Ixchell Reyes
The DIESOL podcast

Brent Warner
Developing Innovation in English as a Second or Other Language,

Ixchell Reyes
Episode 77: 23 tools for 2023

Brent Warner
Welcome to DIESOL This is episode 77. We are your hosts. I’m Brent Warner.

Ixchell Reyes
And I’m Ixchell Reyes.

Brent Warner
Hey, we’re late.

Ixchell Reyes
We’re a little late, a little snotty, a little cough-y a little… is cough-y even a word?

Brent Warner
It is

Ixchell Reyes
C-O-U-G-H… Y

Brent Warner
Oh! C-O-U-G-H-Y, I thought you meant C-O-F-F-E-E… um

Ixchell Reyes
Congested and..

Brent Warner
yeah, so you can hear a little bit of it in yours. Maybe there might be a little tiny bit from me. Both of us were sick.

Ixchell Reyes
Pretty sick man –

Brent Warner
over over the holidays, and so if we had tried to record last week, I think it would have just sounded like like a one of those computerized Vocalizer just (Wooh-wooh sounds)

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah, my my voice pitch would have matched yours.

Brent Warner
I mean, it’s been it’s been a slow and it’s one of those slow annoying recoveries, right? Like,

Brent Warner
Yeah. Yep.

Brent Warner
What a pain in the butt. Okay. Anyways, everything else? Okay. How was the rest of your time off?

Ixchell Reyes
Everything else was okay. I took a glorious while I was two and a half weeks, but it just felt like a long time. A glorious vacation and California which was butt-cold, actually compared to Texas. I was surprised. But it was great to be back in hometown and got to see my family got to spend time with my nephews. That’s just good. Just got to beat to have absolutely nothing to do except for tell my nephew that he cannot keep he cannot tell me that he’s about to fart in my face. (laughter)

Brent Warner
Always important.

Ixchell Reyes
Six year old fascination. Yeah. Did you go anywhere?

Brent Warner
No, I, I my sickness took over. And so I was sleeping through the New Year and all that stuff. So

Ixchell Reyes
yeah. So Happy New Year.

Brent Warner
Happy New Year! 2023. We’re, no, we’re still in the 2020s. So Worst of all, all decades. And we’ll we’ll see how maybe it turns around on lucky number three.

Ixchell Reyes
Hey, It’s the Year of the Rabbit. I don’t know what that means, but…

Brent Warner
Yeah. We’ll jump through it somehow, we’re gonna jump on over.

Brent Warner
All right, so annual tradition at this point, now Ixchell. 23 tools for 2023.

Ixchell Reyes
I know. We started with like 19 we’re up to 23.

Brent Warner
We started with 19? Geez

Ixchell Reyes
I don’t know, I don’t remember.

Brent Warner
I don’t think it’s been that far. Anyways, well, we’ll, we’ll take a look. And we’ll see how we are. But anyways, regardless, we are now at 23 for 23. So let’s, so every year we jump in, we take a look at some tools that and these these are not vetted by us. They’re not you know, anything necessarily. They’re just things that we’re possibly interested in looking at, might fit into our workflow might not. And so it’s just about sharing out a bunch of different possible things to to examine, and to see if it’s going to work for us and for you. So. So between the two of us, we’ve collected all of these , are you ready to jump in?

Ixchell Reyes
I’m ready to hop skip and tell you about good old duck duck go browser. So we’ve mentioned that before. It’s been around for a while, but it just keeps getting better and better. And I think with the latest happenings on Twitter and just just in terms of security and safety online, particularly because our the new generations don’t know world without being online and having that digital footprint even before they’re actually born. It’s really important to stay, you know, keep up to date with with safety, and that Duggal recently introduced a Gmail automatic Gmail sign in blocking feature. So where before I used to be so convenient to just have it, you know, log in with your Gmail account. But now we know that Google collects so much information. So now having the option of blocking those auto sign ins would be a good, maybe a good way. There is something to consider if you’re concerned about all that information. So Duck Duck go. I have it on my browser. It’s one of my browser options.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Cool. So speaking of issues with safety and security out there around the net, I’m gonna follow up, I’m kind of sneaking in a bunch, here as a as my choice, all under one. And I’m going to call this all under the category of the fediverse. So those of you who have seen all these problems going on with Twitter, you probably saw that there’s a pretty large exodus over to Mastodon and Ixchell, we talked about that briefly before. But the fediverse also has all these other things. So they have one called pixel fed, which is like a Instagram equivalent kind of, they have one called peer tube, which is a YouTube equivalent, they have one called write as write WRI te.as. And that’s like a writing kind of a blogging version thing. And so anyways, all of these things are options for moving away from perhaps a technocratic LEA or make them quickly own individual corporations. And the idea behind all of them is that you can either join an instance, so go join a group, a server that you’re interested in, or you can go install your own. So it’s a lot like the way that email works, right, we can all go on Gmail, or we can all go on Yahoo. Or if we are so inclined, we can actually install an email client on our own servers, and then we can still communicate with everyone using them. So it’s that same concept behind different types of social media, right. And so if I’m on Mastodon and that’s kind of the Twitter equivalent to then I can also see what people are doing over at a different Mastodon, if I’m following them, I can still be in contact and connect with other people. But it’s, it is a, you know, run by the people. And there’s no individual one person who can control or make make all the rules. And so I will point out, it’s been a quite a bit of a learning curve. And it’s definitely raw in the experience, like it feels like, you know,

Ixchell Reyes
you’re new, you’re new at everything.

