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Weekly Tech Tips 17 January 2021

Dear Friends!


Happy happy New Year! Is 16 days after New Year’s Day too many to still be saying “Happy New Year”!? Not in Korea it’s not, ‘cause it will be new year all over again in less than a month. One of the many wonderful things about living in Korea.

After a month-long break, I have enough material  to fill five pages, but I won’t. I’ll dole it out in manageable chunks like I always try to do. So let’s get to it.


Weekly Tech Tips


I realize that a lot of what I share is more suitable for the Middle and High Schools at GSIS. Today I learned about a product that can be used in K-12, but I think it really shines in the Elementary School environment. It’s called Drawp for Schools and they have recently partnered with  Google Classroom. It’s an app / Google Slides Addon to create and collaborate with digital drawing tools that adds a project management and lesson plan deployment tool for teachers with a built-in sharing platform for students, teachers and parents. 

Here is a 90 second demo video

https://youtu.be/m0IO82J6ikc

And here is a 3 minute explanatory video

https://youtu.be/XKv7NN_yE1Q

As a drawing app it is best used with iPads, tablets or Chromebooks, so I think the ES might be interested in this.


SPEAKING of Youtube. Did you notice the new microphone at the top of your Youtube videos recently?

You can now control Youtube with your voice which may or may not come in handy depending on how full your hands are and how noisy your classroom is. Still, it’s a new tool that you may want to use. Click the mic on the right and tell Youtube what you want to do.


This is too cool to wait. Open AI, the folks I wrote about a few weeks ago who are getting very good at AI generated writing have applied their technology to computer generated images. 

https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/. This is in the category of scary cool. You describe the image in words and it "draws" it for you. This is not a web search of your image, it creates it. Look at this kangaroo made out of a cucumber I asked it to make. What!

Why did I ask for a cucumber kangaroo? Well, for now you can only control the inputs from a list of options, but I will definitely be looking for this to go live when it should be able to draw anything you ask it to. You'll never want for an image again.

These are the same folks who are about to make it a whole lot harder for teachers and a whole lot easier for students by generating original machine-created natural-language texts. If you checked that out last month then perhaps you will be psyched / horrified to learn that Google, yes of course Google, has a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) six times more powerful than Open AIs.

Google’s new trillion-parameter AI language model is almost 6 times bigger than GPT-3

The point is, AI is coming for you, make no mistake about it. It can already write a decent essay and good computer code and of course it helps companies sell trillions of dollars worth of products. I think that AI is the “future of technology” for the 10’s and 20’s  much like the pc was for the 70’s and 80’s and the Internet was for the 90’s and 00’s, and I think you should check it out



Courses, Tutorials, Webinars and Talks


I hope you had a chance to check out some articles, courses, webinars, or other PD opportunities over the break. If you did then I am sure we’d all love to hear about it. Carmen has been sharing what she is learning in Tomlinson’s Differentiated Learning workshop and it is solid gold. I am so happy to see some conversations about our craft starting to blossom within our community. If you would like to join the conversations check out the Google Group I made “GSIS2020”. I don’t have permission to make a group on our GSIS account so it is a group I made on a private Google account and invited (almost) everyone to. If you didn’t get an invitation and would like to join the conversations please let me know.

I finished my CK-12 course and started creating my first free, online interactive “Flexbook”

It’s not finished or published yet, but when it is I will be sure to show you. 


Just one seminar for you to check out and it’s not until mid Feb. 

Learning with Google

This should be good. A Google for Education Livestream about the latest developments from Google, February 17 and 18th. Available in 13 languages including Korean and Spanish and Japanese. It’s free, but you have to register. Hope to see you there.


It’s about to snow again!,


Scott

 

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