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In this issue

• Koala Go Bug alert

• Koala Teachers Family FB Weekly Recap

• Blends ch, th, sh

• AI blog writer

• Editorial: How should we prepare our toddlers for the future?

• Interesting Links

• Weekly Poll

Koala Go

🐨🦟Koala Go Bug alert

Dawn is the one that pointed this bug out to me. I did a tiny bit of testing and was able to reproduce it so here is the scoop!

When you are building in Playground and you use the “undo” button it will undo what you just did, it seems to work normally and all is well; however, if you duplicate the Playground sometimes those mistakes are not “undone” in the new copy. It’s a weird one, but there you have it.

Thank you Dawn for pointing this one out

Facebook

😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

A slow week on the Facebook group

Issues using Wordwall in the Co-browser

The Literacy Classroom 3 Quick-Start Guide

Playground

 🛝🛠️Blends ch, th, sh - by Dawn

In this group of three Playgrounds, Dawn covers blends. Ch, sh, and th all using the same template. Lots of listening, lots of reading, lots of interactivity, lots of puzzles to solve and sentences to make. Dawn recommends this for ages 6-8ish.

Like many of Dawn’s Playgrounds you go from one room to the next after solving whatever activities or puzzles are in there to open the door to the next area. Students and teachers can’t get lost, and the exercises build on the previous ones. Click the buttons below to see the details on the Marketplace.

Three times the fun

Teaching Tools

👩🏻‍🏫🛠️AI blog writer

A link for another AI powered Blog post writer popped up in a newsletter I read. I hadn’t tested any of these yet so I tried this one out. Not going to lie, kind of impressed. 

I spent about 2-3 minutes entering the information about the type of article I wanted, the AI went through a few steps:

• Rough outline

• Did some online research

• Fleshed out the outline

• Wrote a really long and boring article

• Changed the tone of the article to what I had requested

• Gave itself feedback on the article 

• Then wrote a final version

Start to finish, from me loading the page to having the article was less than 10 minutes, and I had never seen or used this tool before. Wow

So next, I naturally decided to have it write an article about itself.

And here is the PDF

I thought it was a little long so I had another AI work on it.

Finally, when I had a third AI (Gemini) create an image for the article it did a sort of summary, which is what I would actually post in a newsletter with links to the longer article. Here is that summary

Is this the future?

Editorial

✍️🃏 Editorial: How should we prepare our toddlers for the future?

This topic has been on my mind way too much lately. During open discussion with my students that have toddlers, I often ask the question “What jobs do you think there will be for your child?”. Many people admit to have given the subject some thought, but nobody really has an answer. I think everyone is in a holding pattern waiting to see which way the AI/robotics revolution goes.

It could go a few different ways:

• Abundance - AI releases mankind from the drudgery of jobs nobody really wants to do, and creates a time of abundance, where people are not pursuing money, power and trinkets but instead seek knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment.

• Bubble - AI is just a fad, people decide not to use it and AI becomes a novelty.

• 1984 - The wrong people leverage AI to accumulate an obscene amount of power, wealth and control over the rest of humanity.

• Singularity - Control of AI is lost or never achieved and AI decides we are annoying and need to be removed, we use too many resources anyway.

• Other - Something in-between or none of the above.

Regardless of how it eventually turns out, what will jobs or life in general be like for my almost 3 year old? I don’t think a University degree is the ticket (even these days). Then there’s the trades, but how many of those won’t be doable by robots? You have the military, but drones are going to be replacing a lot of the boots on the ground. Who knows?

Do you know?

Links

🧐⛓️‍💥Interesting Links

These are links that I found interesting but haven’t written about, there is simply too much happening these days.

• Factbot by Snopes. 

• America’s Rudest cities

• You can check out a “ghost hunting kit” at this library

• As Elon predicted, electricity is a hurdle for large AI systems, I think we can expect to see a push for more energy production, higher rates and pleas to conserve from now on.

• You Were Probably Taught to Read Wrong

Enjoy!!

Weekly Poll

👋🏾Well that’s it for this issue

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