Teach Middle East Podcast
Welcome to the Teach Middle East Podcast, the ultimate audio hub where educators find inspiration, share innovative ideas, and grow together! Brought to you by Moftah Publishing—the minds behind the premier Teach Middle East Magazine—this podcast is your gateway to the latest research-based practices, cutting-edge classroom strategies, and the heartwarming stories of educators from the Middle East and around the globe.
As the only podcast that interviews school leaders from across the Middle East and beyond, we offer unparalleled insights into the challenges and successes that shape educational landscapes in diverse settings. Join us as we dive deep into the fascinating world of education, where every episode promises a treasure trove of insights designed to connect, develop, and empower the brilliant minds shaping our future. Whether you’re seeking fresh perspectives, practical tips, or a dose of inspiration, the Teach Middle East Podcast is your must-listen resource. Tune in and transform the way you teach!
Teach Middle East Podcast
AI's Role and Impact in Schools with Darren Coxon
Are you curious about transforming your approach to education with AI? In this episode, we sit down with Darren Coxon, who shares his journey from teaching English literature to becoming a pioneer in artificial intelligence for schools. Darren's AI journey began with an encounter with ChatGPT, sparking the founding of Node Education—a venture dedicated to helping schools develop AI strategies. He offers firsthand insights into projects in Tunisia, where integrating AI into the curriculum has opened up new possibilities for students and teachers. This is more than just a conversation about technology; it's an urgent call for educators, school leaders, and parents to adapt and thrive in a rapidly evolving educational landscape.
Darren will present at GESS Dubai 2024 on November 12-14 at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
We delve into the ethical and legal issues schools face, from AI biases to updating assessment practices. Darren shares practical ways to integrate AI thoughtfully, using accessible platforms like Magic School and Notion to enhance learning experiences. Whether you're new to AI or looking to deepen your understanding, this episode is packed with insights to help you leverage AI's potential while maintaining educational integrity.
Connect with Darren here: https://node-edu.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-coxon/
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Hosted by Leisa Grace Wilson
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You are listening to the Teach Middle East podcast connecting, developing and empowering educators.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, welcome back to the Teach Middle East podcast, or welcome to the Teach Middle East podcast. If this is your first time listening to us, where have you been? Join the 20,000 listeners that we have and get on board, get regular. Today I am pleased to have Darren Coxon on the podcast with me and we're going to geek out about AI. He said I hope I don't disappoint you, but I think he won't, because I followed his work on LinkedIn for a long time. This is the beauty of LinkedIn is that you can secretly stalk people for years and they have no idea about it. So when guests reached out to me and said, would you like to interview Darren Kotze, I was like, well, I sure do, and so welcome to the podcast, darren.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Lisa. I hadn't realized I'd been stalked by you for so long. I feel quite honored.
Speaker 2:No, it's my pleasure. So here we go. Where did it all begin, Darren? Take us back and give us the elevator CV rundown.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, like a lot of people, I wasn't expecting AI to come and slap me in the face like it did a couple of years ago. None of us were, were we? So I mean, look my background's education, 100% Teacher, english literature actually Nothing, techie, nothing. Computer science. I taught English and drama and media and film, et cetera, et cetera, for many years, theory of knowledge, and then I moved into headship and then I got into managing groups of schools. So I managed the Brighton College in Abu Dhabi and a few others the academic side, not the operational side. My last role was managing, as chief operating officer, a group of international schools. We were based in Bahrain, but one of the schools was in Tunisia and I was seconded there to be executive head. And I actually arrived in Tunisia at almost exactly the same time that CHAT GPT arrived. So I came October November two years ago, and ChatGPT arrived at the end of November of 22.
Speaker 3:And I remember playing around with it over the Christmas holidays and thinking there's just something in this. This is not interactive whiteboards or VLEs or even iPads. There was a lot more. I could see the potential to disrupt and, sure enough, within a couple of weeks of its release, new York State had banned it and I thought, yeah, well, obviously people are nervous about this. So I decided, like I could I am a geek, even though I'm an English teacher, definitely on the geek spectrum just to go all in and and what we did is we as a school, we we really went for it with AI, so a lot of the teachers were using it really well.
