The Educator's Notebook

featured articles

“Reframing Art History Through A BIPOC Lens”
Hyperallergic - 8/25/23

“Chiang reports that the reader has been well received by her students so far, with an end-of-semester survey indicating that they found the reader spoke more to their personal interests in art and history, made her courses more relevant to their lives, and provided a more nuanced and complex presentation of history.”
NASA Invites Student Entries To Human Exploration Rover Challenge, By Sept 21
Electronics Weekly - 8/22/23

“The Human Exploration Rover Challenge asks high school, college or university students from around the world to create “lightweight, human-powered rovers”. These will have to traverse an obstacle course simulating lunar and Martian terrain, while also completing mission-related science tasks.”

adolescence

“Young Adults In U.S. Drinking Less Than In Prior Decades”
Gallup - 8/22/23

“The age trends reviewed for this report show that the rate has declined 10 percentage points over the past two decades among younger adults, aged 18 to 34, falling from 72% to 62%.”

arts

“Grown-Up Theater Kids Run The World”
New York Times - 8/20/23

“Well before being appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson participated in theater and improv as an undergraduate at Harvard, and was once paired with Matt Damon — then a student, now a Hollywood actor — in a drama class.”

early childhood

“More Screen Time Linked To Delayed Development In Babies”
New York Times - 8/21/23

“One-year-olds exposed to more than four hours of screen time a day experienced developmental delays in communication and problem-solving skills at ages 2 and 4, according to a study published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics."

health

What Will The Fall/Winter Virus Season Look Like?
Your Local Epidemiologist - 8/24/23

“The fall/winter season always means more respiratory sickness—the weather changes, people head inside, and social networks change (school starts, holiday celebrations occur). But the last four years have resulted in very unusual patterns. This makes predicting this season a fool’s game. But I’ll take the bait and give it a shot.”

humanities

This Week In History: Phillis Wheatley Becomes First Black American To Publish A Poetry Collection
Literary Hub - 8/27/23
“What Can Literature Teach Us About Forgiveness?”
New York Times - 8/24/23
Greta Gerwig, Paradise Lost, And Barbie
Literary Hub - 8/23/23

“That Gerwig is thinking about Milton’s radical retelling of the Book of Genesis should come as no surprise.”
Hip-Hop Turns 50: Is Hip-Hop America’s Poetry?
New York Times - 8/22/23

leadership

Focus On Recruitment: “Staff Shortages In Schools May Be Here To Stay”
EdWeek - 8/18/23
“Diagnosing A Broken Culture — And What To Do About It”
Gallup - 8/4/23
“Accountability And Empathy (Are Not Mutually Exclusive)
Ed Batista - 4/14/19

pedagogy

“One Way To Accelerate Student Learning? Set More Challenging Goals”
EdWeek - 8/23/23
“34 Ways To Quiet A Rambunctious Class” (All Grades)
Edutopia - 8/18/23

reading/writing

Which Is Better: Nonsense Word Tests Or Word ID Tests?
Shanahan On Literacy - 8/26/23
Jennifer Gonzalez Debriefs The Reading Instruction Debate
Cult of Pedagogy - 8/20/23

social media

“How To Safeguard Teens’ Well-Being On Social Media”
Stanford - 8/22/23

“Also, talk about the intention behind having a device. Parents may be rightfully concerned about respecting their teen’s privacy, but it’s normal and expected that you ask questions about what they are doing online. Just as you want to support them with peer relationship dynamics at school, you should have periodic conversations with your kids about phone and social media use because there’s a lot to navigate in those spaces.”
Cal Newport: Do We Need A New Twitter?
New Yorker - 8/16/23

stem

The Observable Universe, As A Cartoon
xkcd - 8/24/23
The Observable Universe, As An Illustration
Pablo Carlos Budassi - 8/22/23
James Webb Telescope Captures Stars Shaped Like a “?”
Hyperallergic - 8/21/23
Driverless Taxis Are Spreading
New York Times - 8/21/23
Haptic Body Suits For Listening To Music Through Touch
New York Times - 8/20/23

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3D Printed School Completed In Madagascar
Inhabitat - 7/7/22

sustainability

“Miyawaki Forests” - “Wee” Forests Of Native Plants
New York Times - 8/24/23
“New Jersey Requires Climate Change Education… Here’s How It’s Going”
NPR - 8/21/23
“What The Data Says About Americans’ View Of Climate Change”
Pew Research - 8/9/23
“Why Some Americans Do Not See Urgency In Climate Change”
Pew Research - 8/9/23

tech

“Quiz: Test Your Knowledge Of Digital Topics”
Pew Research - 8/17/23
"What Americans Know About AI, Cybersecurity and Big Tech”
Pew Research - 8/17/23
State Of EdTech: Survey Of 1,500 Teachers And Admin
Clever - 8/15/23

