t read books. That article looks at the more famous among us, but there is also the fact that 130 million American adults have low literacy skills.

Pot Pourri

As we get older, we take baby steps away for doing something new, but we shouldn’t. For the non-jerks out there, studies have shown that the disagreeable are not more likely to get ahead at work. Training your body and not your mind can help you be more creative.

With the amount of remote work done by education in the past 3 years, most aren’t ready to revisit that world. However, there is research showing that virtual brainstorming can out perform in person teams.

Finally, if you have an expectant mothers in your inner circle, you may want to share this article on the downsides of “unique” names.

Be sure to share this with anyone you think may be interested!

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