Brent Warner
Yeah. I mean, it really does feel like Twitter 10 years ago. And so it’s like, okay, not everything that it’s not always easy to communicate or as as smooth as it has become on a lot of these major social media platforms. But on the other hand, it’s yours. It’s, there’s definitely a really good vibe. But for the most part, there’s a little bit in my experience, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, Ixchell. But there’s a little bit of like, the people who’ve been there for a while really want to maintain that culture and not let the Twitter culture kind of take over it as more people come in. But things change as more people come in and move. And that’s how the world works. And so,

Ixchell Reyes
right, and that, I would just want to say that, if you’re worried about that, leaving Twitter or shifting over would would kill your teacher communities. I think that on Mastodon, that’s one of the friendliest communities, it’s there, it’s in its emerging developing stages. But again, as more people get comfortable with it and make the move, I think you’re gonna see that that fullness of of what it was, and it’s new, it’s going to be brand new, a new iteration of it. So open mind.

Brent Warner
Yep. So all of those things, if you’re interested in not being part of the, you know, if you’re interested in having a different option for ways to communicate with people that you have a little bit more control over, you might want to check out the fediverse.

Ixchell Reyes
All right, so moving on to all things AI. So whisper AI is a pretty cool tool by open AI. But instead of giving you back responses, it functions sort of like a hearing aid. And what a really cool about it is that it’s able to listen to multiple accents and identify them. Yeah, and it also listens to jargon, and is able to identify it, which is really cool. Because I know you and I have talked about like when our our jobs or our English jobs gonna go away, right? Our English teaching jobs, and if you’re able to learn from different accents, I mean, that’s that’s that’s just I haven’t even begun to think of the possibilities. But I just think, oh my goodness, for I constantly have to assess my students to see if, if they’re, if they’re if the intelligibility level is where it needs to be in order for them to function in a world or at least in a workplace where the people they’re going to be working with aren’t used to speakers of other languages that would just help so much and I can see ameliorating some of those. The tension that happens from the frustration of being feeling like you’re unable to communicate, and I think it could be a I don’t know again it’s in its beginning stages, but it’s pretty cool. In terms of communication and ease of communication, so whisper a I was gonna make me cough

Brent Warner
Yeah, so that’s, that’s the drinking game we should play as, Ixchell, you should stop muting yourself and every time you cough

Ixchell Reyes
You drink.

Brent Warner
Yes, you you being the kind listeners who are driving to work. (laughter) Okay, so my Okay, so speaking of AI and speaking, vocal AI, mine also, the next one kind of falls along those lines with which is a tool called speakable. It’s at speakable app.com. And basically what it does is it kind of lets lets you just put in words and phrases, and then it does an analysis of students work. So I think definitely for pronunciation class, I could see where this would be valuable. I’m not sure how deep it goes, like how much you can? How much you can have it do at a time. So is it gonna let let people talk for a long time or a little bit, but I think essentially, what it seems to do is it analyzes people speaking, it lets them go in and do quiz type assignments. But with speaking instead of with, like quizzes, types of things, so they’ll speak, it’ll analyze your voice, and then it’ll and then you can make multiple choice questions back and forth out of this. That’s cool. Yeah, there’s kind of all these interesting little parts to it, and then worth exploring, and it can do grading inside of there for you. So and again, very interested to see how accurate this is like if it’s going to grade students in the same way as I would in terms of, you know, their ability to properly or closely pronounced or maybe it would do it better, if it can do it equally as well or better. And it’s all at the click of a button, that can be a real boon for students to be able to get quick, quick turnaround on the feedback. And so I am potentially interested to see how speakable can work. It feels like there’s some it is emerging. I think it feels like it’s not perfect. Or maybe it might go through different iterations in the future, but but it seems like something that at least I want to play with and see what my students come up with, especially in my conversation class. And then there’s a paid version that gives you like a dashboard and all this other stuff that kind of you know, of course, as they do so. But anyways, speakable app.com.

Ixchell Reyes
All right. So along with the theme of AI, I have another option for AI created art. And this is called the starry AI story as in like the Van Gogh Starry Night. And it’s just another It’s another tool, it’s an app. But another one to explore. I know there’s a lot of controversy right now. Because we’re exploring this new world and, and it is going to impact artists of any type, it’s going to redefine, I think the way we view art, what we call art, etc. And that’s just going to be a conversation. But I just thought it would be really cool for language learners to just say, an old house in the middle of a desert, and then you get the image. And now you can use that as a prompt as a writing prompt. So I just use it as something to piggyback onto what I already use. And it’s just another way of having writing prompts and getting no I mean, there’s, I imagine multiple ways that teachers will be able to find a use for this. But that is starry AI. I just think it’s fun.

Brent Warner
That is cool. Yeah. This is not one of my, my choices. But also there’s a inside of Canva canva.com. There’s now a text to image generator as well, where you can type in a couple of words, and it will create a picture out of it as well. And so I’ve been so these kinds of things are showing up. Yeah, that

Ixchell Reyes
is who would have thought a year ago, right? Well, I

Brent Warner
love the idea because it’s like, sometimes you go searching for something you’re like, there’s nothing that really looks at this and you’re spending all this time searching, you’re like, I’m just gonna type it up. And maybe it’s not a perfect thing, but it’s kind of close enough to what you’re looking for. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting fun stuff. I think you can Yeah. All right. So I’m going to take mine back. My number number six here is just Pear Deck. So

Ixchell Reyes
Good ol’ Pear Deck. They keep they keep getting better, you know,

Brent Warner
they really do and that’s kind of why I wanted to talk about it. So I watched Amanda Sandovol presentation on the ditch summit over the winter break. So Matt Miller, who we’ve had on the show before, runs his ditch summit every winter and and has a bunch of different people talking about you know, tools and things you can implement into the classroom, which is great. And then he had Amanda Sandoval on and, and we’ll have links to her social media and stuff like that she shares so much stuff on on Twitter traditionally and everything else but but she has done all these super cool things with Pear Deck. And one of the things I did not really understood that stand that I didn’t understand that existed. Check the grammar, I

Ixchell Reyes
You didn’t understood understand? That’s OK!

