LingoTeach.ai

[Kraut]

https://fltmag.com/lingoteach-ai-simpli ... -creation/

"LingoTeach.ai is an AI (artificial intelligence) tool created by language teachers for language teachers that gives you an easy way to create language teaching resources. It is very intuitive and an excellent classroom resource."
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https://lingoteach.ai/launchwebinar
GPT version is 3.5 (moderator says this is enough for teaching a language at school)

[Cainntear]

They've put up a recording of a 100 minute long webinar rather than even attempting to summarise their main points in text? That's pretty poor PR. They might also have edited out the bit at the start where they talk about being confused about how to record the webinar, cos it really doesn't give much confidence that that even happened.

[Kraut]

This is the best app for language teachers. The creator announces that the next languages on their list is Scottish Gaelic (he is a speaker) and Irish.
Here is a tour of the application.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhDYZcpzlrg
IALLT Interview Project Episode 11: Interview about LingoTeach.AI with Alasdair Harris

[Cainntear]

This is the best app for language teachers. The creator announces that the next languages on their list is Scottish Gaelic (he is a speaker) and Irish.

Thanks -- that video is a heck of a lot better than the previous one. I really was totally turned of by a video 100 minutes long starting with waffle about recording when there was no option to speed it up.

Anyway, what makes you think he's a speaker of Gaelic? He doesn't make that claim anywhere in the current video, and when he does mention Gaelic, he says things in a way that make me think he probably doesn't... although I already thought that given that he's from Glasgow. There wasn't even a Gaelic school in Glasgow when he would have been going through primary. There's an outside chance his parents were Gaelic speakers, but his surname makes that seem less likely.

But enough of a tangent...

Yes, that actually does look like it is pretty useful. It was always a frustration that formulaic worksheets took a long time to write, rather than just being able to get a computer spitting them out. I do suspect that a little more could be done in terms of tracking students' range of expected language, and it's a shame the software doesn't appear to be doing that, instead asking the teacher to click on a series of grammar features every time they generate a text.

Yeah... looks like a major step change in the way things are done.

But back to Gaelic... I don't think the AI's there yet. Gaelic in ChatGPT free is pretty weak, and while I know the free one is running on GPT 3.5 and 4 is out with 5 on the way, I really doubt it'll have enough material to work from to make a good model. When I was doing a computer project for Gaelic, I told my boss specifically that what I was using was called "machine learning", and that "artificial intelligence" needs far too much data as input. ChatGPT 4 has about 300 billion words of input across all languages. How many machine readable text do you think exists in Gaelic? If GPT3.5 could misspell "àlainneas" by including a triple-N instead of a double-N, then really they're clearly struggling for data.

Software companies presenting language software for UK schools are basically faced with the reality that if they don't cover all the languages in the schools, they're potentially going to lose out. One of the big bonuses of software over books is that it can be used across languages, but if only two of the teachers in the department can use it, there's a training issue... plus potential resentment which the head-of-department has to deal with.

If he's aiming for Scotland, having Gaelic is a visible sales asset. I don't know whether the Irish is because they have the Republic of Ireland in their sites right now, or just Northern Ireland, but I suspect he's probably thinking of the whole island. Not trying to do Welsh does kind of suggest that he sees it as a harder market -- Welsh language education is well-developed so presumably well resourced.

But yeah... I suspect the Gaelic stuff is going to be really, really weak, and the end result will be more of a box-ticking exercise.

[Kraut]

At one point he mentions the big languages and then adds "we want to get all these other little languages out". I wonder whether they are going to have Lithuanian, there is a large diaspora in the US and apparently about 200 000 in GB.

[Cainntear]

At one point he mentions the big languages and then adds "we want to get all these other little languages out". I wonder whether they are going to have Lithuanian, there is a large diaspora in the US and apparently about 200 000 in GB.

I think he was talking about "little languages" in the sense of languages that are taught in far fewer schools. The most common are French, German and Spanish. Italian is less common and getting rarer. Mamdarin is on the up. I'm Scotland there's a (not entirely appropriate) split between "Modern Languages" and "Community Languages" as subject categories, and the community ones are very restricted, and mostly fairly large (Hindi, Urdu, Arabic). I think Polish was added to that list a while back (at least in Scotland anyway) but i doubt Lithuanian would get on the list. Ukranian possibly, but even then more as a political statement than anything.

[Kraut]

https://lingoteach.ai/aipromptslanguage ... 5f90604322

AI Prompts for Language Lessons, Jan 2024

00:00 Intro
01:14 Agenda
01:35 What is ChatGPT
02:32 The Opportunities Ahead
03:55 What is prompt?
07:04 What makes a good or bad prompt?
09:36 Write a better prompt
14:53 Good Examples!
16:58 LingoTeach.ai – create a resource
21:05 LingoTeach.ai – Review the text
24:13 LingoTeach.ai – Review the question content
25:38 LingoTeach.ai – Sentence chunks
28:23 LingoTeach.ai – Teacher Toolkit
30:10 LingoTeach.ai – Reveal Translation tool
30:30 LingoTeach.ai – AI voiceover & speed control
30:42 LingoTeach.ai – Questions & vocab (printable)
32:07 LingoTeach.ai – Digital Textbook Toolkit
34:37 LingoTeach.ai – Learning Activities
36:38 LingoTeach.ai – Highlighting tools
37:43 LingoTeach.ai – Sentence chunks
38:47 LingoTeach.ai – Tangled Translations
39:48 LingoTeach.ai – Print worksheets & booklets
43:23 LingoTeach.ai – Resource library
43:45 LingoTeach.ai – Resource examples
44:30 LingoTeach.ai – Lifetime discount!!
46:50 LingoTeach.ai – Closing thoughts!

[Cainntear]

https://lingoteach.ai/aipromptslanguagelessons?mc_cid=8828d3c6f9&mc_eid=5f90604322

AI Prompts for Language Lessons, Jan 2024

44:30 LingoTeach.ai – Lifetime discount!!

Mistake.

He's trying to sell to schools, not teachers, so what is a lifetime discount? Whose lifetime? Is it one account shared in the department? If the lifetime discount requires you to pay non-stop, that's not a particularly enticing deal. And if the lifetime discount is literally 20%, that means that you're not getting a fixed rate, because every time they change it, you end up getting charged more anyway.

The way I see it, it looks more like he's expecting teachers to pay for it themselves, which is sadly what reality is in a lot of school teaching right now, but he should at least be trying to pretend that's not the case...