EASIE AI - For learners, parents, and teachers [Issue 4]

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:

• Trending AI Apps

• Using new tools - Audio Generation - Free

• Generating Images with AI - Backgrounds

• AI Beginners Jargon—Overfitting

• AI Adepts Jargon—Deepfakes

• Good prompting—Examples

• AI Summarization—Uses and Tips

• AI News

Reading Time 5 Mins

Trending AI Apps

AI apps delighting educators and parents.

• Habit Homies - AI makes ancient philosophers your lifestyle consultants!

• Super Teacher App offers unlimited tutoring in any subject at any time with varied learning content for ages 3 - 8+

• QuestionWell generates unlimited standards-aligned questions for anyone to support kids’ learning. Capable free tier!

Using New Tools - Audio-Generation

Do you want custom pop songs for your lessons?

Step-by-step

• Go to UDIO

• Click JOIN in the top right.

• Create an account with one of the available sign-in options (no emails).

• Enter your prompt by clicking in the top left corner (marked by two little dice and an example prompt—it isn’t obvious)

• Click Create in the top right.

• Wait a few minutes.

• Boogie!

Teaching/Learning Use

I wanted an introduction lesson where kids learn the keywords about volcanoes in a fun way.

Prompt: Write a pop song about volcanoes. Use words like volcano, lava, magma, igneous, and Pompeii in the lyrics.

I’d let kids listen to this song and ask them to research the keyword meanings. I’d follow up by going cross-curricular, shifting from geography/science to English language arts/music, and asking them to see if they can compose better lyrics than the AI.

You’d probably agree that even talented songwriters would struggle with this, and so did the AI. My result got lots of “la la la lava, la la la igneous”, but I forgive it for fudging it because the song was as catchy as anything, and it still does what I wanted.

Generating Images With AI

Be an AI Photographer!

Background Elements

Last week I showed the image on the left to illustrate a section with a warning. The image on the right was one of the earlier attempts I rejected because of its background.

If you look closely, you’ll see the train in the background is twisted. Such errors often occur in image generation. An easy way to avoid them is to crop them out or blur the background, which I did on the image I used.

Photographers use depth of field to blur the background when they want the viewers to focus on the subject, and, as AI is trained on photos, it understands it. Add ‘shallow depth of field’ to your prompts to blur the background.

How does this help in education?

Kids look for distractions! That twisted train would have been what many kids focused on rather than the main subject. If you intended to support kids in descriptive writing of the character, that train would have competed with your objective. Use this tip to remove the background and quickly get to the right image.-

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.

Deepfake

A deepfake is a type of synthetic media where artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning algorithms, is used to create realistic but fake images, videos, or audio recordings. These manipulations can make it appear that a person is doing or saying something they never actually did.

A lot of media coverage discusses how deepfakes might manipulate elections or harm the image of celebrities, but they could also impact ordinary life.

They can:

• Harm reputations by making it appear as if a teacher said something they did not.

• Put children in danger by creating a false sense of security through impersonating a parent’s voice.

• Damage mental health if false videos are used to depict children engaging in embarrassing activities as part of bullying.

• Facilitate fraud—impersonation of someone else is obviously open to gaining trust where it is not warranted.

For AI Adepts—Next level AI Knowledge!

Overfitting

Did you know AI models can be trained too much? A good analogy for overfitting is that it’s like studying a math paper by memorising the answers. You’ll be able to ace that test but not apply anything to a different paper as you have bypassed the underlying concepts.

AI training can do this, too. It can study its initial data pool so much that it can’t apply the information to new concepts.

AI trained to distinguish cats from dogs needs to recognise the general differences between the animals. However, if it spends too much time learning with the same data, it starts to memorise the details of the images, such as the ground material or sky and uses these as part of its detection which will lead to poor results.

Prompt Guide

Good prompting practice for you. Learning opportunities for your kids

Examples

Sometimes, we make better sense of text by using formatting rather than punctuation. For example, examples! A textbook might tell you how to do something, and then give an example in a box or use italics.

You can get better responses if you help your chatbot section text in the same way using XML tags (don’t worry—they’re very simple).

Prompt: I've included an explanation of photosynthesis below. Please summarize it so that 3rd-grade readers can understand it.

<explanation>The original explanation</explanation>

Notice the black slash on the second tag.

• You can use any word in the tags as long as they both match, although it is likely to yield better results if they make sense in their context.

• Use <example></example> if you have an existing output you would like the chatbot to emulate, such as its structure.

• You can also ask chatbots to structure their output in XML, which can help you make more use of the output.

• You can use multiple tags to help chatbots know how the purposes of each section of your prompt.

Teaching Help

If you have an explanation of one topic that strikes the perfect tone and structure this method lets you emulate it for another topic. Place the new unedited topic in <information> tags and the new existing, useful text in <example> tags.

Please edit the information below so that a third-grader can understand it. Use a similar style and structure as I have provided in the example.

<information>topic 1 </information>

<example>topic 2</example>

Learning Opportunity

We’ve said before that good writing and good prompting share common traits. A clear structure is part of clarity. A good exercise is to provide a jumbled prompt to kids and ask them to structure it using tags such as <information> and <example>.

The information would be part of the output's content, but the example would show how the chatbot should structure it.

AI For Summarising

One of the strongest uses for current AI is summarization. There are many reasons we might need a summary for educational and professional purposes.

The Educational App Store covers why and how you can use summaries to save time and offer improved learning in its article: AI Summarisers for Teachers - Educational App Store.

See if you can find a new use for your chosen AI platform or one that is even more effective.

AI News

Your one-stop, in-brief AI newsstand

• YouTube now lets you request the takedown of content that simulates your face or voice. Deepfake images and voices could have hugely damaging impacts on reputations and mental wellbeing, so this is a welcome feature that we hope will be well implemented.

• Khan Academy released a unique dataset to help educational app developers produce safe AI.

• Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) continues to support open source AI in this YouTube interview with Kane Sutter.