Brent Warner
I didn’t understand that existed. (laughter) Someone sent me a message about what my grammar there was. It’s you can do it Ixchell, you can send me the message.

Ixchell Reyes
Grammar Nazis.

Brent Warner
Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes
I’m good. (laughter)

Brent Warner
So anyways, there’s a thing I did not really realize inside of Pear Deck, which is one of the options for interaction, you know, the other multiple choice or dragging little dots over things is you can just embed outside resources as a like right into it. And so you can just go take a webpage. So if you have a quizzes or a Quizlet, you can put it right into your Pear Deck. Or if you have, you know, if you have some sort of page on the internet that you want your students to read, you can just embed it right there. And so any interactive thing that is not actually part of Pear Deck can still be brought into Pear Deck, through the www button. And so there’s a lot of things that I want to play with there as well, to be able to just kind of have my students working through a, a clear guided process inside of paradex. So that’s like where the scaffolding is. But then you can take it out through these other means. And you can even by the way, put in like a Google form in there on the side. So students are doing one side of things, reading about what you want, what you want them to do. And then they can go fill in the Google Form to get your information about it as they’re doing it. Right. So lots of cool things inside of Pear Deck, and I want to do more exploration and build more lessons out that my students can use in the future as well.

Ixchell Reyes
That is pretty cool. All right. So the next tool I have is something that is along the lines of quizzes and Edie puzzle, sort of. So it’s called Quest Gen AI, again, with the use of AI. And what it’ll do it, it’ll it’ll take AI generated prompts, and it’ll, it’ll give you quizzes based on it. So you could do your Google, you could have critical thinking questions you could have true or false, etc, etc. But I just think this is where we are again, it’s it’s a new thing. I don’t know. I haven’t used it. But I’m, I’m going to explore and see how well it takes information from me i or something generated and again, find potential implications, good or bad? Yeah, but that’s question AI.

Brent Warner
Question AI. Okay, so I’m gonna follow up with one that’s similar to that, I think, which is conquer, ce o n ke R, which is from the moat people. So as you know, I love moat. It’s a great, great tool. And so now they have this one called conquer co n k e. R. And what I really like about conquer is well, I don’t know if I really like it actually, sorry. I am learning. I like it. But yeah, well, I mean, I just played with it once or twice, is the same kind of idea. So you basically drop in a bunch of prompt into it. So you put in a reading passage, maybe 500 words, or whatever it is. And I think as a limit, but let’s just say it’s 500 words, and then it will create a quick multiple choice. Ai generated questions out of that. And I looked at it and it looked pretty, like I did a reading that I’ve done in my class a bunch of times, and I’m like, Okay, it’s all right. Like, they are, of course, surface level questions, right. So I would only use it for something that’s like some very light formative work. But I thought it was pretty good. And, and, and then the cool thing that you can do with it is you can click a button and it can convert it directly out into a Google form for you. So like it creates the multiple choice questions, I think you might go in and edit a little bit, and then you push a button and it’s like, boom, here’s a Google form and then you can just instantly make it and then have the students work with it right away. Right. So I kind of like that. I definitely would hesitate to use it for serious summative quizzes, but for like, hey, let’s see how we’re doing. See what we’re understanding. Let’s collectively look at how our class is doing with this reading. I could see some fun potential with it there.

Ixchell Reyes
Very cool. I like the way it’s built to conquer

Brent Warner
instead of SEO and qu er, I guess right. So, yeah, there we go. Alright, so

Ixchell Reyes
the next tool is called sketch Mehta. I think it’s called sketch Mehta lab. But it’s sketched out made up. And the reason why I chose this tool is because again, I have a six year old nephew who’s in kindergarten, and he’s learning to read or like, he’s at the emerging stages of, of, of reading readiness. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is his generation doesn’t know a gentleman doesn’t know what it’s like to not have YouTube on. And so it took so much of my energy to get them off the YouTube or off TV, and to have them do something else that I wanted to say, Yep, I’m that person now. In my day, so sketch, Mehta takes drawings, and you add, forgot what they’re called the little points, you can add the little movement points, and it’ll animate, it has a different different templates of animation that once you, you add in the little, you scan the image, and you map the points out, it’ll move, which I thought this is great, because my six year old nephew loves cars right now he’s into cars and trains, and he likes to draw cars and trains and it would be really cool to animate his cars, and then have him tell me a story that he couldn’t then try to ride out. So I think this is great for many ages, but I particularly thought the younger grade levels, especially language learners would be cool to see that their own drawing come to life.

Brent Warner
Yeah, that is pretty cool. So like, if you go on to the website here, is actually pretty amazing. Because it’s like, you can have just kind of a semi Sorry, sorry, kids, but a semi crummy drawing or something, you

Ixchell Reyes
really know rudimentary drawing. On it, I’m proud of my,

Brent Warner
you’re gonna have a simplified, simplified drying of stick figure and and you can show where, where the arms where the legs are on it, and then, and then it recognizes that and uses it as its movement tool. So that’s actually there’s a lot of really cool potential with that.