Speaker 3:We then collapsed the curriculum at the end of the second term, so June of 2023, people were learning about sustainable development goals with AI and they were running, with passion, projects with AI and it was just really successful. I then decided to come back to the UK and basically just do what I'm doing now, which is what I learned over that almost a year in Tunisia and what I've learned since Just helping people understand it, use it, not be scared of it, have a bit of fun with it, don't take it too seriously it takes me so seriously in education but then also be aware of the risks and understand what the risks are. Someone said to me it's like it's all fear and fun with you, derna, which I suppose is kind of. Maybe that's my catchphrase fear and fun. But yeah, definitely to make sure people are mindful of it, but don't take it too seriously.
Speaker 2:So tell me then, what are you currently doing as it relates to AI, because I know recently you went full time into this and you launched something. I told you I stalk you, that's just how it is. So, because the listeners aren't up to date as I am. What have you launched? What are you doing now?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean I've been doing the consultancy for about a year now, on and off, more on and off. So I came back to the UK sort of September, october of last year, and since then I've been really been doing my own thing, supporting some platforms, but mainly just doing my own thing. So I've just I I've actually just launched node, node education. So node is basically a support function for schools and colleges around strategy, because that's key the training, staff training policy procedure, the kind of paperwork that sits in the background, and then something around the tools as well. I'm actually developing some ai tools at the moment. So node is kind of a catch-all which which really supports in a 360 degree way, I suppose, schools and what on earth to do with AI. So that's kind of my way in. But yeah, look, I, I'm speaking at guests, I speak all over the world and I'm just here for schools to help them implement it in a way that actually works for them.
Speaker 2:So we're going to go into the nitty gritties, as school AI is now disrupting the way the students learn. It's disrupting the way the administrators do their work. It's disrupting how teachers do their work. What are some of the things that schools need to become very cognizant of around the use of AI or an implementation of an AI policy? Give us the one, two, three of it all.
Speaker 3:Yes. Well, the first thing is that nothing will change unless people realise that there has to be change. So one of the first things a leader has to do is to create this sense of urgency, and we know this. I mean John Kotter has been speaking about this for years and years and years. I mean his Leading Change book for me is one of the best books on leadership ever written. So one of the first things that leaders have to do is make staff understand that and parents and students understand that this is this is the direction of travel.
Speaker 3:Love it or hate it, you really do need to be going in this direction. I think from there you need to make sure you're well. Number one is that the head, the head teacher, the principal, has to be not necessarily technically leading this, but has to be brought in. I say to the schools that I work with the first thing that needs to happen is the head needs to stand up in front of the staff and say this is the direction of travel. We really have no choice, because if you don't do that, what tends to happen is you get like pockets of use in the school. You'll get. You get one or two teachers who are using it kind of slightly furtively, like they're feeling a bit guilty, because teachers by nature, we all have a bit of a guilty conscience. We just do. It's just part of who we are. And so often you get teachers who are using it in the background and they're thinking oh, this is working really, really well. And I know this because so many times when I speak at conferences, I get people coming up to me and saying I've been using it for this and it's been really, really effective. And I'm like so what are you doing as a school? They're like well, nothing really. This is just me. So I think you need to make sure that you've got that urgency, that person at the front driving it. And then it's about who are going to be your implementation team.
Speaker 3:And one of the pieces of advice I would strongly give to schools is if you just create, I don't know, like an AI working party and the brief of the AI working party is understanding how best to implement AI across the school it's such a vague and nothing thing. It doesn't mean anything. Well, where, how, why? My suggestion will be plan a series of maybe it's a collapsed curriculum day, or even just a half a day or some sort of festival or something that that working party is working towards. So, rather than it being we're creating a group of people to bring AI into the school, we're creating a group of people to plan for an event where ai is front and center. It worked so well, unbelievably well, in tunisia, so I would strongly encourage that to be the case.
