Tech-Neill-ogy #25 - 12 November 2023

Welcome to newsletter #25!

It’s always busy around here (LinkedIn)! This week, there is a ton of news to share. Skim through or dive in, but there was too much good stuff to leave out.

A rant… Look, AI is good at aggregating data, which is one of the reasons why the way that I write counselor letters of recommendation benefits from ChatGPT’s assistance. But what’s the deal with self-reported transcripts? This is clearly a move to outsource manual labor onto the already stressed-out applicants. Can’t universities use AI to do this? I plugged one of my kids’ transcripts in (safety precautions taken, of course), and it clearly and quickly created a table of courses and grades by year level. I then asked it to try to categorize the courses for a credit count. No problem! Why are we offloading this work onto kids?

Thanks, as always, to those of you who share resources with me. I appreciate all of it! In any case, feel free to drop me an email at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you!

Enjoy this week’s newsletter, and consider joining us this coming Thursday (see graphic below) for our monthly Third Thursday!

This is something I’ve done a few times. For context, we worked with students early in the senior year to get them to write an elevator pitch about themselves using their brag sheet. If they didn’t like it after a few regenerations on ChatGPT, we told them to think about how they could modify their answers to the questions in the brag sheet to more accurately reflect themselves. Now, with a few students, I have taken my letter of recommendation to examine how closely it aligns with the student’s elevator pitch using a similar prompt to the one that follows:

Following is a high school college counselor letter of recommendation that I wrote for a student as their college counselor. Please analyze the letter and summarize the letter into a five-sentence elevator pitch about the student, which they might deliver to an admissions representative about themselves. 

Even if you don’t have an elevator pitch from the student to compare it to, this is an interesting exercise to explore one lens for how your letters might represent your students. Always interesting to see how these things work out! I’d love to hear your feedback if you give this a try!

As always, if you’d like to explore some of the other hacks, tips, and prompts I’ve shared here and elsewhere, check out this link. If you have any great prompts or questions about prompting, send me a note at [email protected].

In closing, I wanted to share a bit of bright light. Malin from Cranbrook Kingswood in Michigan shared with me this course description, eligible for their seniors to meet their Religion & Philosophy graduation requirement:

Ethics of AI: Safeguarding Humanity
From military drones to shopping recommendations, AI is powering a wide array of smart products and services across nearly every industry—and with it, creating new ethical dilemmas for which there are no easy answers. Moreover, those involved with AI often lack the tools and knowledge to expertly navigate ethical challenges. This course examines today’s most pressing ethical issues related to AI and explores implications for AI design, warfare and politics, policy making, and responsibility—both individual and corporate. Students will be pushed to think about AI in terms of what is truly good, not just advantageous. While the course will be largely project-based, assessment will also be in the forms of presentations, essays, exams, and machine learning projects.

Pretty cool! I love it! Anyone else out there have any AI courses at the high school level? I’d love to hear about them, if so!

Happy counseling,

Jeff