Ixchell Reyes
It’s an Introduction to Art and how things are to movement, really. And if your language learners aren’t there yet, that’s just again, an introductory toward that. I just think it’s great for conversation pieces as well, which will our language learners to be speaking,

Brent Warner
nice, nice, cool. Okay. So one, small one is the I came out a while back, but it’s still pretty cool is the iPhone stamp feature that removes backgrounds for you.

Ixchell Reyes
So not everybody knows about this? Not everybody. Okay.

Brent Warner
So if you don’t know about this, basically, you go onto a photo on your phone, and you I think you just long push on one person, right? Like or what whoever you’re trying to focus on, and it will just remove the background, and it’ll turn it into a sticker that you can then go, you know, use in your messages, you can go drop them into your Google Docs, or whatever else. And so, so there’s some really cool ways I think that like, you know, teachers could probably do a couple of silly poses of themselves, and like pointing at things and then just drop that picture right into a document or onto a, a slide or something like that. So some really easy ways for you to, to incorporate personalized pictures. And you could also take pictures of your own students and have them doing some of those things right. And then put that put those into the slide decks throughout everything. So people get excited to see their own themselves in which activity or assignment you might be connecting them with. So there’s some really interesting and fun things that you could potentially do. built right into your iPhone without any extra apps or anything like that, either. Yeah,

Ixchell Reyes
I never thought about it in terms of adding stuff to worksheets. I just been taking pictures of my nephew with boogers. Sending him back to my sister yours. So the next tool, the next tool is UPDF. And I know that I’ve given this a shout out. I was one of my fun finds, but I just think not enough people know about it. And it’s a free PDF maker, but it also edits PDFs, reads PDFs, annotates PDFs, converts PDFs and it does all this for free. It doesn’t take up a lot of space, which has been the case with other PDF editing or annotating apps. And so for the person who doesn’t like to download and sign up and then have to pay for something this is just a bare bones, but it does so much. So I, I know I learned about it from Nick peachy. So again, I just thought it deserved another shout out because I’m going to be using it quite a lot. This year, I’m trying to transition into having this be my main PDF editor.

Brent Warner
Okay, nice. So no more No more kami for you.

Ixchell Reyes
I’m sorry, Cami have a phone app. So I do everything, almost everything Yes. You know, all my phone

Brent Warner
legit legit call so Okay. All right. And so next for me is this one called Roshi. And you know, I guess Fair, fair claim, I did a little bit of consulting with Johnny, one of the lead developer of this as he was trying to figure out what he wanted to build. And just some light conversations about what what’s useful and what’s not. But this is a pretty cool, so it’s Roshi, R O S hi.ai. And, of course, more artificial intelligence stuff. It’s pretty cool. But what this one does, so one, it is partly based on some of the same AI languaging models that Chad GPT is using, I think, but what it does is it’ll grab material that you provide it with, so any it says any basically any material online, and you click a button, and it will do the whole simplification. So the the like, it’s essentially like taking Newsela to anything that you want, right. So when you provide the content, it will scan through it, it will simplify the language to the level that you’re looking for it at. But then also the next things is that it turns it into a lesson. So it gives you like summaries of things, it’ll give you a vocabulary out of the words, it’ll take. It’ll, it’ll generate questions out of things. And so it can do a ton of cool things. And a lot of those stuff that exists already in Newsela. But now you just convert it to Hey, this is the article that I want it to do it from or here’s the reading that I want it to do some workout of. And it looks pretty powerful from what I’ve seen, that they’ve developed at this point. And they’re really putting a lot of work and effort into it. So it’s certainly something worth at least looking at to see if it’s going to fit into your workflow. That’s Roshi, R O S hi.ai.

Brent Warner
Okay, quick break here, um, Ixchell you and I are both slightly available for consultation and training at institutions. So if you’re interested in having one or both of us, come over, please reach out to us, we can help you and your team develop some better ways to interact with your students to build some more creativity or opportunities for learning into your language learners classrooms. And as I said, you can work with both or either of us depending on your needs, and of course, our availability. So, you know, both of us have a lot going on. So these are fairly limited. But please do feel free to reach out if you want to talk about details.

Ixchell Reyes
All right. So the next tool is called Teach flicks. Kind of like Netflix. I don’t know how long this has been around. And I have a feeling that I just missed it for whatever reason, someone tweeted, I feel like they tweeted it out. And I was like, wait a minute, what is this? So teach flicks is a platform that looks similar to Netflix, but it’s free. And it’s got vetted content, video content, it’s vetted by teachers, I think it would still be wise to better yourself, but you can type in the topic you want to watch. And then the age group of the students you’re going to be showing this to and then you get multiple clips of of things that are geared toward toward a classroom. So I think this is a really cool thing I I couldn’t find it’s it leads me to think that it’s still not very widely known, because there’s not a lot of stuff on there. I don’t know if that’s also because of copyright issues or whatever but but I just think it’s great to have that already. Because right now I’m using YouTube playlists and that’s how I document my sources. But then I don’t always want to use YouTube especially with all of the ads that that it’s forcing you to sit through right. So teach flex cool.

