Issue 49

New color scheme

Author

David Skaife
December 03, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

In partnership with

Facebook

😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

Not really much activity on the Facebook page this week

Koala Go Tutorial

 🐨🛝Koala Go Whiteboard Dress-up activity and bringing student drawings to life

Taking an already fun activity one step further with the help of AI.

Click the image or link below to see the article.

I don’t know why this is so fun

1440 - The newsletter

I scan this one nearly everyday for something new and interesting to read about.

Sheep Thumbs GIF

Have a look, you might like it too!

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Teaching Tools - Canva

👩🏻‍🏫🛠️Canva: Magic Grab

It’s like magic…AI powered magic.

 Click the image or link below to see the article.

One of Canva’s AI powered tools

Polls - surveys - trivia

📝🎤Polls and surveys

Unimpressed Loop GIF

The engagement level in past surveys/polls was less than stellar, but now it’s time to take another stab at it😁

The quote below was written by Claude, a large language model AI assistant by Anthropic. I gave Claude my ideas on the topic, Claude wrote a very nice first draft, but I asked for a rewrite with a different tone and style. Below are the results.

Hey there!

Let's talk polls. When you take a moment to answer our quick surveys, you're not just clicking a button—you're helping us create a newsletter that actually speaks to you. Think of it like tuning a radio to the perfect station: your feedback helps us find just the right frequency.

Why does your input matter? Because this newsletter isn't just something we send out; it's a conversation we're building together. Every response gives us a clearer picture of what you want to read, learn, and explore.

So next time you see a poll, jump in! It'll take less time than making a cup of coffee, and you'll be directly shaping what lands in your inbox. Pretty cool, right?

Claude

Thanks for your continued support and answering the survey👍

Koala Go Playgrounds

🐨🛝What’s on my workbench these days?

Another build in the experimental phase

Always trying new ideas

Editorial

✍️🃏Editorial: The new look of Koala Bites

You probably noticed some changes to the newsletter this week, mainly the colors. The original color palette was one that I liked on Canva, but to be honest I was getting bored with it. I decided to go either monochrome (black, white, gray) or the opposite direction. Some of you may recognize the colors, they seemed appropriate.

"Crafting Connection: Technology, Creativity, and Continuous Improvement" - Image prompt and caption created by Claude, image by Leonardo, Gemini was not in the mood to be helpful I guess.

The logo has been updated, I saw no reason to replace that original AI generated Koala Bites design, I still really like it, so I decided to just colorize it.

When looking at every section I could see some that were only taking up space, so I removed them. The goal is to be as sleek and useful as possible.

Awhile back I started posting all my articles on the website with only introductions and links to them in the newsletter, my reasons for this were twofold. First, now all articles can be searched there instead of being hidden in old newsletters. Second, I felt that the newsletter needed to be shorter in length, and now it is. 

Behind the scenes I have made some organizational changes that make it less work to publish every week. You won’t notice these, but I certainly do.

In no particular order, the next steps I have planned for future changes are:

  • Including polls/surveys, my earlier attempts got very low numbers of respondents, but it’s time to try again.

  • Using the automations functions to welcome people when they sign up and other things I have been thinking about to add more value.

  • The Beehiiv team is constantly adding new features and functionality, some unannounced and/or undocumented. Even after all this time I’m only scratching the surface of what is possible with the platform. I need to spend a bit more time digging around in the menus and asking the AI support bot questions, like this weekend when I decided to start changing things. As another example I just noticed a button to allow GIF usage as images…

Anyway, expect to see things evolving over time.

Also you can leave a comment or like by clicking the icons at the top of the newsletter, just under the issue number on the left side ❤️💬.

Hope you like the changes

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