“In Q2 2023, we interviewed district leaders and conducted a survey of 1,500 teachers and administrations from Clever’s user base. The survey included about 1,000 teachers and 500 administrators, representing mostly public schools (86% for teachers and 78% for administrators).”

tech/ai

“A.I. Vs. Humans: Which Performs Which Tasks Better?” [A Timeline]
Visual Capitalist - 8/25/23
“Talk With Students About A.I.”
Learning On Purpose - 8/25/23

“If you are already trying AI, show students what you’re doing. Ask them what they think. Tell them what you think. Your willingness to show your work models vulnerability and offers implicit permission to talk openly about using AI for learning… If you show your work, students are more likely to show theirs.”
How Is Copyright Law Handling A.I. Generated Material?
Goodwin Law - 8/24/23

“On August 18, 2023, the US District Court for the District of Columbia (the Court) ruled in Thaler v. Register of Copyrights that an AI-generated work “absent any guiding human hand” is not protected by copyright, explaining that “[h]uman authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” …This said, the Court was mindful of AI-focused questions that are sure to arise (and may arise more quickly given this ruling). The Court noted that “[t]he increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an ‘author’ of a generated work, the scope of the protection obtained over the resultant image, how to assess the originality of AI-generated works where the systems may have been trained on unknown pre-existing works, how copyright might best be used to incentivize creative works involving AI, and more.”
“How Teachers And Students Feel About A.I.”
New York Times - 8/24/23

“As the school year begins, their thinking has evolved.”
NYT On A.I. Success This Fall
New York Times - 8/24/23

“First, I encourage educators — especially those who teach in high schools and colleges — to assume that 100 percent of their students are using ChatGPT and other generative A.I. tools on every assignment, in every subject, unless they’re being physically supervised inside a school building… My third piece of advice — and the one that may get me the most angry emails from teachers — is that teachers should focus less on warning students about the shortcomings of generative A.I. than figuring out what the technology does well.”

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Leveraging A.I. For Better Decision Making - Future Case Studies
Harvard Business Review - 8/24/23
Meta Releases Open Coding Language Model
Meta - 8/24/23
Teacher Workflow For Several Gen A.I. Tools
A.J. Juliani - 8/24/23

“It has been nine minutes on this video, I now have ideas for an activity, a lesson plan connected to my standards, and a presentation, all setting students up.”
A.I. Helps Stroke Victim Speak For First Time In 18 Years
New York Times - 8/23/23
Survey: Are Teachers Ready For A.I. This Fall?
EdWeek - 8/21/23

“Nearly 4 in 10 teachers expect to use AI in their classrooms by the end of the 2023-24 school year. Less than half as many say they are prepared to use the tools.”
Ethan Mollick On How To Generate Strong Prompts
One Useful Thing - 8/20/23

“Now, I need to be very clear here: I don’t mean expert prompts, produced through elaborate “prompt engineering.” I have written before that prompt engineering is overrated. For most uses, you can build a good prompt mostly by asking the AI to do something in back-and-forth dialogue, combined with trial and error, and a few small tricks (I will get to those shortly). No, I mean the prompts of experts - prompts that encode our hard-earned expertise in ways that AI can help other people apply. Prompts that we can use to do our work easier, or, if you are inclined, to gift others with your own abilities.”
Generative A.I. Is A Great Leveler: Strengthening The Weakest
MIT - 3/10/23

“Inequality between workers decreases, as ChatGPT compresses the productivity distribution by benefiting low-ability workers more. ChatGPT mostly substitutes for worker effort rather than complementing worker skills, and restructures tasks towards idea-generation and editing and away from rough-drafting. Exposure to ChatGPT increases job satisfaction and self-efficacy and heightens both concern and excitement about automation technologies.”

other

How A Harvard Professor Became The World’s Leading Alien Hunter”
New York Times - 8/24/23
Public Appreciation For Teachers Is Growing
EdWeek - 8/24/23

“Overall, 73 percent of Americans say teachers are undervalued, 67 percent support increasing their pay even if it means raising property taxes, and 66 percent say that teachers should have more say over what is taught in schools—a substantially larger share than the percentage of poll respondents who said the same for school boards, local residents, and state policymakers.”

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Articles on August 27, 2023

featured articles

adolescence

arts

athena

athletics

creativity

diversity/inclusion

early childhood

health

humanities

leadership

pedagogy

reading/writing

social media

stem

sustainability

tech

tech/ai

other