Brent Warner
So that sounds pretty good. My next one is perusal. So this also is not new but it’s something that I can’t remember if my colleagues are using it or if it’s if it just heard of it around or whatever but perusal is PE ru S A L L. And basically, we talked about this before, I honestly can’t,

Ixchell Reyes
I don’t, I don’t think so some of these are new to me, I have a horrible memory. But

Brent Warner
it’s a well developed, I’m like, Oh, this has got to be something we’ve talked about at some point in the past, but I just can’t remember. So anyways, what it does is a kind of turns your reading assignments into like a social annotation opportunity for students. So so it’s all digital. It’s kind of in the same way that I think that you would look at like a Google Doc, right? So you’ve got a Google Doc, and you can click on the plus button. And then you can have a comment there on the side. And then students can even respond to those comments on your Google Docs. Right? And I know some teachers do activities that way. Not a lot, because sometimes it’s like, oh, is it gonna send through in the Canvas version, or whatever, all these types of things, but but the thing that I do like about is that what it creates a conversation built right into the app. And so it’s like an e reader. It’s like socializing an e reader, right? So you can highlight something, a student can then say, I don’t really understand what what this is saying, what does it mean? And then another student can come back and respond, and they get rewarded for communicating with each other? And then also, I guess it analyzes the quality of the responses to so if they’re just quick, like yes, knows not so much. Whereas if there are kind of explanatory, like using AI to compare the question versus the answer versus what’s in the thing, I think. And so it seems like there’s like a lot of opportunity. And I was watching one of their promo videos. And they’re saying, like, with reading assignments, like I guess they’re, and this is all in the video. So this is not me, me citing research, is that something like 30% of students do reading assignments, but when they start using this and interacting and it becomes a social experience for them, then it moves up all the way up to like 90% of the people will do the readings and the activities. And so I think that’s some really interesting potential and ways to get students going engaged. And then the teacher can create their own sets of questions on readings. And a students can also go in and build their own questions and conversation starters out of those as well. So So I really like the different possibilities here. It can integrate with all sorts of different LMS platforms and different things like that. So it is one that I’m going to look into some more this semester. So perusal, P E, R U S, a, l l.com.

Ixchell Reyes
Cool. So I’m talking about annotating the next app, I feel like it was one of my fun finds, or I mentioned it before, but I think it again, it’s something that could be for those people who got brand new iPads for Christmas. And you want Well, I had to replace mine, you had to mine broke. Anyway, good notes. Good notes is a very free again, kind of bare bones. rudimentary, I wouldn’t call it rudimentary, it does what it needs to do for note taking or other robust apps cost about $10. But this is a good one, if you’re trying to get the you know, trying to get used to writing with a stylus and then also figuring out how to download as a PDF. And then if you really are spending a lot of time taking notes on your iPad, you can move on to a paid app, but good notes is a good I would say for language learners, I would probably say this is an easy, no sign up, download it, it’s free, it does the job. You don’t need to commit to anything, but I like it. I still use it. I’ve been using it over. What is it? No Notability. And I love Notability. But good notes is a good quick to good free version. Okay.

Brent Warner
And just looking at this on the website, as you’re sharing it. It also says that any educational institution using Apple school manager will have full access to good notes, including handwriting recognition for free. So the upgraded version is free. If you’re, I guess an apple school or if you have no idea or so. So that’s pretty cool. Pretty cool. Yeah, that’s a bonus there to possibly if you’re if that’s your school. Cool. All right. So my next one is called talk at ease talk at ease. And so you can find this at talk@ease.com. And basically, it’s an app that you can get on an Android or an iPhone, and it lets you have a conversation with it. Now, the language in here is a little strange because sometimes the language on the website seems to say you’re going to have a conversation with a native speaker. And other times it seems to say that it’s like a native speaker voice on artificial intelligence and so I’m pretty sure I don’t think that they’re, they’re able to accommodate this many act actual native speakers to respond to back and forth view. But it does look pretty cool because it’s like, you’ll get information and then you’ll be able to ask an answer it questions kind of whatever type different tons of different types of conversations, it says 16,000 conversation pieces provide practice. Wow. And so they’ve got all these different things. It’s not free. Well, there is a free version to get you started. But then it says like, it’s either it’s based on euros, but 299 euros per month, or if you get six months, then it’s for 12 euros total. Sounds like a cup of coffee per month, it may be something like that. And it again, I’ll play with it a little bit more. But it might be something for your students that it’s worth it for them to just be able to interact with every once in a while to try. Like, if they’re prepping for a conversation that they know that they’re going to have, right, then they can, they can kind of set themselves up for a few minutes and say like, Okay, let me try and see what happens if I say this and that and, and how it will respond to me. So I like that idea of helping students kind of warm up for their conversations and giving more realistic responses back through this. So talk@ease.com is maybe something that you can share with your students.

Ixchell Reyes
Pretty cool. So I’m going back to note taking, and again, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again, especially for teachers that may be overseas that don’t have are or were anyone not working within a Google environment at their institution, or were mine blocks it so that everybody can use a Google Doc. But this is called kala notes, co ll a note, and it is collaborative notes. So it’s more for students who are taking notes on a digital device with a stylus, but you can link several, I guess groups or whoever you’re sending the link out to. And you can take notes on that collaborative notes on a lecture, which is really cool, because I know that one of when I’ve been using it, I’ve doodled a lot. And there’s a lot of people who like to do sketchnoting. And I may be writing notes, like handwritten notes, but someone else is doing the same exact information on the same page. But as a as a diagram or as a some kind of illustration, which again, enhances the my memory recall of that concept. So I think it would be really cool to have it with groups to have groups taking notes and then sharing notes. So collaborative notes on mobile devices,

Brent Warner
does it call no cross? So it’s not only

Ixchell Reyes
I don’t think I know what I mean. I don’t think it does it. I think right now it’s only on Apple devices. I would have to check. Yeah. So for schools who are using it, I would love to see this. across all devices. Yeah. If it was like, Yeah, I’d be amazing. Yeah. But no, it’s again, it’s free. That’s why I like chose it. It’s free. There’s no signup. And you just have to set clear guidelines, depending on what age here are using to share this out to bid. It’s pretty cool.

