Month: November 2023

The noises of knowledge production

Posted on by School of Education University of Bristol

Blog by Dr Rachel Helme and Michael Rumbelow, TLC Research Centre, School of Education

How to record and represent the non-verbal sounds of the School of Education? This was the challenge we set ourselves in an experimental research project recently funded by the TLC Research Centre.

Several constraints were explicit in the brief, for example to avoid identifiable human speech, to spend a certain number of hours on production, ethically to make people aware of when and where and why we were recording, to use only the relatively modest equipment budgeted for, and to produce a short podcast-length soundfile of up to 20 minutes. (more…)

UK announces AI funding for teachers: how this technology could change the profession

Posted on by School of Education University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nicola Warren-Lee, University of Bristol and Lyndsay Grant, University of Bristol

During the recent international AI Safety Summit held in the UK, the government announced a further £2 million to be invested in Oak National Academy – a publicly funded classroom resource hub – to develop artificial intelligence tools to help reduce teachers’ workloads.

Generative AI, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, responds to prompts from users to produce content. It has become a hot topic in education.

While there isn’t much up-to-date research on how teachers are using AI, we know from our work with schools that teachers are experimenting with AI to create lesson plans, classroom resources and schemes of work. For example, a teacher might ask ChatGPT, “make me a lesson plan on river flooding in Tewkesbury for year seven”. Within seconds, a plan will be available containing learning objectives, materials, activities, homework, assessments and more. (more…)