- AI can boost productivity by 47% according to surveyed employers
- 42% of employers are actively looking for people with AI qualifications…yet 75% of employers are having trouble finding qualified candidates
- Over 80% of younger employees, including Gen-Zs and Millennials, are interested in picking up AI skills. Even with retirement in sight, roughly two-thirds of workers over the age of 55 – Boomers – indicate they would enroll in an AI course if offered by their company.”
- Greeting card magic. Need to write a wonderful graduation message to your niece? Maybe, a congratulatory note to a friend, or celebrate secretary’s day with a greeting card? If you’ve found yourself drawing a blank at a critical moment, an AI chatbot can make life easier for you. Here are five prompts that will have people saying, “Wow, I wish I’d gotten a card from them.”
- Book Reviews. Read some books and want to write an awe-inspiring book review? Put together a short outline, then ask AI to craft a book review for you that incorporates the main points.
- Cover Letter Clean-up. Use AI chatbots to revise your cover letter in a way that matches your experience to the job requirements.
- Resume revision. Revise your resume to match a job description, or to tighten the language in your resume. Discuss pros and cons of this approach.
- Data Analysis. Analyze any collection of data, from your personal finances to developing a budget for your next trip.
- Travel Agent. Use a travel agent custom GPT (a chatbot designed for a specific purpose) to plan your next trip.
- list of ways goes here - more to come
- ChatGPT. Available in two versions, free and “Plus” ($20 a month), you can use it as a writing assistant. With the paid version, you can use custom GPTs to analyze large data sets to make graphs, design images, and get a higher quality response.
- Perplexity. Available in two versions, free and Pro ("$20 a month), this AI excels at answering questions updating information it provides with current web citations. You can attach and generate images, as well as analyze documents. It also allows you to switch AI models from ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, Google Gemini, and others. This is the author’s preferred general purpose AI chatbot.
- Claude. Boasting excellent word and sentence comprehension, it’s easy to give it large files for analysis and summary. Lacks up to date web citations in its Pro version ($20 a month).
- Microsoft CoPilot. A web-based tool that works for free with an account, offers up to date web citations, and image generation or analysis. This AI tool is integrated into a variety of Microsoft 365 tools. You may also appreciate it’s built-in image creator.
- Google Gemini. Available in free or paid versions, Google’s Gemini offers a wealth of analysis, up to date citations, and putting results in Google Workspace formats (e.g. Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.). Gemini Advanced offers even more functionality. It is integrated into Google Workspace tools as Google Duet.
Got Google EDU AI yet?
Google makes announcement about Gemini AI available for purchase…I am curious how many schools have purchased AI via Google for their teachers and older than 18 students?
Announcement
Starting May 23rd, education institutions can add Gemini for Google Workspace to their existing Workspace for Education edition for users 18 years and older by purchasing one of the following add-ons:
Gemini Education is a lower price offering to help education institutions get started with generative AI in Workspace, with a monthly usage limit. Through the Admin console, Admins can learn more about how people in their domain are trending towards their usage limits.
Gemini Education Premium includes everything in Gemini Education, plus additional advanced features like AI-powered note taking and summaries in Meet, AI-enhanced data loss prevention and more coming soon. This add-on provides full access and usage of generative AI tools in Workspace. via Google
10 Free Generative AI Courses Offered by Google #tcea #tceajmg #coaching #teaching #education #edtech
Google now offers 10 free courses in a Generative AI Learning Path. Take the courses and earn completion badges! Check them out. Want to learn more about Generative AI? Google has you covered with their recent announcement of ten free courses! Come along and take a quick tour of these amazing courses that can build your capacity for using artificial intelligence. These are a part of the Generative AI Learning Path offered in Google Cloud Skills Boost.
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AI Tool List
This post has been updated and moved. Find it online at
https://mglinks.org/ai/
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Timelines Made Easy
Why not introduce students to the concept of creating timelines to document their adventures? Consider guiding them through crafting timelines of their recent experiences. Demonstrating how to illustrate events with pictures and videos can be a powerful learning experience at any time of the year.
AI Smackdown: Gemini Advanced Versus Perplexity Pro
Wondering if a pro account is worth the $20? Let’s explore the similarities and differences between Gemini Advanced and Perplexity Pro. Artificial intelligence models change daily. What is impossible today will be child’s play tomorrow. AI middleware is available and knowing what tool to invest in can be difficult. For those of us in education, it’s critical to know what tools work best and can save time. Keeping those needs in mind, let’s take a look at two powerful AI tools: Google Gemini and Perplexity. As someone with access to the Pro version for each, allow me to share my observations.
Get a discount if signing up for Perplexity Pro
Read more (Note: This blog was current as of early April, 2024. Information may have changed since then!)
Aligning TCEA Courses to the ISTE Standards
I was curious about how these online, self-paced courses would align to edtech standards. Here’s a rough table that tries to show how they match up.
| EdTech Standards | Standard Description | TCEA Self-Paced Courses |
|---|---|---|
| Learner | Educators continually improve their practice by learning from and with others and exploring proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning. |
- Artificial Intelligence Educator - Canva Specialist - ChatGPT for Educators |
| Leader | Educators seek out opportunities for leadership to support student empowerment and success and to improve teaching and learning. | - Effective Engagement with Self-Reported Grades - Teacher-Library Collaboration - Google Certified Trainer |
| Citizen | Educators inspire students to positively contribute and responsibly participate in the digital world. | - Cybersecurity for Teachers - Social and Emotional Learning |
| Collaborator | Educators dedicate time to collaborate with both colleagues and students to improve practice, discover and share resources and ideas, and solve problems. | - Blended Learning - Dynamic Instruction with Project-Based Learning (PBL) - Google Workspace for Education Courses |
| Designer | Educators design authentic, learner-driven activities and environments that recognize and accommodate learner variability. | - Creative Response to Literature - Effective Math: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 - Canva Educator |
| Facilitator | Educators facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement of the ISTE Standards for Students. | - Strategies That Work, Part 1 & Part 2 - Jigsaw Method - Robotics and STEM/STEAM Courses |
| Analyst | Educators understand and use data to drive their instruction and support students in achieving their learning goals. | - Assessment-Based Feedback - Evidence-Based Teaching - Kernel Essays for Writing and Reading |
Instrument Playground: Making Music is #Google to My Ears #tcea #tceajmg
Make music with Instrument Playground, a Google Arts & Culture Experiment! Pick from 65 instruments and play to your heart’s content.
Demystifying AI #IntroAI
by Miguel Guhlin, mguhlin@tcea.org | Read the TCEA TechNotes blog | Sign up for online courses to learn more
An Introduction to AI
Depending on who you speak to, AI is a climate destroying, memory-loss, soul-sucking destructive force, or a powerful technology that can work for the good of all. For folks in real estate, it’s easy to be skeptical. In fact, you should be. Let’s explore some aspects of AI and ways to capitalize on its power for the benefit of our clients, as well as ourselves.
What is AI?
Are there tasks you engage in that are repetitive, that require learning, decision-making, and problem-solving? Then AI can lighten your load. You can use AI as your personal assistant, an aide that can help you fine-tune a pitch, market properties, or manage paperwork. The human connection must still be made, and only you can do that. AI is unable to provide that human touch. You can explore how AI can assist you in your work.
What does “assist you in your work” mean, though? AI can boost your productivity, and impact your marketability:
“The lesson learned for forward-thinking organisations is, lean into the opportunity and excitement piece, and you’ll capture more employee loyalty, employee retention, etc.” Source: Dan Helfrich, CEO of Deloitte Consulting, as cited
Countries like the United States are prepared to take advantage of AI. Let’s take a look at specific AI tools that may be helpful, first in your personal life and then in your work.
AI in Our Personal Lives
You know, you may already use Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to help you with smart devices. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, CoPilot make it easy to have conversations with AI. Ask questions in the moment, the same way you might ask Siri or Alexa for information about an actor’s net worth or what movies they starred in. Let’s take at a few simple uses of AI chatbots:
There are million and one uses of AI. Simply ask yourself, “How could I use AI to help me with an everyday task or learn something new?”
Did You Know?
Canva.com offers a variety of AI powered tools and apps, as well as design resources. Learn more about them via the TCEA Course, Canva Specialist.
AI for Professional Purposes
Ever found yourself wishing for help when streamlining operations, checking for errors, or enhancing customer service? AI-powered chatbots can help. For example, they can handle initial customer inquiries. This allows staff more time to focus on more complex tasks. AI can also analyze vast amounts of data.
Use AI to clarify decision-making processes, come up with processes, and flow-charts. Here are some specific ways you can use them:
Available AI Programs
You can take advantage of several AI models. Each offers a slightly different tool set. While you can use these tools for free, paying the $20 a month can make a big difference. A short list appears below with a key distinguishing feature:
Each of these tools is improving daily. All of these tools can generate human-like text based on the input you provide it. Use these tools for drafting email responses, creating content for marketing and contract materials, or even, property descriptions. What’s more, there are many tools for creating head shots and videos.
Did You Know?
The paid versions of these tools ($20 a month) also allow you to create images based on a text description. You can find some more AI-powered image creation tools and AI art generators. ChatGPT Plus allows you to generate images from a text prompt, as well.
Custom Data Analysis Tools
What’s more, you can use tools like custom GPTs via ChatGPT to engage in data analysis and to generate graphs. Drop a huge amount of data from Excel or Google Sheets into ChatGPT, and you’ll be able to organize it. That might be handy.
Here are two resources to assist you:
Specialized AI Tools
Below are some additional AI-powered tools that can assist you. Some great tools to use for several purposes:
| Tool/Platform | Focus Area | Key Features | AI Use Suggestions |
|---|---|---|---|
| AdCreative.ai | Marketing & Content Generation | AI-generated visuals and text for ads and social media posts | Enhance digital marketing campaigns with data-backed, high-conversion ad creatives and improve click-through rates. |
| Aragon AI | AI Headshots | Generates professional AI headshots | Create professional headshots for team profiles, company websites, and marketing materials. |
| Beautiful.ai | Presentation Software | AI-powered slide templates and design automation | Streamline the creation of pitches and reports with smart templates and automated design rules. |
| Canva | Image Creation | Design platform with templates for various uses | Design a wide range of visual content, from infographics to presentations, with an easy-to-use interface. |
| DALL-E 2 | Image Generation | AI that creates images from textual descriptions | Generate creative visuals for campaigns, presentations, and content marketing from simple text prompts. |
| ElevenLabs | Speech Synthesis and Text-to-Speech | Realistic voice generation in multiple languages | Produce high-quality voiceovers for multimedia presentations and instructional videos. |
| HeyGen | AI Video Marketing | Enables creation of business videos without video editing skills | Quickly create professional videos for marketing, training, and internal communications. |
| Opus | Video Content | Transforms long-form videos into bite-sized clips | Generate engaging social media content by converting longer videos into short, shareable clips. |
| Pablo by Buffer | Social Media Images | Simplifies creation of social media images | Easily create branded images for social media campaigns and content marketing. |
| Presence Copilot™ | AI Assistance | Offers AI-powered assistance for professionals | Improve efficiency in client management, scheduling, and task automation. |
| Snappa | Image Creation | Offers templates and design resources for creating graphics | Quickly design graphics for digital marketing, social media, and branding with access to stock images and icons. |
| Synthesia | AI Video Content | Synthetic media generation for AI-generated video content | Create custom videos with AI avatars for various applications, from e-learning to customer engagement. |
Don’t limit yourself to these solutions. More are emerging every day, and there are many you can take adapt for your use.
A Partial Conclusion
Digital tools, especially new ones, do impact the status quo. Where would we be without email? Text messages? Smartphones? Or, paper and the fountain pen? It’s easy to think that these technologies will results in job displacement. But the truth is, they simply require us to learn how to use them, then push us to innovate. They force us to ask ourselves, “In what ways does AI change how I add value and how can I leverage that to the benefit of those I serve?”
Let’s lead the charge in embracing AI, demonstrating its value, and ensuring our industry remains at the forefront of innovation. Let’s create a future where AI and human intelligence work hand in hand to achieve greater success in the real estate and title insurance industries.
A Countdown Timer for Every Occasion #tcea #tceajmg
Keeping track of time can be a full-time job for some students in a group. Why not make that job easier with a countdown timer? Even as an adult, when leading workshop sessions and classroom activities, one app is close at hand for me: either the iPhone Stopwatch or a Google time keeper. Let’s take a look at several free timer options you can use in the classroom. FREE is the key word for all time trackers on this list. Paid countdown timer solutions abound, like CountingDownTo or CountDownKings, but this list will give you quite a bang at no cost.
#tcea #tceajmg
Google for Education’s K-12 Cybersecurity Guidebook #tcea #tceajmg
Google announced its updated K-12 Cybersecurity Guidebook. The guidebook starts with key points from CISA’s Protecting Our Future report and covers NIST’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) updated Cybersecurity Framework. For certain, cybersecurity is keeping people up at night. Let’s take a moment to explore these changes and potential implications.
#tcea #tceajmg
Google Drive Bingo: Explore 25 Google Drive Tips
Read about 15 tips for optimizing your Google Drive experience, plus get 10 more in a Google Drive bingo card!
Exploring Canva Whiteboard as a Jamboard Alternative #tcea #tceajmg
Wish you had an easy-to-use online whiteboard? With Google moving Jamboard to read-only mode on October 1, 2024, you may be seeking out an alternative. What digital, online whiteboard will you use with your students instead? If you are a “less is more” kind of person, you may be looking for easier tools to use than those suggested by Google (e.g., Figjam, LucidSpark, Miro). Let’s look at one you may want to know more about: Canva Whiteboard.
#tcea #tceajmg
Wakelet Acquires Digital Portfolio solution, bulb
A question that never grows old for me is, How are schools today encouraging students to create digital portfolios of their K-12 work? It’s a question that came up at every K-12 school district I worked in. Solutions like bulb didn’t really pop up until after I stopped looking for a digital portfolio solution. One of the big challenges for these types of solutions, like bulb, is per user cost. Still, that doesn’t take away from the need for a digital portfolio solution.
News from Wakelet
Wakelet, a curation platform, has acquired bulb, a digital portfolio solution:
Education systems are responding to this, by going further than ever to prepare their students for life beyond the classroom - empowering them with digital portfolios. Together with Bulb, we’ll be able to offer even more value to schools and districts looking to maximize student outcomes inside and outside the classroom.” Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Lafayette, CO, bulb is the leading digital portfolio provider for districts, schools, and higher education institutions. It is used by 8 of the largest 25 school districts in the USA and 7 out of the largest 10 districts in Texas. bulb has users in all 50 states of the USA and 153 countries worldwide. source
Memories
Back in 2015-2016, or maybe a little after that, I remember meeting with a bulb representative. We sat down at Salsalitos Mexican Restaurant in San Antonio, Tx at a back table in the dimly lit space and chatted about bulb. I remember being a little nervous about the meeting, and nothing came of it.
It’s hard to believe we’re now in 2024, and bulb’s reach has grown to its current size. At the time, I remember thinking about Dr. Helen Barrett’s work regarding electronic portfolios from WAY back when. It’s amazing how far digital portfolios have come, and how easy it is to use a wide variety of solution providers or self-hosted, open source tools to host portfolios.
Partnered with the Wakelet team, I’m sure more amazing things will happen with bulb.
Two New Google AI Tools: Help Me Write and NotebookLM
Two New Google AI Tools: Help Me Write and NotebookLM
Ready to explore some Mnew Google AI tools? Get a preview of Google Workspace Labs’ Help Me Write and NotebookLM!