Brent Warner
Cool. All right. So the next one that I have up here is the prime machine, which is basically it’s a corpus, so it’s the prime a machine dotnet. And then you can get links to download it on the App Store, Google Play Microsoft, whatever, you can go download it. It’s it’s an app, but it’s it’s, you know, pretty straightforward. It’s a corpus app, but it’s a little bit easier to use than some of the core corpuses that are out there court by Marc Machina is gonna be like, be able to tell us all about. Yeah, but But anyways, so this is I just kind of like it because it’s a simplified version. And it doesn’t take very long to get into it or to figure out I think a lot of the problem that I have had in the past with corpus is just different. Whatever corpus choice it is, is that sometimes it can be like, wait a second, how am I used? Like, what’s going on here? Is it kind of clear to see what’s going on. They are by default, not obviously the easiest because it’s just tons of text being processed and presented to you. But it does seem pretty good. It starts off by you’d put in your Word into it and it’ll it’ll tell you like kind of all sorts of settings where it’s being used and they do the text to the left side and text to the right side of it. Then the whatever word you put in, it’ll show you the common collocations that you can use and how frequent the word is and all sorts of things like that. So I like it. It’s just it’s doesn’t feel totally modern, but it still kind of gets, you know a student’s right to it if they really want to look at words and how they’re being used properly, and maybe a little bit of an easier version, something that they can just have downloaded and put right on their computer. So the prime machine is an option for that.

Ixchell Reyes
Cool. So the next one I found is called lusail, which was a Oh means Museum in Spanish and probably Latin thinking. But it’s a search engine of artworks, the search engine is still working to get different collections on it. So right now, it only has maybe about five or six different collections, different from different museums, and you can search a key term and then it’ll pull every collection out. So you can if you’re looking for a picture of something of an artwork, or you’re looking to see what else is tied to that artwork, it’ll pull up the piece, and I’ll give you the information. So kind of like a, an art dictionary, I guess, from museums. It’s most of the images are already free to use, because they’re there. What do you call it? I don’t know what they’re called. I can’t think right now. I have post COVID brain. Yes, open access. And so, of course, we can always do the Google search. But then with Google search, you get multiple other things that are not related. So if you just want a quick, focused search, and you’re particularly looking for art, this is one

Brent Warner
nice, nice. Okay, cool. So my next one is Scree, GL, Sc,

Ixchell Reyes
what’s all the funny?

Brent Warner
This is the year of odd names, right? So somehow, yeah, some. So squiggle, this isn’t a Mac, a Mac only version. As far as I know, I think it is. But I really, really like this tool. So basically, what it does is if you’re on Zoom, or if you’re doing screen recordings, or whatever, you can activate this and it will clear your screen. So it so nothing shows up until you actively go and click on that thing. So like you can actually have your screen prepared with like, you know, four or five different apps or windows open, but until you select the one that people viewing it on the other side cannot see it. So it just looks like a clean screen to them. So so it’s really cool if you’re prepped, right, like, and you’re gonna say, Hey, I’m gonna bring up this picture a little bit later, you can still have it right there open and ready to go on your desktop. And then I think you hit like command one, and then it’ll pop up on the screen for people who are looking at it, right. And it’s really cool, really interesting, as a kind of a clean way to share the screen. Especially if you’re doing screen recordings, or like I said, if you’re teaching online, those are great. And then the other part that is wonderful is, is a small developer. So I reached out with a couple of things that I was looking for. And he responded, and he’s like, Hey, let me check into it. And he built both of the things that I asked him to build right into it. So cool. Yeah, so one thing I said it was like, Hey, I’d like to have these windows be able to be highlighted in different colors. So that like if I’m talking to my students, I can say look at the green window, look at the yellow window, whatever it is, right? So he built that in. And then he also built in an option to crop share. So if I only want to show a section of a window that I’m looking at, so let’s say I’ve got something up on USA Today. And there’s a bunch of ads on the right hand side that I don’t really want like all those ads showing up, I can just highlight in on the section of the text that I want to be able to show and he built it in so that we can actually just crop out and show sections of work as well. So so if you’re doing any kind of screen sharing or screen recording, and you want a cleaner option for things squiggle is really wonderful. And that’s an app oblate aipp, bblit.com. And squiggle is that he’s got several different apps, but the screen goal is this one.

Ixchell Reyes
Really cool. All right. So this is a truly new app for 2023. It was only created about five or so days ago. And it’s following on the toes of chat GPT and all the implications of what this means for writing classes and plagiarism. And unfortunately, right now, as of today, the beta is down because they got so much web traffic, that right now it’s on a sign in basis to let you know when when the beta is up. But this is called GPT zero and it was developed by a student who wanted to help wanted educators to have another tool to figure out If any written work has been done by chat GPT type tools, okay, yeah. And so it will go through multiple, I want to say algorithms or some kind of formula that detects how there’s two if you if you, if you go to the website, the GPT, zero website, the, the guy who created this talks to you, or walks you through the different points that it measures, and what the likelihood of that being not a real human

Brent Warner
is interesting.

