Category: AI and education

Download a high resolution .png image here. Download a powerpoint slide here. Pedagogy AI is a roadmap for a lesson in which students use AI for themselves. It is based on observations of lessons where students used iPads to research and solve problems. This is a versatile pedagogy. There are times when the teacher teaches…

An explosion of creativity Teachers are discovering new ways of using AI in their teaching, in an explosion of creativity. Their joyful enthusiasm is infectious! Teachers can use the many examples in the table below to inspire or plan lessons for students of all ages and abilities.   The ability of AI to simplify and translate text…

AI the disruptor AI is increasingly being described as a “key disruptor” of business and commercial systems. In this, it is following a well-established pattern of the effects of any new technology on society. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” as Marshall McLuhan (almost) said. The phrase “key disruptor” is used less often…

Visible and invisible controls Basil Bernstein realised that teachers in traditional classrooms used very visible methods to organise and control their teaching. He called these ‘visible’ controls because they were continuously made explicit to students throughout the lesson.  These controls affected every aspect of the teaching process including:  Traditional classrooms place the responsibility for these…

ICT and visible and invisible controls Laptops, tablets, wifi and modern software are designed to encourage mobility, collaboration, and group work.  Surfing the Internet is a divergent activity, bringing together into a single page a diversity of ideas and a range of views from across the web. Often these ideas are conflicting and of differing…

AI and controls ICT networks are known to change society in several predictable ways. Rainie and Lee suggest that:  “in networked societies, boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections shift between multiple networks, and hierarchies tend to be flatter and more recursive*.” Rainie, Lee; Wellman, Barry. (2012) Networked: The New Social Operating…

How students can use AI in the classroom  The recent announcements by OpenAI and Microsoft that organisations can now build their own customised chatbots is something of a game changer for education, because it enables the pre-training that I have discussed in earlier articles in this series to be implemented and monitored. This would enable a version of AI…

The learning context The knowledge and skills that are taught in a lesson have a special context. They are part of a wider sequence of ideas that are intended to lead a student towards mastery of the knowledge or skill. The context is further defined by a variety of local and national factors, as shown below.…

The learning outcomes Paying close attention to the learning context empowers a student to enter the learning and to respond in appropriate ways. This is not just by using technical language correctly, but also by giving responses that are appropriate to the social environment of the classroom and school.  A student who tries to use…

The learning conversation Learning takes place within the learning conversation. Broadly, there are two kinds of conversations: social conversations and private conversations.  All learning has a social context. A teacher asking questions and dealing with answers is a learning conversation. So are the conversations in group work. Even reading a book is a social conversation:…