In this issue

• Koala Teachers Family FB Weekly Recap

• Playground Stories FAQ

• Creating stories for adult students, reading practice, vocabulary, phrasal verbs, idioms etc…

• How to leverage AI to make inspirational images for your writing

• Editorial: Why I moved some students off of Koala Go

• User Submissions

Facebook

😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

Xavier would like to know how use AI for tutoring

Recording of the “Writing in Koala Go” Webinar with Katie and Deanna

Katie is looking for Playground creators to give webinars on various topics

Poll for top 20 Koala Go Playgrounds

Book times to watch a Playground creator go from napkin sketch to published Playground

Playground launch

🛝📗 Playground Stories FAQ

This should answer the most common questions about Playground Stories, one of my favorite things about Koala Go.

AI Tools

🤖🤫Creating stories for adult students, reading practice, vocabulary, phrasal verbs, idioms etc…

One of my most advanced students is at the stage that they need to practice and learn more of the things that make you sound more like a native speaker, phrasal verbs, idioms, slang, etc.

I first tried to modify the Popcorn prompt but it wasn’t quite right for this use. Next I decided to create a one-off prompt to generate some reading material for our class. Just a simple story with no branching or interactive elements.

This time around I chose to use Claude by Anthropic, because they just had a big update and scored the highest benchmark score for creative writing.

This turned out better than I expected, probably because I had the AI ask me some questions to make the story better, which it did. I answered all it’s questions and hit enter.

The text was full of the desired material, the storyline was even entertaining for the student. We spent most of the class reading through and explaining it all, and most importantly laughing.

I am glad I gave this a chance as the alternatives were not great. I could either write something myself or spend hours searching for the right material.

Enjoy!!

AI tools

🤖🛠️How to leverage AI to make inspirational images for your writing

Just another handy use case for AI in your daily life. I no longer need to spend time thinking about what kind of images I need to use in some of my articles, for example, the editorials. No reason you couldn’t do the same with social media posts or any other writing tasks for that matter.

Lately I have started simply having the AI read the article and make suggestions as to what images to add, it may even suggest captions. I then ask it to create the image, I get 3 or 4 versions and either pick one to use or generate more.

Gemini still refuses to generate any humans, so I usually prompt it to “Use mice wearing clothes instead of humans” maybe that’s just a me thing, but I really like it. For  this week’s editorial I used Koalas instead of mice.

Here is a simple prompt that has worked for me, I write longer prompts now that are more descriptive but this will get you started:

Read this article and please describe some images to go with it:

I then paste the text of the article onto the end of it, this time it was last month’s editorial, and below is what I got back.

Sure, here are images along with the article on how to start an online teaching business:

Image 1

A photo of a person sitting at a desk with a laptop computer open in front of them. They are wearing headphones and smiling while looking at the screen.

Caption: Dreaming of starting your online teaching business? Great! But the road might be different than you think.

Image 2

A collage of images showing the negative aspects of some online teaching jobs. This could include a grumpy looking teacher, a low hourly wage sign, and a chaotic classroom environment.

Caption: Beware of low wages, unhappy students, and unsteady job security.

Image 3

A photo of a lightbulb

Caption: Here's an idea: Use online platforms to gain experience and build your client base.

Image 4

A photo of a person standing on top of a mountain peak, looking out at a vast landscape.

Caption: There's a lot to learn! Be patient and persistent in your online teaching journey

Then I asked Gemini to “ Please create image 1 but use mice wearing clothes instead of humans.” and the results were the image at the start of this article. I picked number 3, I could have generated more, but I really liked that one.

The images are far from perfect but good enough for the 4 second look that most readers give them, and honestly I don’t think I would spend the time to add images without the AI assistance.

Editorial

✍️🃏Editorial: Why I moved some students off of Koala Go

Koala Go is the absolute best at what it does, highly interactive lessons using the Whiteboard, Co-browser and Playground.

Originally I was happy to learn that I could use Koala Go to teach students from Preply. Since I already knew how to use Koala, that is what I did since I was reluctant (lazy) to learn the ins-and-outs of another new classroom. Especially since I didn’t know if Preply was going to work out for me.

Recently, I have actually moved most of my students to the Preply classroom, not because it is a better classroom, but because with my adult conversation classes we actually never used any of the interactive features that make Koala great. So using Koala was an extra and unneeded step. Plus, when using the Preply classroom you get credited for classes quicker and if there is ever a dispute Preply has the records easily at hand. 

One interesting and promising feature of the Preply classroom is that it uses AI to give class insights 5 minutes before the class ends. This is still sort of in beta testing, I will cover more about this feature later when I learn more. I’m actually kind of excited to see them being proactive with AI features.

Anyway, I figured out how to do everything in my classes with the screen-sharing feature and transitioned all my adults to the new set-up. I needed a new tool to record the speaking presentations we do in class but once I found that I just have to work on my organization and muscle memory to do things more smoothly. The first half of the class is still on the Koala Whiteboard, I just don’t invite students and simple share that screen. So far so good.

With my one 9 year old student I’m very happy to keep using Koala because we heavily use the interactive features to have classes that the student wants to attend.

I’m a big fan of Koala Go, as you probably already knew; However, the different classroom platforms are just tools, and a hammer is not always the best solution, sometimes you need a screwdriver or a basin wrench (I bet you don’t have a basin wrench).

⬇️⬇️ 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!