Category: writing
-
Teaching Writing in the Age of AI
With Victoria the latest state to ban ChatGPT, teachers everywhere are grappling with the implications of the large language model and the impact it will have on the classroom. We know that banning and blocking technology is – at best – a temporary solution. Students will find ways around the blocks, and teachers will be […]
-
Practical Writing Strategies: Sneak Peak
This is an extract from the introduction to Practical Writing Strategies. PWS is written by myself and Benjamin White, and will be published by Amba Press later this year. Introduction What is writing? When Leon wrote Practical Reading Strategies, he started with a seemingly simple question: what is reading? The question came from a Community […]
-
Getting Motivated for the Personal Response
This post refers to the new VCE English and EAL Study Design. However, the ideas about personal writing can be applied anywhere in the English curriculum where students are expected to respond personally to texts. Many schools in Victoria will be preparing for the new Unit 1 Reading and Exploring Texts outcome, the Personal Response. […]
-
Socrates Against The Machine: Can Looking Back Help Us to Think About the Future of Education?
Socrates Against The Machine: Can Looking Back Help Us to Think About the Future of Education? In the past two weeks, AI writing has gone mainstream. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an app sitting on top of its latest large language model, was released for “public testing”, and it seems to have captured the imagination of a large chunk […]
-
Prompt Whispering: Getting better results from ChatGPT
This article was originally posted over on LinkedIn. If you haven’t heard about ChatGPT in the past week, then your LinkedIn feed looks dramatically different to mine. Probably due to the nature of the people I follow, and the algorithms lurking under the hood, the latest experiment from OpenAI has almost entirely filled my feed, Chrome suggestions, […]
-
Can an AI critique human writing?
My previous post on OpenAI’s latest offering – ChatGPT – demonstrated how far the technology has come in essay writing. ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is capable of generating human-like text based on a given prompt or input. ChatGPT uses a technique called “transformer” architecture to process the input text […]
-
A New Level of AI Essay
I’ve written a number of posts this year about Artificial Intelligence and education. Next week, I’ll start my PhD exploring AI and writing, and it’s fair to say I’ve been down the rabbit hole. The rate of change is very rapid, and it seems like every week a new app is released which builds on […]
-
Reading and Exploring: How to write the OC1 Personal Response
I just got back from the VATE conference after two days with some of the best English teachers and presenters in the state. We also heard directly from the VCAA and a handful of the examination panel about the new Study Design. It’s clear that the new SD is looming large for English teachers and […]
-
Choosing Mentor Texts
Before the new VCE English and EAL Study Design was launched for consultation I had already written a few posts about using texts as models, from students’ own writing through to literary classics. When the SD came out, it was great to see that idea translated into the ‘mentor texts’ for Crafting and Creating Texts. […]
-
VCE English and EAL: Assessing the new Crafting and Creating Texts outcomes
In all of the Professional Learnings I’ve been running recently related to the new Study Design, the assessment question has cropped up more than any other. We don’t have a sample examination yet; and we won’t get one until well into next year. But the VCAA have provided us with Unit 3 and 4 Performance […]
Leon Furze 