Ixchell Reyes
Okay. And so he said, he got a lot of backlash from students, of course, a lot of praise from teachers. But what he said is that he would like, you know, it helps you to become a better writer, because if you are using information from a nonhuman source, you want to see how close you can get to the human element of that, I guess. And so I just think it’s, again, something that we had not thought of before. And it’s like I would, I would liken it to the turn it in 2.0 of AI. And so I think that’s going to be something huge, and I don’t think it’s going to be the first one, I think there will be others and eventually someone will purchase it. And again, turn it into point oh, GPT zero. So if you are interested in it, you can type in your email to get the latest news when it’s backup. But right now, it’s a 3d use. Eventually, I feel like someone’s gonna buy it out. And schools will be using something like

Brent Warner
this. Yeah, I just signed up for it just to see what it’s like. So that’s super cool. Okay. Great. So mine, my last one. This one is completely non tech. It’s, yeah, good old fashioned paper notes. Oh, holy crap. No, I. So right now I’ve got the field notes, you know, like the you can get these little field notes type of things out there in the world. And then what I got for Christmas, this is actually what I asked for is this, this little space pen, like a mini half size pen that when you take off the cap, it becomes almost full size so that you can write with it. But it’s like one of these long lasting Ultra like designed for outerspace types of pens.

Ixchell Reyes
How pricey was that?

Brent Warner
I think it was like 30 bucks, 25 or 30 bucks or something like okay, like it’s a pretty nice pattern. That’s pretty good pen. Yeah. And it’s supposed to last it’s refillable, you know, but like, supposedly, like you can you can do the upside down writing all that stuff. All of this was just because I watched this video on this guy who kind of did this thing. And he’s like, oh, you know, instead of just relying on the phone, like I’m separating myself from the phone, as you as you guys know, I’m, I’m kind of like trying to eliminate a lot of the phone usage of stuff. And so I like the idea of still having a place to take notes. And just to think separately. And when you’re on your phone, of course, you’re just distracted by all the other things. So even if you’re taking notes on your phone, and this is no criticism of your app, your notes Ixchell, from before, those are great, but like just for yourself, right? And I’m like, Well, what about the good old fashioned process of having just a pen and a piece of paper and just sitting and being able to carry it around with you. So I can stick that notepad in my back pocket, I can stick the pen with me in my pocket and go anywhere and be able to write ideas, lesson plans, a lot of the times I’ll get struck with like good ideas for lesson plans and things but I tend not to put them into my phone or tend not to just kind of go like Oh, well think about later. But I like the idea of having a written record and then when you write it you’re you’re turning your brain into activation mode to think about it some more and see how it’s gonna work and process through so so yeah, I just got some just, I’m trying this out to kind of support my own thinking through through the next year and, and see how well it goes. It’s an experiment. I might use it more or less than I thought but it’s worth trying out.

Ixchell Reyes
You know, Brett, I recently purchased a five pack mini Nope, they’re just tiny, like composition books, but I really want their adventure. I’m a big fan of Adventure Time. So they have like the Adventure Time a logo of little illustrations and I’ve been carrying them in my purse and in my backpack and it’s what I pull out I do not as much as I do a lot of stuff on my phone. I hate taking notes on my phone I hate the note apps, the note Notes app is for grocery stores or things that I you know certain things but I did not like taking notes on there. And I found that I’m horrible with handwriting now and I just because I’m just so not not using my own writing and it just takes a lot more effort. And I found like, Oh, what am I writing again? So yeah, I became a little bit concerned because I like writing and I like using pens and I like the fists single aspect of, of writing. So I am with you on that it’s important not to forget that there are perfectly good way. Good other good ways of taking notes. So. So last but not least, are you still listening out there?

Brent Warner
Nope, they’re all gone. But that’s okay. I’m here. No way.

Ixchell Reyes
So as we were, I’ve been more concerned about privacy and about digital footprints, and not that I have anything to worry about. But for new generations, it’s just harder to discern what to put online and what not to put online. And I have seen just, you know, with the transition of power that Twitter has now was where it is. I started thinking about click just cleaning up my my tweets, and most of my tweets are probably just educational related or Adventure Time related or silly posts deleted, but I just thought, you know, I would not if I were to leave Twitter, I would not want to leave a trail behind. Who knows. Anyway, so I started looking into APSET clean out, I mean, you could close your account, but your tweets, mites, I don’t I don’t trust. I don’t trust the mollusk. So tweet delete is a an app no signup required. It erases in a batch about 3200 tweets. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. So I really, I don’t really have anything that I wanted to keep, I usually bookmark everything, or I switch it over to a wakelet if it’s a tool, but at this point, it’s like no, it’s also a good, good thing to let go. But just gotta let go. Some things are just not meant to be on the internet forever. And right now I feel like there’s just so much to worry about. So tweet, delete is one, there are many. But this is one that I thought, Oh, I don’t want to sign up for things I don’t want to I just want to delete in batches. And so I cleaned out everything. And I think I only have the last 600 The most recent 600 tweets available. Yeah. So

Brent Warner
I’ve seen a couple of people that I follow in there. They only like Have they auto delete every tweet that’s like older than a week or something like that. So there’s all sorts of different approaches to these things. To do that, go ahead, saying it’s a good thing like, Hey, you don’t have to like not every person has to follow in the same way as system designs it for right like, like, Hey, this is how I want to use it. And I just want these ideas to exist for a certain amount of time. If someone wants to screenshot them, that’s fine, but if not, then that’s fine too. They’ll be gone. And it’s just interesting to see that like hey, people are figuring out different ways to approach these technologies. So yeah,

Ixchell Reyes
just are more warmer and more interested in the end safety and safeguarding our personal information especially when it’s in the hands of someone who may not really care about where it goes. So are may stand to profit from anyway,

Brent Warner
you can that be

Ixchell Reyes
alright, it is time for our fun finds. And this time around. I have a no bake Ferreira che cheescake that I found on Instagram.

