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😑📘Koala Teachers Family recap

Noteworthy posts

• Free Valentine’s Day lessons from Abridge Academy

• Important Update meeting by the Koala Team

• Deanna is starting a YouTube channel for students

Koala Go

Koala Go Update Meeting

In case you hadn’t seen the Facebook post or hadn’t noticed the recent slowdown on updates from Koala, here is a link to register for the meeting.

Click the image or link below to register.

Don’t miss it!!

Teaching Tools

 👩🏻‍🏫🛠️Digiscreen, one of the many free education tools from La Digitale

A free classroom whiteboard/organizer for online or in-person classes.

Click on the image or link to see the article

I’m really liking this

1440 - The newsletter

AI Tools

🤖🛠️Image Playground on the Mac

Apple’s latest update for Mac included this app, I was pleasantly surprised.

 Click the image or link below to see the article.

Generate images on your own computer

Koala Go Playgrounds

🐨🛝What’s on my workbench these days?

Wait a minute… that’s not a Playground, I am currently getting up to speed on some no-code programming skills. It’s a steep learning curve, but should be worth it.

A working prototype, that needs a lot more work

Editorial

✍️🃏Editorial: 2025, the year of AI agents

If you keep up with AI news that’s the headline, 2025 is the year for AI agent development and I would have to agree, every major player and many startups are jumping on the bandwagon rolling out their own versions of agents. To keep up I have been going down that rabbit hole so I can be an early adopter. To me, it seems like there are two major ways of tackling agents:

• An AI with vision having control of a browser and basically navigating the internet as a human would.

• Coding various tools for an AI or AIs to use in a sort of script. This is what I’m focusing on at the moment.

That first option is, so far, pretty clunky, slow and expensive in inference time (the real cost of AI). It’s going to get much faster, more accurate and magnitudes cheaper this year.

I like that second approach as it seems silly to restrict a computer to a slow inefficient human user interface when everything could be coded. But this would require more work to modify current human focused websites and tools. It seems like a pay me now or pay me later sort of deal.

I believe there is room for both and situations where one will be better than the other, so I need to get ready for both.

Since I don’t have access the first type of agent at this time, the method and platform I chose to experiment with is called No-Code, and although it’s true that you aren’t actually writing code, it really helps to understand how code works and have the vocabulary well in hand, and that’s your learning curve. Since I haven’t really written any code since about 1985, I do have a lot to catch up on and my learning curve looks like a vertical wall at this point.

Getting that rough draft storyteller working was only the start of a long journey.

Are you ready for AI agents?

Links

🧐⛓️‍💥Interesting Links

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

That’s it for this week, Enjoy!!

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.