Speaker 3:But the other thing I would say is that, when it comes to actually bringing it into the classroom, don't straight away, because what will probably happen is it will go wrong because it does, because ai is not that good right now. I mean does wait. I mean it drives me mad. I mean, for someone who works with it all day, I'm just forever. I'm surprised I've got hair still forever pulling my hair out. It's just, it does stupid things all the time. You don't want to do stupid things in front of the kids, in front of the students.
Speaker 3:So I would say, allow your staff time to play with it and just see what it's good for. I mean, I know what it's good for within my sphere, but I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a physics teacher, so teachers have to be given the time to play, and so I think, after establishing the sense of urgency and making sure you've got the right people planning towards an event. You've got to find the time. People planning towards an event, you've got to find the time.
Speaker 3:So one of my talks just to kind of skip forward to some of the things I'm doing at Guess in a few weeks' time is basically about how do you make room for AI as a school leader.
Speaker 3:How do you find the time to give your staff the freedom and the permission and the time, the physical time, to actually play with it, because if you don't, nothing will happen. It will literally be one or two keen, probably 30-something Gen Z. Generally it tends to be new members of staff who I really like going for it. But then you get the kind of the slightly older, basically my age, sort of Gen X. You get one or two that are interested, but often you'll get them like oh, I just don't have time for that, I don't have time for church. You have to make time. You have to make time because it's getting so much better and it's so much more useful and so much more challenging that if you don't, what you're going to find is your students are going to use it and they're just going to accelerate away from you and you're just going to be left behind.
Speaker 2:I tell you what I've noticed. I've noticed because I'm like always on LinkedIn or X and stuff. I've noticed that there are, now, unknown to the school leaders, groups of staff who've put themselves in these online groups and online chats who are doing different things with AI, all to the ignorance of the school leaders, and they're implementing and maybe having their own ways of dealing with it, without the school having any knowledge at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's absolutely true. And what will then happen is the teachers will either leave that school because they're like, do you know what? I've reached a plateau and I can't get any further Well, they just go off and do it themselves. And I've seen two or three much younger than me I mean I've been around. I mean this is year 26 for me in teaching and education. They've only been in the role maybe five, six, seven years. They've already become basically gone up and do consultants because they recognize there's a real need for people who have been practitioners, who've actually been in the classroom, so not ed tech salespeople, but actual teachers who can then speak the language of teaching and have the credibility amongst their peers who then go off and support other schools. So you're absolutely right. I mean I posted two days ago, two or three days ago, on LinkedIn. This is 100% on school leaders. Anytime you get a large seismic potential risk and I think the last time we had it was exactly 10 years ago when we had Keeping Children Safe in Education was released. The first edition of that was released in 2014. Inspections then suddenly went up a notch and that was absolutely on school leaders to sort out to deal with, and governors.
Speaker 3:By leadership, I actually also mean governance Right now, as of literally, and governors. By leadership, I actually also mean governance Right now, as of literally, and even from last week, when we saw the US parents suing their son's high school for accusing him of cheating and it's allegedly apparently we don't know the whole facts caused him irreparable damage. So they sued the school. From what I hear, they may have won, or certainly they're likely to win. I think, with all of these things coming and bubbling up, we're at that similar inflection point. We're at an inflection point through the 2010s and then 2014 KCSIE. We're at a similar point 10 years later, where they are only, I think, much more potentially disruptive. So heads and governors have to take this seriously. For me, it's our number one agenda item right now, above anything else.