Brent Warner
You got a cheesecake from Instagram.

Ixchell Reyes
I saw the recipe on Instagram. Oh, and it’s by break or bake. That’s the user.

Brent Warner
Oh, this thing? Yeah, I made this. I thought it was something that you bought at a store.

Ixchell Reyes
Oh, no. Like the part where it said no bake. I was like, Yes. And then you know, she was talking about how you get a lot of you tend to get a lot of for rochet boxes or little during the holidays. More than you want to consume

Brent Warner
does happen. Yeah. Yeah. So this inspired

Ixchell Reyes
a cake and cheesecake and I’m not really a big cheesecake fan. But this just looked tasty and the fact that it’s chocolate and it’s no bake and I still have to perfect my method. But it came out delicious. And it’s one of the few things I can do. Maybe it’s delicious, because I can’t really taste

Brent Warner
tastes like I don’t know.

Ixchell Reyes
But yeah, it’s one of the few things I’ve been able to enjoy post COVID So no bake for rochet cheesecake. Cool.

Brent Warner
So mine is a book. It’s called Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson. Do you know Neal Stephenson, Ixchell?

Ixchell Reyes
I don’t think so.

Brent Warner
He’s like the guy who came up with the term, the metaverse and all this stuff. So there’s this like, very long form kind of predictive science fiction stuff.

Ixchell Reyes
Oh, it’s science fiction. That’s probably why..

Brent Warner
Well, this is, it’s this is kind of dystopian science fiction kind of it’s super interesting anyways, so this is a guy. I mean, he, he came up with this idea of the metaverse, right? And so this is where like Zuckerberg and all these Silicon Valley people are stealing their ideas from. “Stealing,” you know, like they’re, they’re, they’re incorporating it, right?

Ixchell Reyes
Stealing! Stealing!

Brent Warner
But anyway, so this book is super interesting because it basically I can’t spend too long getting into the whole concept of it, but basically, a very wealthy game designer dies, but in his will he, he says like he wants to be cryogenically frozen. And then the kind of the outcomes of that are that like the technology had changed between the time he signed that and the time that he actually died. And so there’s like, all these ethical questions about whether or not he actually should be preserved or shouldn’t be preserved, because it’s not about reviving the brain, it’s about scanning it and then putting it into a computer. And then having those computer programs become, you know, the new person back to life, right. But now, then it starts getting into him. It goes in two sides. So one in the real world, and then the one on the, in the built in computer world where his brain scans now exist, and he starts to develop a consciousness slowly, it’s his massive books, like 900 pages, but he slowly starts to develop this consciousness and like, it’s, it’s really interesting, because it’s all about like, how he’s developing a world because he’s a game designer, but he doesn’t really know that he was a game designer. And he was also a person and like, how, what does the what does it look like to build a world out of nothing, not even realizing that you used to be a person, right? But also all of these really interesting things about what technology is going to look like in the real world, the death of passwords, but like, who’s controlling technology? And it’s like, super fascinating and very in depth, all these different crazy ideas that really just sparked my imagination on like, what’s the future going to actually look like when we start seeing these things? And how people are incorporating or not incorporating, they made these jokes about how it’s like, oh, it was cute in old movies, how people used to say, Oh, I’m gonna get on the internet. And these are the smart people that are going to figure things out, right, as compared to just being a part of the Internet all the time. Right. And so it is like breathing. It’s like, you don’t think of it as a separate thing. And so, wow, anyways, this book is pretty in depth.

Brent Warner
So you finished all 900 pages? No, I’m about halfway through right now. So it’s pretty, pretty powerful. If you want a massive book, if you have an audible subscription and you’re looking for something that’s gonna get you some value out of it. It is huge. So Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson.

Ixchell Reyes
All right, as always, if you’re giving us a shout out anyway, tag us on social media where mostly we’re on all the platforms are now.

Brent Warner
We’re not very active about posting, but, but we are findable. Oh, man, we’re still making the show. It’s just, it’s hard for me. Okay, and the show notes and other episodes at diesel.org/77, the number “seven-seven”. Or, of course, you can listen to us at voiceEd, Canada that’s v o i c e d.ca Yeah, social medias so still… all the trash we’re talking we’re kind of there. Twitter. The show is at @dieselpod. I am at @BrentGWarner.

Ixchell Reyes
And I’m still at Ixy underscore pixie. @Ixy_Pixy.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Oh, and also just gonna say because I talked about the fediverse. I’m also on Mastodon at @BrentGWarner@mstdn.social.

Ixchell Reyes
I’m somewhere in Mastodon too.

Brent Warner
Find me and they’ll find you.

Ixchell Reyes
Yeah. All right. And Latvian thank you is Paulius Paul Diaz for tuning in to the diesel podcast.

Brent Warner
Thanks, everybody. Happy New Year.

Ixchell Reyes
Happy New Year.