Claire Amos

Image source What New Zealand Could Learn from Estonia’s Bold AI Leap in Education Estonia has done it again —pushing boundaries and proving that a small nation with a big vision can lead the world in digital education. Their latest initiative, AI Leap 2025, is a gutsy, all-in move to integrate artificial intelligence into their education system. And frankly, New Zealand should be paying close attention. As a school leader, I see AI sneaking into our classrooms whether we like it or not (spoiler: the kids are already using it whether we like it or not). The question is, will we, as an education system, harness AI’s potential, or will we fumble our way through while our students and some schools get ahead while others fall behind? Doubling down on an already alarming digital divide. Estonia’s approach offers some serious food for thought—so let’s break it down. From Tiger Leap to AI Leap—Where’s Our Big Leap? Back in the 1990s, Estonia’s Tiger Leap programme brought computers and the in...

X link: https://twitter.com/michelledennis Types of AI - vision speech, language, search, decision Source: https://inclusioncloud.com/insights/blog/azure-cognitive-services/ Source: https://ai4k12.org/ Every time you interact with AI you are training the AI and making it better. Showed a number of images getting listeners to choose which photos are real people and which are generated, highlighting how hard it is to to pick. Showed the results showing the same prompt being used a year apart and showing how much AI has already evolved and improved. Showing AI-created video, currently short and have to pay for service but this will change soon. ChatGPT and friends - ChatGPT is growing the most quickly. Talked about prompts and the ways you iterate improving and updating responses. ChatGPT - lowered the level of skill needed to get responses. Low threshold to use it but suggests needing to understand some of the ways it works. ChatGPT Vision - now breaks down images into words. Example - u...

A focus on leadership & well-being amidst great challenges and opportunities. From the programme: While previously considered a profession that offers a balanced lifestyle, more recently the education sector has gone through a steady professionalisation and a stagnation in the lifestyle benefits it can offer. As the responsibility of teachers continues to grow, and emerging interest in the profession declines, schools and the education sector more broadly must appropriately respond to the current and future needs of educators. In this session Mark will provide a practical, data-driven and engaging guide to these education trends, how these massive shifts are changing the way in which students engage with their education, and teachers engage their students, and why work wellbeing is a non-negotiable for the future and how to achieve it. Demographic growth and change Australia's 2.2% annual growth rate More people and more students Internal migration Rise of the regions 60% have ...

Below are the slides I shared at NZQA's 'Assessment in the Age of AI' symposium.   This is my brief overview of how we are approaching AI at Albany Senior High School and some of the concerns and some of thoughts I have about the topic.  In short, I am worried we are so damn busy we aren't giving it the attention it needs. I also worry that leaders will try and ignore and/or attempt to ban and that this ignores the fact that Pandora's Box is well and truly opened and this thing is developing faster than we can imagine and is increasingly woven into platforms and tools we already use. We are sitting at a fork in the path where both options lead to a world fundamentally altered by AI and we need to choose whether to work with it or stick our heads in the sand. That decision is going to have a tangible impact on how well our young people are going to be equipped to thrive in the future.  We need to embrace AI, and approach it with curiosity, criticality and care.  ...

Today I am lucky enough to be down at the NZQA 'Assessment in the Age of AI' symposium. I will share my presentation later today. We started the day with a kick-ass keynote from Dr Simon McCallum. You can listen to him speak about the topic here: How AI chatbots could shake up the world   - item from TV show Q+A introducing AI and our keynote Simon McCallum Below are my notes from his session. No apologies for typos and shorthand. ;)  Understanding Generative AI A large language model was initially designed with translation in mind. Translating requires understanding. "Meaning is Usage", mapping words and the connection between words. Some of what we mean is embedded in the words we use. LLM start by mapping words into vectors connecting relationships between words. Meaning in tokens, attention on windows, and building understanding.  Source: https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/06/word-embeddings-count-word2veec/ Tokens are the basic units of text or code that a...