Speaker 2:I agree with you 100%. And then we want to look at what are some of these risks that heads need to be cognizant of, aware of.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean the first one is exactly to the point of the family who's suing the school. So I've been speaking on this for about a year and a half and literally on this. In fact, one of my slides for my presentation which is one of the only slides I haven't changed but virtually every time I present I present something different because it's changing all the time was that if you use an AI plagiarism detector, best case and you confidently say you cheated and the student's like, no, I didn't, no, I absolutely did not Best case scenario you've destroyed the trust between you and them. And not only have you destroyed the trust with that individual, you've probably lost the whole class Because they all think, well, we're just waiting for him to accuse us. Now Worst case scenario is the parents sue the school, which is exactly what we saw last week. So I think one of the biggest risks that we have is not having any policy in place, not having any staff training in place, allowing staff to use plagiarism detectors which do not work. We know this. We've been banging on about this for months and months and months and months. These do not work.
Speaker 3:Last week, I put the US Declaration of Independence through an AI plagiarism detector, bearing in mind that's like 1774, 1776 or something 250 years old 50% generated by AI. I mean, you know the US Declaration of Independence, apparently, according to one of the GPT-00, I can't even remember which one it was, doesn't matter 50% generated by AI. So I think that's probably the biggest risk. You cannot use them. You cannot accuse students of using AI in that way, because you will absolutely destroy the trust amongst all of the staff and the students and the parents. You literally will. You may as well just kind of give up. So if that's the case, what do you need to do? Well, you need to think of, first of all, other ways to assess. So, ok, let's start to have this conversation about other ways. So you may know Russell Cayley. I think you may have even interviewed him in the past Think Learning Studios. He's done a lot of work around sort of portfolio. So how do we start getting our students to generate portfolios of what they know, portfolios of what they've done, portfolios of what they understand, and then start having conversations around those portfolios and reflecting which is way more? It's more of a real world thing.
Speaker 3:Anyway, we're going to need to move away from exams. It won't be long before you know what I'm wearing here. I could easily have the augmented reality. I mean right now. Those glasses are very clunky. Give it five years, they won't be. I mean even, maybe even less than five years. So contact lenses we're going to see these things happening in the next three to five years.
Speaker 3:So what we've just started to see, literally as of this term, is the beginning of the single biggest inflection point that we've ever experienced in education. And bear in mind we're talking about a system which is 250 years old. This is where it has to change, because if it doesn't, we are going to see more schools being sued. We're going to see higher rates of drop, doesn't? We are going to see more schools being sued. We're going to see higher rates of dropout. We're going to see universities rumbling, which they already are. We're seeing these things happening in real time. So this is why I do what I do. Look I, I, as I said, I'm an english teacher. I never set out to be an ai kind of consultant, a trainer, but I can see the risk, so I felt like it was actually. I always felt like I had a trainer, but I can see the risks, so I felt like it was actually. I always felt like I had a moral obligation to be part of the solution, rather than kind of complaining from the sidelines.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and talk to me about the biases of AI, because, yes, there are the risks of false accusations, of using it when they haven't, and the AI detectors are diabolical they're terrible, they don't work. But then what about the biases that come into AI that students and teachers, and especially school leaders, need to be aware of?
Speaker 3:Well, I think I'm probably in the minority when I would say that most generative AI is actually becoming less biased. The reason is that they are that the computer scientists are doing everything they possibly can because people see it as being such a big-ticket item. They're actually doing everything they can. So if you work with chat GPT, okay, I'm not getting a strong sense of bias coming through anymore, particularly when we think about how we use chat GPT. Okay, it's very transactional. You want it to do something and it does it. You tend not to go back and forth in the way that you might with a sort of more personable chatbot. So I would say that when it comes to the likes of chat GPT, I'm less worried. Okay, it's not something that I talk much about. It's not something that I think you need to be too worried about right now, and I do think it's not something that I talk much about. It's not something that I think you need to be too worried about right now, and I do think it's getting better. Text to image AI yes, it still has some biases, but I would say that actually they push things too far the other way. So, if you text, I don't know if you prompt an app like a platform like Adobe Firefly. Often you'll get images which are almost trying too hard to be broadly represented, to the point where they're no longer useful because you want it to give you something and it won't because it will actually give you something, which is it tries to be almost too unbiased.
