🤖🐉In this issue🐨🫦

New feature: A clickable table of contents

• Koala Teachers Family FB Weekly Recap

• What’s this? A page of Playground Stories?

• Popcorn the story teller: part 2

• Editorial: Tutoring adults - The two-way street

• User Submissions

Facebook

😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

Another relatively slow week for must see information

What types of blocks do you want to see added to Playground?

Webpages

🕸️🤔What’s this? A page of Playground Stories?

I was poking around the Koala Go website as one does while waiting for a student, or maybe that is just me. I usually like to check if there are new coffee chats coming up, then I noticed something I hadn’t seen before…maybe you haven’t seen it either… There is a whole page of links to Playground Stories, not sure who curated them or how you might submit new ones, just wanted to share it with readers who might have missed it.

AI Tools

🤖🤫Popcorn the story teller: part 2

This is part 2 of building a personality and purpose for Popcorn.

The basic prompt I started with has evolved into something much better, the output is looking a little more stable, still a lot of work to do, but there is noticeable progress.

To make it easier to modify for each student and other use cases I constructed the prompt sort of like a piece of code. I have variables so I don’t have to make so many changes to the body of the prompt as most are right up at the top.

One of my advanced adult students wanted to start using more collocations, phrasal verbs and idioms to get to that next level of English speaking and conversation. There are some good books on the subject but the exercises are less than engaging. I was just going to have AI write an essay that was heavy on those parts of speech and use that as our reading practice, then I thought, why not have an interactive story session with Popcorn? And actually, I could just change the name and description of Popcorn to be more inline with the student’s needs, since those things are now in easy to find and edit sections of the prompt.

Last week I tried it with this adult student and got mixed results. Entertainment value - above average, educational value - only so-so. If I try this again I would request more action in the story for adults and collect more of the student’s favorite things and preferences for their profile.

Anyhow, searching the web has given me some ideas to try out for the next generation of the story telling dragon. Below is a PDF of the latest prompt I use for Elisa, my student. Feel free to experiment with it.

Enjoy!!

Editorial

✍️🃏Editorial: Tutoring adults - The two-way street

Tutoring adults from around the world has been really rewarding, it reminds me of being a tour guide and talking with people from all over the world and from every walk of life.

It’s amazing the things you can learn.

I tend to be curious and when I have a question during class, I just ask it as long as it doesn’t seem overly rude, and my threshold for that might not be the same as yours.

Anyway, I learn new things, see new perspectives and basically enjoy all my interactions with the students. It’s truly a two-way street for information exchange.

A major theme is how the news you see is not the same story you get from people that are actually there. I have students currently living in Ukraine and also Israel, their stories are NOT anywhere close to the news you are fed daily.

Which version of reality is correct? Probably neither or maybe both. We will probably never really know.

⬇️⬇️ User Submissions ⬇️⬇️

Playground

💧👩🏻‍🏫Seeking content for Dunk The Teacher and Escape the planet

Do you like the concept behind these games but they don’t have the right content for you? Send me an email about it.

My original plan was to offer many different versions with the content that teachers like yourself wanted (each version at $3), but since I cannot read minds I need you to tell me what you need. 😆

Submissions

🙋🏽‍♂️🤷🏻‍♀️How do I submit my Playground to be featured in Koala Bites?

If you have a Playground you would like to have in this newsletter, or for that matter, anything the readers might find useful. Just click that button that says “Submissions”. That will open an email for you to describe what you would like to submit.

I like to schedule a time where I can come to your classroom and tour the Playground. Then I will do a short write-up. There is no cost for this.

Bye-bye

👋🏾Well that’s it for this issue

Don’t forget to share it with your friends or on social media!