Playful learning
Digital literacy learnathon in Denmark, Claude's learning mode, how we talk about how LLMs 'think', Roblox lootboxes, Minecraft Movie, and much more...
What’s happening
Phew! Well done to teachers and all educators for getting through the spring term. We wish everyone a happy Easter holiday.
It's been a busy term for us, from presenting at BETT, guest lecturing at UCL and joining colleagues at Linköping University to working on a DfE toolkit for teachers on the safe and effective use of AI. We’ll be taking a break from the newsletter for a couple of weeks over the school holidays – back in your inboxes on 25 April.
European teachers collaborate on digital literacy through the Co-Create Erasmus project
Next week Sarah will be in Denmark meeting with teachers and school leaders from Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden for the Co-Create Erasmus project's second in-person programme week. Schools across these countries are collaborating to explore digital literacy, computational thinking, design thinking, media literacy and the responsible use of data and AI.
At each meeting, teachers share feedback on classroom-based action research projects (called learnathons) they've conducted since the previous gathering and plan new investigations based on shared ideas and practices.
What are learnathons?
These learnathons serve as extended assignments that bridge the gap between project meetings. Teachers apply insights from collaborative sessions to experiment with innovative approaches to teaching digital skills and literacies in their own classrooms. Working alongside their students, they test various creative methods for developing digital literacy skills, tailoring approaches to meet specific student needs.
Curriculum connections
The project draws on different aspects of digital literacy from each country's curriculum, with the Finnish National Literacy Strategy's concept of "multiliteracies" providing a particularly well-articulated framework.
Focus for Denmark
During the visit to Middelfart, Denmark, participants will:
Learn about the Danish curriculum and observe teaching practices in local schools
Explore design thinking and the design circle as learning tools
Investigate playful learning approaches based on work from the Lego Foundation and the Capital of Children in Billund.
The Lego Foundation defines playful learning as activities that incorporate five key characteristics: they must be joyful, meaningful, socially interactive, actively engaging, and iterative.
Sarah will report back from Denmark on the collaboration between teachers and school leaders when we return after the Easter break.
AI roundup
Which LLM is the best fit for your task?
There are many detailed and in-depth guides to the various LLMs (and we’ve certainly pointed to a few of these in newsletters past) but this is a good overview of strengths and weaknesses of the current crop, which would be a useful starting point for anyone dipping a toe into AI waters for the first time.
Claude’s new ‘learning mode’
Anthropic has launched a new Claude for Education tier, initially aimed at education, and the LSE is one of its first customers with a ‘full campus deal’ for all students (but not all faculty, Michelle notes). Tech Crunch has reviewed the initiative and highlights that the ‘learning mode’ feature allows Claude to ask questions, rather than simply answering them, to test understanding, highlight fundamental principles behind specific problems, and provide potentially useful templates for research papers, outlines and study guides.
Rooms with no elephants and otters on airplanes
Ethan Mollick takes a look at multimodal image generation and the huge advances that have been made in this area. He provides powerful examples of the capabilities of GPT-4o when offered both text-based and image-based prompts, but also touches on some of the concerns and complexities raised by these images.
“These multimodal systems are reshaping the landscape of visual creation, offering powerful new capabilities while raising legitimate questions about creative ownership and authenticity. The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur, pushing us to reconsider what constitutes originality in a world where anyone can generate sophisticated visuals with a few prompts.”
Less futuristic, more practical?
The time-saving potential of AI was front of mind for education secretary Bridget Philipson as she toured a Department for Education-sponsored AI hackathon and emphasised that she was less interested on how children may or may not use AI in schools than in how it could help staff and reduce workloads:
“In the next few years I want to see AI tech embedded across schools, with staff supported to use the best technology to improve children’s outcomes but also to make teaching a more attractive career for people to go into and stay.”
How reasoning models actually ‘think’
There’s lots of unfortunate anthropomorphisation in this Economist article, which claims that researchers are “peering inside the minds of LLMs”, but it relays some interesting findings. As Alex Hern notes in his Bluesky thread on the research, it suggests that the ‘next token prediction’ model is too simplistic – LLMs are doing more than simply looking for the word that statistically ends the sentence most often. Instead, when prompted to write a rhyming couplet, “it begins thinking of the rhyme as soon as the first line is written, keeping it in mind as it writes the second line towards an intended ending”.
And how we talk about how AI ‘thinks’
Bryan Alexander has shared notes from a discussion about AI and language on the Future Trends Forum. His guests were Anna Mills and Nate Angell, authors of a new paper, Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations. Among the interesting topics were how the language we use about AI systems influences how we think about them. So, for example, Anna Mills prefers ‘mirage’ to ‘hallucination’ as mirage centres the viewer, the human perception, much better than hallucination, which suggests agency of the AI.
Quick links
Innovate for climate change schools summit: Emma Darcy has highlighted the upcoming climate change and digital innovation pupil-focused summit in Luton on 2 May. The event is invitation only so if you are interested in attending, complete the form.
‘They are scamming me’: what kids say about Roblox: children who were interviewed for new research into Roblox lootboxes and money in online games complain of “scary” and complex transactions, describe random reward systems as “child gambling”, and talk of “scams” and “cash grabs”, with the platform’s inflexible refund policy providing little recourse.
Experience CS: a free integrated curriculum for computer science: a partnership between Raspberry Pi and Google launches a new CS curriculum in June.
Crisis in childhood: yesterday saw children’s commissioner Rachel d’Souza launch the inaugural Festival of Childhood at the Young V&A in London and urge adults, and especially decision-makers, to actually listen to children – and then act on what they are telling us.
“If we want children to experience the vivid technicolour of life, the joy of childhood, the innocence of youth, we have to prove that we will respond more quickly to them than Chat GPT.”
Crisis in adolescence: and the fallout from the hard-hitting Netflix series Adolescence continues, with a focus on male inclusion in education and a call for more male teachers in schools (although research into the impact of this is mixed).
We’re reading, listening…
Farvel Google?
As Sarah will be working in Danish schools next week, this podcast was of particular interest, as it reports on the Danish Data Protection Agency order in 2022 that schools should stop using Google products over the tech firm’s misuse of students’ personal data. Neil Selwyn talks to Emilie Mørch Groth (Aarhus University) to see what has happened since, what this controversy tells us about the digital dependency of the modern welfare state, and the complexities of pushing back against Big Tech corporations.
What's next for the Online Safety Act?
The ParentZone’s TechShock podcast interviews Maeve Walsh from the Online Safety Act Network to explore the extent to which Ofcom is overlooking safety-by-design measures in favour of addressing harms that have already occurred, and how the UK Government might strengthen the Act against both global developments and developments in technology.
However, is the implementation of the Online Safety Act now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression?
We also enjoyed the FT’s brilliant Lunch with Beeban Kidron, in which the veteran online safety campaigner discusses her efforts to curb Big Tech.
Off the starting blocks
We will undoubtedly be watching A Minecraft Movie as a Minecraft-obsessed daughter has been counting down the days until it’s out in the cinemas. Luckily this Guardian review suggests it might not be too painful for all the parents across the country who have to sit through it at some point during these Easter holidays (and there are homegrown alternatives if it turns out to be as dire as the trailer suggested). But for an insight into the phenomenon that is Minecraft, this excellent FT article (free read but you may need to register) explores the secrets of the success of the most popular video game of all time.
Give it a try
Browse a cleaner web
Add 12ft.io/ – like this https://12ft.io/ <URL> – to the URL of a webpage to remove popups, banners and other visual distractions.
Connected Learning is by Sarah Horrocks and Michelle Pauli