Speaker 3:I would say that where the biggest concerns are with AI more broadly we're not talking about generative AI more broadly are the biases inherent in the algorithms that we see in TikTok. I am, more broadly are the biases inherent in the algorithms that we see in TikTok, that we see in Instagram, that we see in YouTube, the shorts that are constantly pushing a very narrow worldview on our children. Ok, so TikTok's the most obvious example. The biases, the way the algorithm works. Essentially, you know it works out what you like and it just gives you more of the same.
Speaker 3:That that's the thing that worries me. So I almost feel like we don't talk enough about that. We talk a lot about ai bias, but when we talk about it, we I personally believe the damaging ai bias sits more in the kind of the machine learning end, in the kind of the the algorithmic end, rather than worrying that chat gpt is going to give me some sort of biased output Again. I think I'm in a minority there, but certainly from my perspective that's where I think educators and leaders and parents should be more worried about than chat GPT.
Speaker 2:You touched on something that concerns me because, as a parent, I worry about my kids' use of things like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, etc. I wanted to ask you, then what should parents be aware of in terms of their child's use of these platforms? Yes, you talk about them serving more of the same, but what else should they be looking out for?
Speaker 3:It's hard, isn't it? Because if you allow your child to have a phone I mean, I have a 17 year old, an eight-year-old and a five-year-old. So I've got one who's kind of got through that, she's almost got through the worst. She's pretty sensible. But I've got an eight-year-old boy. He's very, very susceptible and prone to like boys are. He loves minecraft and he's learning to code and he likes that whole online world. And then my five-year-old she's still playing with dolls. So I don't know which way she'll go, but it worries me.
Speaker 3:But if, if you're a parent who's giving you a phone I'm not judging either way, but lots of children have phones then it's actually very, very hard. Because if you're allowing your child a phone, the only thing you can do is maybe prescribe the times that they use the phone. But then, of course, that can be a big challenge, because the phone becomes an extension of their hand and how do you take it away from them? And I'm not here to give advice on parenting, because that's, quite frankly, it's not not my place to, but for me personally, the only thing I can think to do is to try and push as many interests my children's way that get them away from their phone. I hope that one of them sticks and hope that carries them through those very difficult years when actually all they want to do is just be absorbed on an online world.
Speaker 3:So my 17 year old daughter she just got buried into football age eight, nine, ten years old, and actually that carried her through her early teens because all she was doing she was playing football. She played for a local side, she was training with one of the big UK teams on their junior squad. That carried her through. So the only advice I can give is what I'm going to do myself is try and get my children involved in things that interest them, which take them away from a phone, because once they're in the phone, then what can you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. For the record, my kids don't have phones because no.
Speaker 3:Because, yeah, because exactly.
Speaker 2:Because no? So taking it back to schools and taking it back to teachers. There's a lot of fear around AI and some people have completely buried their heads in the sand with it. But when it comes on to using it in the classroom you already said, not with the students, not in front of the students.
Speaker 3:Initially. Initially, yes. When you're first understanding how to speak to it, do it on your own. Don't learn in front of the students. It's not good for them yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, I actually agree with you. But where should staff? Let's say they're school leadership, they're yet to come on board. They're going to come on board but they're yet to do it. Where should staff begin? Because they want to get knowledge. They want get knowledge, they want to know how to utilize these tools and they don't.
