Black History Month

There are multiple sites that have FREE Black History Month content.

 Discovery Education contains anything from podcasts, videos,          podcasts, activities, slide shows & quizes.  

  BrainPOP  has anything from Black History changemakers, to      historical  dates and times in history that are relevant to Black History.

 INFOhio under the district login page, you will find   reputable research resources, webquests, & videos. 

Pear Deck  has multiple decks you can copy,  edit  and use to teach a interative lessons that is either teacher or student paced.

World Read Aloud Day

 

        World Read Aloud Day was created about 13 years ago in order to create unity and interest in reading. The goal was to bring everyone together to share reading and bring more interest to children and parents. For World Read Aloud Day I have compiled a few websites that will give you read-aloud ideas along with multiple eBooks to enjoy with your scholars. Along with the resources I have included the WRAD-A-THON schedule, that includes multiple live events of people reading around the world!

QR CODE READ ALOUDS

PICTURE BOOK COLLECTION

PEBBLEGO

INFOHIO

          

Sora

The reading app for students!

With Sora, you and your students can borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your district's library.  Powered by OverDrive, Sora is similar to Libby, but geared specifically towards school aged content.  For instance, Sora curates books into collections like, "Appreciate a Dragon Day," "New Year New Series," and currently an "MLK Day" collection:

Borrowing books with Sora is easy! Simply access the site through the Logins page on the district website, choose Youngstown City School District, and login with your district Google account.  

The program includes quite a few student-centered features.  I was specifically drawn to the ability of readers to define words and then review all of the words you've looked up, essentially creating your own personal vocabulary list!

Links:

https://soraapp.com/
 

OpenAI

On the OpenAI website, you will find two unique artificial intelligence platforms with potential classroom uses: Chat GPT & DALL-E  

ChatGPT

What is Chat GPT?  Chat GPT is a text-based AI platform that can recognize human language and respond.  What in the world does that mean? Essentially, you ask it questions and it responds.  Here is an example:

I logged into Chat GPT and provided it with the following prompt:

'Introduce Chat GPT to teachers by explaining its educational benefits.'

This was it's response:

"Hello teachers! I am Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am not able to browse the internet, so my knowledge is limited to what I was trained on, which has a cutoff date of 2021.

With that being said, I can tell you that Chat GPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a type of AI technology that can help teachers in a number of ways. For example, Chat GPT can be used to automatically grade student assignments, providing teachers with more time to focus on other tasks. It can also be used to provide personalized feedback to students, helping them to better understand difficult concepts.

Additionally, Chat GPT can be used to assist with lesson planning and curriculum development, allowing teachers to create more engaging and effective learning materials for their students. It can even be used to help facilitate online learning, allowing for more interactive and personalized instruction.

Overall, Chat GPT has the potential to greatly enhance the educational experience for both teachers and students, providing new opportunities for learning and growth."

Some potential classroom uses for ChatGPT:

Conversational Practice

Writing Practice

Vocabulary & Grammar Practice

Reading Comprehension

Some potential negative impacts on the classroom:

Dependency

Privacy Concerns

Inequalities

Dall-E

As a segue, I next prompted ChatGPT to provide a summary of Open AI's artificial intelligence image generator, Dall-E.  This is what it wrote:

"DALL-E is a large-scale neural network created by the AI research lab OpenAI. It is capable of generating images from text descriptions, using a process called "deep learning". For example, if you were to provide DALL-E with the text description "a dog playing with a frisbee on a beach," it would generate an image of a dog playing with a frisbee on a beach.

The main purpose of DALL-E is to demonstrate the capabilities of deep learning algorithms and the potential for AI to create new and interesting things. DALL-E has been used to generate a wide range of images, including photorealistic images, abstract art, and even characters and scenes from popular movies and TV shows.

Overall, DALL-E is an impressive example of the power of deep learning and AI, and it has the potential to be used in a wide range of applications in the future."

In the present, DALL-E is more fun than educational, but I could definitely see ways to utilize it in the classroom.

For example, I prompted DALL-E to generate 'a Picasso style painting of a high school classroom.' This is what it created:

Not perfectly Picasso, but impressive nonetheless.  Despite any imperfections (and potential headaches), Chat GPT and DALL-E offer unique and valuable capabilities that can help teachers to create engaging and effective learning materials for their students.  They also provide a glimpse of the future of not only education, but of the trajectory artificial intelligence is taking society.  

(Cue your Skynet reference now!)

If that hasn't totally scared you off, check out the links below to gain further insight into these apps as well as experience both of these platforms for yourself! Just sign up for OpenAI access with your Google account and then you're ready to get started.

Useful Links:

The Atlantic Article: The End of High School English

DALL-E

Chat GPT