The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.
I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.
Link to an example:
https://learnyourway.withgoogle.com/scopes/AOcKkhsL/slides-n...
It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.
The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.
EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?
When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.
Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.
But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?
It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.
We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...
Everywhere you look in education there are problems. There isn't going to be some stylized answer.
These Google guys - and a lot of other people who write comments online - go and promote something they think is a world view or theory, and is really just a bunch of stereotypes and projections of their own college-aged vengances. VC likes these kind of people! These Google guys fit that mold. I can agree with the broad strokes of techno-utopia, but that also means you need space to say that your app is bad, your art is ugly, and your text is long and boring.
These Google guys do not have space for criticism. They are Enterprise Sales. If the district asks for tasteless Corporate Memphis art, that's the art they're going to get - I'm going to focus on the art because I know something about art, and the text that appeared in the demo was so horrifically boring that I didn't read it. Have you opened a children's book? None of it looks like fucking Corporate Memphis!
One thing I am certain of is that these Google guys do have taste, they are smart people. Their problem is Enterprise Sales. Don't get me wrong. If you are narrowly focused on giving people what they want, your creative product will fail.
The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.
The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.
1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)
2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)
3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)
Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.
"a list can be used for a recipe"
"a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals"
"a map can be used for a cookbook"
"a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen"
"a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together"
Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.
I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem.
existing material is clear enough to learn from.
I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be:
> Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing
Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a generation of memes of the likes we have never seen before. And if the side-effect is more people are at least conversant in more topics, well, maybe that's not a failure mode at all
I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.
Like, if you had made the text pdf readers do some manual thinking by working on trying to place the topic into the same type of familiar/favored context, wouldn't that have been the better comparison?
I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts) but I'm not excited by this particular study structure.
Call me pessimistic, but this technology looks more poised to replace teachers in schools than supplement them.
No AI you ever create will get a kid to choose learning how math works over doing basically anything else with their time. The point of school is not to teach, it is to discipline children to participate in education. Otherwise, why have it at all? Kids can find extensive information and guides for basically any topic they want on the internet right now.
The entire "AI education" thing misses this.
lagniappe•58m ago