Yesterday, 206 students walked across the stage, accepted their diplomas, shook hands with a bunch of people they didn’t know, and walked off into their futures. They’re an impressive group. Eight of them are National Merit finalists, putting them among the top 1% of American students. An additional 11 are commended scholars (top 4% nationally). Collectively, they took 136 advanced placement courses and 255 college … Continue reading Are They Ready?
On Monday, March 9, 2020, Governor Mike DeWine announced that three cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in Ohio. Two days later, he reported that Ohio had four cases. I was confused. Does that mean Ohio now had seven cases, or does the second announcement include the three previously reported? When I figured out that seven was the total, I knew we had a problem. … Continue reading Detecting AI
It’s been 20 years since I bought my first car with an in-dash navigation system. It was magic. Type in a destination, and it’ll show you a map with turn-by-turn directions telling you how to get there. “This will make you stupid,” one of my colleagues exclaimed at the time. “You don’t need to know anything.” And it’s true in the sense that I don’t … Continue reading Recalculating…
I kind of fell into the world of personal learning networks. I didn’t know, back in 2005, that I was curating a group of professionals with whom I would exchange ideas, or that it would become the most valuable professional learning experience of my career. I just knew that there were interesting people talking about challenging ideas, and that the things they were struggling with … Continue reading Asynchronous Learning Networks
Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s embedded in the tools we use every day. There’s no practical way to block it in schools, and there’s no reliable method for detecting its use. We know our students are going to use it whether we want them to or not, and we know that there are lots of issues around privacy, safety, ethics, and security that we should … Continue reading What Should We Do About AI?
Last week, I attended an Artificial Intelligence forum sponsored by OhioX and InnovateOhio. The event included a couple demonstrations, including one on how AI can be used for marketing, and one on Microsoft’s approach to AI. But the primary focus of the event was two panel discussions: healthcare and education. The healthcare discussion consisted of representatives from Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital, and Pandata, a company … Continue reading If Only
Here is the question that was put to 113,000 doctors, from border to border and coast to coast: ‘What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?’ Three of America’s leading independent research organizations did the asking. And the brand named most was Camel. Well, doctors like all of us smoke for pleasure. Camel’s rich, full flavor appeals to their taste. And Camel’s cool mildness registers with their … Continue reading Is it Time to Quit Smoking?
We’re not hungry. Over my career, I’ve often used the metaphor of feeding the hungry in my approach to technology use in the classroom. Some teachers and school leaders are eager and ready to try new things. We certainly want to support that. Others are struggling just to keep their heads above water. We need to support them, too, and perhaps through them a lifeline … Continue reading Appetites
When I was in school, we weren’t allowed to use calculators. We did our calculations by hand. That included long division, and deriving square roots, and looking up logarithms and trig functions in computation tables. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that my physics teacher said, “you know, you could just use a calculator and save yourself a lot of time.” By … Continue reading Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand
A few years ago, MSN fired all of their reporters and replaced them with artificial intelligence. “Reporters” might be the wrong word. MSN didn’t report their own news. They used other news sources, and curated their own news site based on the content that they gathered from other places. They found that this could be done just as easily by software as it can by … Continue reading Did I Really Write This?
“On the back of your notecard, please write one thing that I can do to make this class better for you.” “Don’t make it boring,” fourteen year old me wrote on the back of my card. This was the first day of my high school biology class. The teacher had never risen from his table at the front of the room, and had just spent … Continue reading Attention, Please
For the first six years of my career, I taught a middle school computer applications class. Nobody really cared what I taught. They didn’t say that, of course. But the administration knew that kids needed to learn about computers, and they didn’t really know exactly what that should look like, so they carved out some space and just let me do my thing. I never … Continue reading Information Illiterate
Taste of Tech 