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EASIE AI - For learners, parents, and teachers

Richer lessons and better progress are possible with AI support at home.

Author

Educational App Store
June 18, 2024

Welcome, cutting-edge educators and aspirational parents

Introducing your no-nonsense EASie guide to using AI to support your kids’ learning and growing your own AI literacy

Today, we’ll cover:

  • Break bad habits with the help of Socrates

  • AI Beginners Jargon—Prompt

  • AI Adepts Jargon—Retrieval-Augmented Generation

  • Good prompting—clarity

  • AI News

Reading Time 4 Mins

Talk to the past! Habit Homies

Source Dall-E

Break out of your echo chamber and build better habits into your life by chatting with [checks notes] A ROMAN EMPEROR! (or Socrates). We loved Habit Homies’ original take on using AI to get a new perspective on self-improvement. It is a fully-fledged habit tracker which uses AI’s role-playing potential to provide guidance and ideas for breaking out of a rut.

Step-by-step

  • Go to Habit Homies and check the review.

  • Click download on iOS (sorry, non-iOS users)

  • Sign into the app

  • Tell the app how you’d like to improve.

  • See what the Stoic philosophers would recommend.

Make a Note — AI Note-taking apps

Apple announced that its next release of iPadOS would have many AI features, but those of us with handwriting we can’t even read might be eager to see what their handwriting assistance will offer.

This feature will let you use your Apple Pencil to write on your iPad, making it readable but still your handwriting. For some of us, that seems paradoxical. It could be a boon if you still make notes better with a pen than a keyboard.

AI Jargon - Learning

We’ll help you increase your knowledge of AI by explaining a beginner and advanced concept each week.

For AI beginners—We all start somewhere.

GPT

The initialism GPT now serves two roles in AI. It should mean Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which includes the family of AI models known as LLMs (think ChatGPT). However, ChatGPT named one of its functions GPTs.

These GPTs provide a way of pre-instructing ChatGPT to work in a way suited to specific tasks. Creating one is essential, the same as providing a detailed prompt that ChatGPT will use each time the GPT is needed.

  • GPTs are very convenient for tasks you repeat often.

  • Originally, only paying users could use ChatGPT’s GPTs. Now, free account users can access them

  • Microsoft’s CoPilot also has GPTs, but the facility for non-commercial users to create them will be removed next month.

For AI Adepts—Next level AI Knowledge!

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Each LLM’s knowledge is fixed. It has no knowledge of something that happened the day after training was completed, and it cannot be easily added to the underlying model. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is when your LLM brings in information from elsewhere.

  • Google’s Gemini and Bing.AI use a web search to perform RAG. The results support the prompt you enter and can be fully up-to-date.

  • When you question a PDF or other document with an LLM, you are using RAG.

  • The new data provided by RAG feeds into the prompt—it doesn’t usually have any special status or increased importance.

  • RAG cannot provide a whole document, so it uses chunks. The relevance of these chunks may not always be perfect, or they may split key information.

  • RAG can reduce AI hallucinations but not guarantee their absence.

Prompt Guide

Good prompting practice for you. Learning opportunities for your kids

Clarity

Good prompting and good writing are the same thing. You want to communicate your needs without room for confusion or taking longer than you need.

  • Ask yourself what you want from the AI, and express it as clearly as possible.

  • Don’t waste words.

  • Good punctuation will help, but AI can be quite forgiving.

  • Inserting line breaks can help you write clearly.*

*Pressing enter will start the prompt on web-based chatbots like ChatGPT, but pressing SHIFT and ENTER together will start a new line without telling the AI to begin.

Learning opportunity:

While kids (under 13) aren’t permitted to use chatbots like ChatGPT unsupervised, according to the T&Cs, you can support their AI literacy by helping them develop the skills to create effective prompts. Highlight to them the links between good writing habits and building AI skills.

AI Safety

Best Practices in AI for Education

Buddy.AI

Generative AI is still too unpredictable for apps for young kids, but that does not mean AI can’t support learning for under 13s. Buddy.AI does not contain AI, but its developers, as part of the Educational App Store’s AI Assessment, noted how AI helped streamline its development.

AI can create learning content quickly, and then humans can check it. This, combined with other, less risky, AI technology, such as speech recognition and natural language processing, can improve the interactivity for young kids.

Take a look at the Buddy AI review.

AI News

Your one-stop, in-brief AI newsstand

  • Apple announced it would train all Apple Developer Academy students and mentors across six countries in technologies AI tools and tech.

  • Multiple AI Video generators impressed social media users this week with videos that take an image and turn it into a short video. Memes came alive and old photos gained a new life. Luma’s Dream Machine and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha are waiting-list only, but the AI video is clearly coming.

  • Meta has agreed not to train its AI on data from users in the UK and EU. The GDPR, which passed into UK law before Brexit, is considered an obstacle to this use of data.

We hope you’ve learned something new about AI and that we’ll see you again. AI holds great promise for education when used safely, responsibly, and effectively. This newsletter is one part we want to play to help raise AI Literacy skills for parents, teachers and kids. 

We have other plans to help ensure AI is a force for good in education—you’ll find out more about those in future newsletters. See you then!