Speaker 3:They don't want to be afraid anymore. I've slightly revised my opinion for maybe a few six months ago, because six months ago I was very anti-wrappers. The wrapper app is where you have ai in the background and then you have some sort of user interface nice friendly user interface on the top, and you push a button rather than doing a prompt. I would actually say now that they're possibly a good way in when you're first looking to bring it into the classroom. So the obvious one is Magic School. Okay, so I think that some I don't necessarily think all of Magic School is fantastic, but I think there are some elements which I really like. So, for example, you can set up a little student room. You can put AI tools inside that student room and then you can let the students use them. So text-to-image generators, safe little chatbots. So there are ways that you can use platforms like Magic School in quite a good way. Gamma's another one. So Gamma for presentations, that's fantastic. Notion for documents, that's really, really good. It's all got AI built in and it's done in quite a safe way. Quizzes, which I think is the best quiz. I'm not affiliated to any of these, by the way. So these are just ones that I use myself and that I recommend that schools look at. Quizzes is great for little AI-generated quizzes, obviously because it's called quizzes. These are good, safe, simple, quite boundaried ways to bring AI in AI to generate a multiple-cho AI in AI to generate a multiple choice quiz, ai to create a presentation, ai to share a little text, to image generator with your students, and they're cross age as well. So I mean you can use those with younger students as well as older students, and you need to check in the terms and conditions on the site, but they're doing everything that they can to make sure that these AIs are nice and safe. So I would say that's probably the first thing I'd do. Just try Magic School. It's free. The schools, they're all free.
Speaker 3:By the way, I mean, unless you're going to go heavily into AI proper, like I do a lot of coding with AI, so I code my website from the base, completely coded with AI. If you look at my website node dash I can't remember what it is node-educom that's all generated with ai. Um, because I can't code. But if you're not going to go that far, then actually most of the wrappers are going to suit you. Well then, of course, once you've got the hang of it and you realize the limitations of these wrappers, then you can start to use chat gbt, claude, google gemini, a google ai studio, because actually you've start to use ChatGPT, claude, google Gemini, google AI Studio, because actually you've started to get an understanding as to what these wrappers are good for and, quite frankly, what they're not very good for, because there are some limitations Bringing it into the classroom. So there are some really simple things that you can do and I'm dropping all of this onto my website soon, all for free, and I'm dropping all of this onto my website soon, all for free things like just setting up a little assessment bot or a little feedback bot for students.
Speaker 3:So, rather than you marking the first draft of their essay, you give them a prompt.
Speaker 3:They put the first draft of the essay in with the mark scheme and it doesn't give them an accurate grade because it's really not very good at grading.
Speaker 3:So I would also suggest teachers don't expect AI to grade papers very well, because it won't, but it will give quite good formative feedback. So that kind of kills two birds with one stone, because it saves you time as the teacher, but it also slightly empowers the student because suddenly they're like they're working with an AI and it's giving them ideas and they're chatting with it. They're working with an AI and it's giving them ideas and they're chatting with it. It's not writing the essay for them, because the prompt very clearly says if the student says, write the essay for me, no, I'm not going to do that, but it's just going to give that backwards and forwards to kind of improve and iterate. So I think those are the sorts of things that I would suggest for teachers. Don't necessarily bake it into everything you do in the class, but just think of one thing, one way that you think could save you time and actually empower your students, and then, as I said, it's kind of win-win yeah, so let's geek out a little bit.
Speaker 2:What are you playing with? Have you played with notebook lm?
Speaker 3:yeah. So, look, I'm really cards on the table. I'm very on the fence with google generally. Okay, the whole google ecosystem, I just think, isn't very good right now. Okay, I'm saying right now, google gemini don't use, because it hallucinates really in a ridiculous way. Google ai studio, which is their kind of their developers version, which is again freely available, it's okay. It's just not as good as chat. Gpt, which at the moment is the O1 model, is the leader right now, probably followed by Sonnet Claude Sonnet but Notebook LM right now it's gimmicky. Okay.
