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Issue 36
Tuesday Edition
David Skaife
September 03, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
In this issue
😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap
Playground
🛝🛠️Word Search puzzle prototype Playground Story Approved!!
The word search puzzle in action
This one took much longer than normal to get approved, but here it is!!
Enjoy!!
Teaching Tools
👩🏻🏫🛠️Super Teacher
Ivy (the creator of Super Teacher) walked me through the set-up process for Super Teacher and we made a video so you can see what it is all about.
What is Super Teacher?
Class scheduler
Payment processor
Professional looking web presence
Online store for your self-paced lessons or resources.
What Super Teacher isn’t.
You are not competing with other teachers on Super Teacher. Your leads follow your link to your page and that is all they see.
There are no students looking for classes here, you need to self market.
Super Teacher is not a middleman. They provide tools to make your teaching life easier.
The free plan has the same features as the paid plan, the only difference is that the free plan charges a 10% fee on purchases. The paid plan is just a flat fee no matter what your sales are. Currently the price is 9/mo but soon it will go to 17/mo. This is a great way to get started, no upfront expenses. Once it is working and making money for you there is just a small flat fee vs a high percentage like the other platforms we are used to.
Ivy is constantly adding new features that actual users are asking for, much like Koala Go, this means a lot to me.
You don’t have anything to lose, just set it up and use it, there are no fees until you start making money.
This process has inspired me to start getting ready to look for my own students again because Super Teacher will handle the website presence, the scheduling, the payments and even a spot for my self-paced products and resources. Now if I can only find somebody to do the marketing for me.🙃
If you do decide to go over and take it for a test drive here is my referral link:
Enjoy!!
AI Tools
🌹🤖Rosebud AI - Popcorn gets some company
I usually have a Rosebud tab open these days so I can pop-in, request a change and go work on something else for awhile as Rosie writes code for my ideas. This week I did more work on Popcorn just to make the background less static and more interesting to look at on its own.
Clouds, bees and a surprise
Since the clouds worked out so well I decided to add a bee buzzing around, so I asked for Rosie to create the image of a bee for me, which turned out pretty good, I then added it to the scene and asked for it to move around randomly. Surprisingly simple, but it isn’t always. The bee was too big so I shrank it down and I needed it to flip around when it changed the direction it was moving. Most of these were pretty quick to implement.
Next, I tried a trick I had seen in the tips that pop-up on screen while you are waiting for code to be written. I asked for suggestions on how to make the bee move more naturally and look more like a bee flying. Rosie gave me 10 ideas, I asked Rosie to implement all of them and naturally, that failed. I went through the list and asked for some of them to be added one at a time which was way more successful. Judge for yourself, but I like how they look and move.
Rosie’s bee image
Later, one bee didn’t seem like enough so I asked for 3. I was showing one of my students the progress and they suggested that Popcorn should breath fire on the bees. Hmm, why not? So after many tries and much fine tuning, we have fire!!
I still want to fine tune the features that I have and add a few more as the ideas come to me.
Feel free to use it as is or remix it to your own taste.
What do you think I should add next?
Try it, you might enjoy it.
Editorial
✍️🃏Editorial: Nice News
While reminiscing about my earlier years I vaguely remember a time when the news (TV news) was not all toxic. I remember stories about small town heroes, dogs finding their family after years of separation, people helping other people, celebrating achievements of regular folks, etc…
"Good news is the best kind of news, even for mice." -image and caption created by Gemini because I asked nicely
Unfortunately, bad news seems to be more profitable in this click-bait economy than inspiring, uplifting, or feel good stories so that’s really all we get these days.
As a use case for AI I was going to have AI search through news headlines and provide a list of stories to curate for a “Good News” newsletter. Luckily somebody already has one, it does have some ads, but nothing is perfect.
Read some good news for a change.
Links
🧐⛓️💥Interesting Links
These are links that I found interesting but haven’t written about, there is simply too much happening these days.
OpenAI close to AGI but not prepared for it, former employee
Anthropic releases System prompts for transparency, nerdy but eye opening to understand how these things work.
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