Here are a few items that I hope will be of interest to you.
Department for Education Survey
The Department for Education is currently running a survey to find out people’s views on the curriculum. The survey closes on 22nd November 2024. I think it’s important to take the survey even if you’re a cynic and don’t think the government will take any notice, because as I’ve always said, we don’t want to give any administration an excuse not to run such surveys. Here’s the link: DfE Curriculum and Assessment Review.
Over in the Digital Education Supplement area
Since my last email to subscribers to Digital Education I've uploaded several articles to the Digital Education Supplement area, such as my portfolio, with an AI-generated podcast of it, which is quite a hoot, and further articles about using AI in schools. Here's part of the latest one:
Beyond the hype: report into the state of AI in education in England
My view of the findings of the report is that I think we are at the stage we were perhaps thirty years ago. Some far-sighted schools were experimenting with giving students and teachers internet access and some even had their own website. Quite a few were using locked down access or so-called ‘walled-gardens’. These were ok to an extent: they kept everyone safe, supposedly. However, they could never be a viable option in the era of ever-expanding numbers of potentially useful websites. I think there comes a point where the costs of being cautious outweigh the benefits, and that a far more sustainable approach is to train teachers and students to become what I suppose we might call ‘AI literate’.
But I do think, from my own experiments, that schools that have not embraced AI and have no plans, or strategies, to do so, are missing out. I’ve used AI to generate course outlines, create assessments, mark assessments, create lesson plans and create illustrations, just to list a few examples. I regard these as a starting point, so they are not effortless, plus of course you need to use really good prompts. However, I’ve cut course preparation from four of five hours to one or two hours, which is quite significant.
Finally, to reassure you, I don’t use AI to generate my articles! I sometimes use it for summarising reports, as I’ve done below, but when I do I indicate the fact.
Subscribe to Digital Education for free, and then go to the Digital Education Supplement area to read the whole thing.
My blogging course
One last thing. My course on writing for blogs still has a few places left (12 sign-ups since I last checked, so there are six more places) and it’s online, so even if you’re on the other side of the world you can still attend. Woohoo! Here are the details: