Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Barrington 220 Completes WAN and Internet Upgrades
The costs of this project were covered in large part with funding from the federal E-rate program along with additional funding from the State of Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology E-rate consortium.
Combined with a recently completed upgrade of much of our school building network equipment, Barrington 220 continues to provide proven and consistent high-speed Internet access throughout the school district, via our dynamic, high-density capable network.
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16 Now Available
Apple recently released the latest versions of their major operating systems—macOS Ventura for the Mac and iPadOS 16 for the iPad. We originally delayed users from installing those updates until we were sure Apple had exterminated the known bugs that might affect us here in Barrington 220. Over the last couple of months Apple has release some minor updates to both systems, and the Technology Department has released macOS Ventura 13.1 for MacBook Air laptops and iPadOS 16.2 for iPads.
An important prerequisite to upgrading the OS on you device is making sure you have enough hard drive space to allow the software to download successfully.- On the MacBook Air, if you click once on the Macintosh HD (hard drive) icon on your desktop to highlight it, then go to the File menu and select Get Info (or use the keyboard shortcut Command+I) you will get a window that will show you how much available space you have. We recommend at least 40GB of free space.
- On an iPad we recommend you have at least 5GB of free space available. You can check how much free space you have on your iPad by going to Settings > General > About where you'll find Available which shows you your available space.
We ask that you keep your devices updated with the latest versions of operating systems and software, and we recommend that you update your devices as soon as possible. If you need help freeing up space on your computer or iPad, please reach out to your building LTA or call x.1500 from a district phone, and we'll be happy to get you started.
Five Ways Teachers Can Use ChatGPT
What is ChatGPT?
Generative AI is any artificial intelligence that creates new and original content. OpenAI is the company behind the trending application ChatGPT, which has gained millions of users since its launch in November 2022. OpenAI consists of three APIs (application programming interface):
- GPT-3—Generates natural language text from user-generated prompts
- DALL-E—Creates and edits original images from user-generated, text-based prompts
- CodeX—Translates natural language to programming code
GPT-3 is the technology driving ChatGPT. The GPT stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer." ChatGPT was trained using a massive human-created text dataset and uses that knowledge to create original, human-like text-based responses when given a prompt. It works similarly to the more common next-word prediction you may experience with texting, Gmail, and Google Docs, but it uses over 175 billion parameters in its predictive algorithm to produce rich and complete texts. ChatGPT does not actively scour the Internet for information when a prompt is entered, it uses what it learned from the dataset to generate a response.
ChatGPT creates natural language, text-based responses in a conversational, back-and-forth "chat" with the user. Think of it as an intelligent writing assistant like the AI navigation assistant in your car or an AI chatbot like Alexa or Siri.
What to know before you consider using ChatGPT
- ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding, but incorrect or even nonsensical answers. Rather than omit information, ChatGPT will try to answer the prompt to the best of its ability. It will sometimes insert “made-up” information that isn’t true. For example, one user found that when asking ChatGPT to include citations for sources, the AI fabricated sources that do not exist. In other examples, ChatGPT created a high-quality math word problem, but gave a credible-sounding—but incorrect answer—to the problem.
- ChatPGT may sometimes respond with harmful instructions or exhibit bias in its answer. Since it is based on human-generated information, it may reflect bias or inaccuracies of the human authors.
- Instead of asking clarifying questions, ChatGPT might guess about the user's intent if the prompt is ambiguous. This could produce answers that seem plausible, but do not answer the user's intended question.
- ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet and has limited knowledge of events after 2021.
Five Ways Teachers Can Use ChatGPT
Create learning objectives for a lesson on information literacy for a 4th grade class
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