Tag: teachers
-
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…
-
Advanced Techniques for ChatGPT in education
In a previous post on Practical Strategies for ChatGPT, I explored some of the basics of prompting the AI language model. I also organised education tasks into six areas: In this post I’ll go deeper into prompt techniques, and I’m organising around five key skills that could be used to lift your prompts in any…
-
Teaching AI Ethics
As we head into the start of Term 1 it’s already looking like Artificial Intelligence is going to be one of the most talked about issues in the classroom. Much of the narrative around models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has centred on students using it to cheat on assignments. But I’ve already been working with schools…
-
ChatGPT in Education: Back to Basics
Chances are slim by now that you haven’t heard of ChatGPT. Every major news outlet from the Guardian to the Herald Sun has run articles on OpenAI’s latest offering, and it has featured heavily on social media newsfeeds across Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I’ve written a lot of posts lately about ChatGPT in education, and…
-
I built an AI Section C generator and the world did not end
If you’ve read any online news recently you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’ve already been back at school for six months, and that ChatGPT has successfully destroyed the education system, killed the essay, and turned every one of our students into a compulsive plagiarist. I’ve written a number of posts about ChatGPT and AI…
-
Using Comparative Judgement to Assess Writing
If you’ve ever formally assessed senior English (at least here in Victoria), then you’ve used comparative judgement to assess writing. Comparative judgement, as the name suggests, is an assessment method based on comparing responses to determine their overall placement on an assessment scale. It’s an effective method supported by research, much of which is outlined…
-
Why write?
This is an early extract from our book Practical Writing Strategies, which will be published in 2023 by Amba Press. The elephant in the room Most of the time, we get students to write so we can assess them on their knowledge. Simple. It’s a sad truth that the main purpose of most writing in…
-
Teachers as Writers: Term 4 Professional Learning
Last term I wrote a three part series of posts reflecting on the importance of teachers as writers. In part one I talked about writing for an audience – whether that’s students, teachers, or the general public. Part two focused on the various kinds of writing teachers might engage in, from classroom modelling through to…
-
Review: Simple Tools by Martin Jorgensen
When I first received a copy of Martin Jorgensen’s Simple Tools I expected a book filled with suggestions for apps and digital tools to use in class. In fact, there are only a few recommendations for tools scattered throughout the text. What I found instead was a much more purposeful and systematic method for selecting…
-
Teachers as Writers: Part Three
In the previous two posts in this series I explored the reasons teachers might wish to write, and some of the ways in which teachers could increase their writing output. In this third and final post on the subject, I’ll explore the process of moving from teacher to author, and how to get published. Calling…