Tag Archives: Tech

How to help your elementary school learner harness the power of ChatGPT

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I’m a mom and a woman in tech.  And sometimes the ideals of both can be at odds with each other.  But, this also makes me passionate about both topics. It makes me want to learn and explore so I can help my family on this journey!  

In a few weeks, I’ll be talking (read: podcasting) about helping our kids find balance when it comes to learning with and using technology.  I’m still working through my speaking notes but it made me want to get THIS post down on ‘paper’.

Image from Real Programming 4 Kids

ChatGPT came blazing on to the scene for the general public a few months ago. And very quickly education systems started realizing how the immediate uses of this AI (as declared by general users described on reddit and tiktok) could be detrimental to the current (and well outdated) strategies of education. We quickly learned that ChatGPT could:

  • write essays
  • sail through the MCAT
  • take notes on a large piece of text / video

Now, I’m not saying that ChatGPT will be the great end all be all for disrupting how elementary schools operate, especially as there are some identified flaws:

  • provides comprehensive answers when they should be concise
  • can provide prejudice / biased responses
  • for some answers, it’s more wordy than it is detailed

So how can you help your elementary learner embrace AI and support their education? 

  1. generate vocab lists/review letter sounds
  2. automate cue cards/questions for study session
  3. learn new topics

Check out the gallery for some of the questions I asked and answers ChatGPT provided!

Blogmas | Tech definitions for you and your grandma

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I recently listed to Brit Morin explained a few tech buzzwords and I felt compelled to share!  Check out the definitions for you and your grandma below!

Web 3.0

This essentially means we are in the 3rd version of the world wide web/internet. But there is a very interesting difference between each version (shout out to all the folks who know how to swith their floppy from read to write). 

Web 1.0 was dial up where most of the users could only READ what was posted by government or other professional bodies.  Web 2.0 was where people started actually creating content on the internet.  Whether that was blog posts, facebook photo albums or youtube tutorials – meaning we were able to WRITE on the internet.  Web 3.0 is where it’s tricky.  We are still creating content, but we now are starting to realize we do not own any of that data.  Like I am writing this post right now, but I have no legitimate ownership of these words.  It’s technically owned by the companies that store the data (ie: go daddy and wordpress).  When we had floppy disks we could write to it and also share it with others without a real worry that it was going to be stolen.  But now because go daddy has got my blog post on their servers I can’t be for sure they won’t use it for their own gain).

It’s an interesting concept that brings up a lot of questions about control and ownership.

Blockchain

Think of block chain as at type of technology that acts like a ledger.  What is a ledger, it’s a term used in banking to document all transactions of an institution.  Blockchain can be used to track all types & details of transactions (details such as: who made the txn, when, was something bought, was something sold etc).  Why does this matter?  Well blockchain has the ability to be the bridge between moving society from only writing on Web 2.0 to successful ownership of one’s own data in Web 3.0 (because Web 3.0 was built on blockchain).  There are more uses of blockchain like identity and finance but just thinking of it as a book that records all the details of any type of transaction is key.

Want more? Follow my Blogmas 2022 journey here!