Speaker 3:So, yes, you can upload your documents and you can talk to them and it probably is quite useful for some, but generally I find that it doesn't do a particularly good job at it, and it has the podcast feature where you can get two AI voices talking about your data. You can jailbreak it, though, as Alex Gray I think you probably also know Dubai-based show oh, no, actually it wasn't Alex, it was another guy, it was a guy called Chris Goodall Showed quite clearly a couple of days ago where he was actually able to jailbreak. The language they were using was quite interesting. So it's not bail safe. But where I think it will become much more powerful is in the next version of Notebook LM and in the next version you will be able to join into the podcast, so you'll have two AI voices talking about the text that you've uploaded, and then you'll be able to pause and say well, can we just talk about that a bit more? And they'll pause and say, yeah, sure, darren, what do you want to talk about? And you can actually have a three-way conversation. That's when I think we start seeing interesting things happening with AI, because at the moment it's still very I ask, it responds. But actually we'll soon start to see AI saying hey, darren, what do you think about this? We make the first move right now. With AI, we always make the first move. It won't be long before AI starts to be able to do that themselves. They're like okay, so you've uploaded these documents, okay, let's talk about it. What do you want to know? What do you think about this? And almost like it becomes a back and forth Q&A type thing. I think that's when we start seeing AI acting more like a very good teacher. We start seeing AI acting more like a very good teacher.
Speaker 3:Right now, it's really limited as to what we. It's a bit of a mirror at the moment. It's a mirror. What we put in, we get out. If we don't put much in, if we put, you know, garbage in, garbage out you know the computer science mantra. It's very much the case. It won't be long before that isn't the case, and that's what we need to be mindful of, because if I'm a student and I'm working with AI and it's friendly and it's personable and it's funny and it's intelligent and it's insightful and it understands me, and then I go into school and I'm being talked at by my teacher, who doesn't really know me, what am I going to choose? I'm going to choose the friendly, personable AI. I'm learning stuff from this AI. I sit in a classroom with my teacher being talked at. I'm learning nothing. That is what's happening. We're not quite there yet, but that's what's coming down the track.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of perplexity, do you use any of those stuff? What are you using?
Speaker 3:So I use in my kind of toolbox. I use Chowchee PT for most of my coding. It's just the best for coding. I mean hands, just the best for coding. I mean hands down the best for coding. I use Perplexity for research. I don't use Google anymore, I always just use Perplexity. Typescriptio is also very good, so that is more of an academic-focused, it's like academic Perplexity. Honestly, that's kind of it. Really I don't use many. I mean I would say, say, 80 of the time I'm just using check, which wasn't the case before. Turbo scribe, I used best transcriber, so I use turbo scribe for transcribing. What else? I'm just looking now, as we're speaking, at my, and then I'm using adobe firefly for text to image generation. Yeah, that's's it. And then I've got hosting sites that I host my website on. But in terms of the actual AI that I use, I would say 80% to 90% of the time in my job I just use ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. Thank you so much, darren. Can you do us a favor and just look at camera, wherever your camera is, and just invite people to your talk at guest, dubai 2024 yes, so let me just call them up because I've got I'm actually speaking to several, I've got several.
Speaker 3:You won't, you won't, basically won't be able to miss me, because I've, I've, actually, I'm actually moderating a couple of panels. I'm moderating an ai panel, which is practical discussions around how to implement three design principles for AI in education. I'm also hosting a panel around innovations in ed tech, and then I'm talking about project based learning and AI. I'm talking about how, as leaders, we need to evolve in how we lead schools towards AI, and then I'm talking about our vision for the future. So I think I'm involved in three or four talks and two or three panels, so you absolutely won't be able to. Or four talks and two or three panels, so you absolutely won't be able to miss me. I'll just be everywhere.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Well, guys, I will love to see you all at Guest Dubai. I'm going to be on stand V52, the Teach Middle East stand, live podcasting from our stand at Guest Dubai. So stop by, get your views heard, get your face on camera and get your voice heard, and, obviously, go and check out Darren and all the other fantastic keynote speakers that will be present at Guest Dubai 2024. Thank you so much, darren.
Speaker 3:Huge pleasure, Great great to meet you, Lisa. Thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 2:Most welcome.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Teach Middle East podcast. Visit our website teachmiddleeastcom and follow us on social media. The links are in the show notes.
