Introduction

Hi, everyone. Let's see, is my mic, my mic? Yeah, great.

Okay, so I am from New York. I can also speak loudly, but I tend, I've been told I speak kind of slowly, so I'll try to speed it up, inspired by Pablo.

And I'll also be here for questions.

Speaker Introduction

1My name is Laura Mahalel and I am not your dream tutor, but I have some ideas, some tips and some tricks, some examples that you can use to help you use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Cloud to accelerate your learning and to get things done.

So a little bit about me, or as Pablo said, why should you listen to me? I've worked at these fabulous places, but I'm currently looking for my next opportunity, either in tech enablement or L&D. I am also available as a consultant.

And I am also a certified yoga instructor, which we're going to hear a little bit. We'll get back to that in a moment.

Grounding Exercise

But before we get started, let's take a moment to ground. So I'd like to invite, I want to share with you something that I just learned.

So I invite you to inhale and exhale. And as you exhale, draw your navel in and hold the air out. And when you're ready, when you need to take that breath, simply soften your belly and allow the air to come back in.

Well done. You have just told your parasympathetic nervous system that it is okay to relax.

Hopefully your mind is a little calmer than it was a minute ago and you are ready to learn. You've already learned something, so you're welcome.

Importance of Generative AI

All right, back in the day, Steve Jobs famously said that the personal computer was like a bicycle for the mind that could take humans faster, farther. And I say that generative AI is like an e-bike for the mind. It's a tool that can take you very, very far very quickly.

And just to provide a little bit more context, how can you use these tools to learn? Well, imagine that you have a friend who has read every book ever written and is always available to talk with you day or night. What would you ask them? What mysteries would you unlock?

Would you learn about pirates or Python? The possibilities are truly endless. And if you pause to think about it, it's quite profound.

But we'll come back to Earth a little bit more and to the topic of this talk.

Ways to Learn Using AI

There are tons of different ways to learn. I'm going to share with you A couple of things that I've discovered have given traction both for myself and for my clients.

I'll give you some examples of what I call one and done. This is where there's a specific thing to do, like you've got to fix the sink, you've got to troubleshoot something, you've got to get something done.

Second examples are going to be more like extended learning, when you've got a desire to go deeper in a topic. to grow and learn something in a sustained way.

So again, for comparison, one set of tasks is like, I just need to fix the sink. The other is, I want to become a plumber, which by the way, when AI takes our jobs, might not be such a bad idea.

Was that? I didn't used to think so, by the way. But I'm going to show you when I did something that blew my mind and made me think otherwise. And you'll be able to do it too.

One and Done Examples

So who here is the tech support person for their family? Probably most of you. It's a really fun job, right? Zero pay. You're on call at all hours.

My brother likes to tell his kids, if you're old enough to have a phone, then you're old enough to support it. My husband, and I'm going to go through a couple of slides. I'll try to go quickly and then I'm going to jump to demo.

Just always a little nervous things will break, but he got this email. Well, I got this email from him. The reason was that he got an email saying that the mail that he'd been using for the last nine years was about to lock him out because he had so much stuff in it and he was way over the limit.

So their tech support was kind enough to provide some instructions, which I told them to try, but they didn't work. So enter me and ChatGPT. Now, I just copy and pasted very sloppily and said to ChatGPT, please tell me what to do here. Compare, make a recommendation. And very quickly, it did. It gave some links to sources, even. Fabulous. Sounds great.

That wasn't the end of the story. There were more steps involved. And one thing was there was a five gigabyte limit and I am not a programmer. I have been working in tech for a long time, but I just some details I don't remember. So one thing that I want to share with you, there is no shame in asking silly questions. This is one of the advantages of using these tools. they do not judge you. So not ashamed to say, this is a good way to learn, to ask the questions. It got more complicated than that.

OK, wrong slide. But the point is, it was able to give me other instructions, including command lines that I could use to make more intelligent searches. We got the job done.

Extended Learning Examples

Second example, again, family tech support. It's my dad. He is a semi-retired earth scientist. And he heard I was playing around with chat GPT, and he said, do you think you could write me some Python code to generate wavelet visualizations?

I was like, yeah, sure, why not? And then I thought, what's a wavelet transformation, right? So I asked my friend ChatGPT and gave me more details than I really needed to know.

But in short, I'm going to jump to this. Generating the Python was really easy. I did that in one minute, and you could too. Just say, hey, Chachi PD, can you generate the Python code to do this?

Fabulous. But as I mentioned, I am not a coder. So I got the code. Cool. I don't know what to do with it. And that's where I can go back to ChatGPT and no silly questions. I can say, all right, how am I going to run this thing?

I have some knowledge. I'd heard of Jupyter Notebooks. You saw Pablo's nice Jupyter Notebooks, right? I didn't know how to set one up. I didn't know what libraries I needed. I know these terms, but how to string it all together.

That's the kind of thing that, yes, there's tons of documentation out there. And I spent many years as a technical writer. So I honor that profession and those resources. But stringing together all these different bits is really hard to do without a nice, intelligent person.

So it was like having one of my favorite engineers sitting at my side, holding my hand, walking through. And the miraculous thing In less than two hours, I had the code set up and running on my laptop, and we got these beautiful wavelets.

Key Takeaways

Now, even more miraculous, I will show you in a few minutes in the demo how you all can do what I did in two hours. That was a few months ago. Now, we're going to do it in like a minute. But first, let me just summarize some of the takeaways here of the one and done, the fix the sync kind of challenges.

It's OK to be sloppy. You don't have to be shy.

And it might not just be one and done. Just because it's a one-time task, it might take some iterating.

You know, a lot of people tell me, oh, I tried chat GPT, and it doesn't tell me. You got to keep at it a little bit. So interact with it.

Take advantage of the ways that it is like a human and the ways that it's not like a human. And more specifically, unlike a human, it's patient. It's non-judgmental.

But like a human, you can speak to it in natural language, which is For someone who is not super techie, kind of a gift.

OK.

Long-Term Support and Coaching

Second kind of examples that I'm going to get into are longer term support or advice, coaching, ways to grow, improve, navigate specific challenges, like becoming a plumber. But much more, really, anything that you want to learn about. And if you have something that you want to learn about and you're like, how can I get

Please talk to me afterwards. I'd be happy to chat.

It's not just me who thinks this. Sal Khan, perhaps one of the greatest educators of our lifetime, is a big fan. He wrote a whole book on it.

Basically, he has noticed for a long time that one of the challenges in traditional education is that it is not flexible. Teachers have to teach to the middle student. But now with AI, we have a solution that can overcome obstacles by providing scalable and adaptable learning.

In his words, you can use it to quickly fill the Swiss cheese holes that are in your knowledge. You can get immediate, personalized feedback on whatever you don't know. And the data supports the idea of one-on-one tutoring being just about the best way to learn.

Personalized Guides

All right, so let's go ahead and take a look, see what it looks like. I'm going to introduce you to some of the personalized guides I built for myself and for my clients by creating chat GPTs in OpenAI.

OK, so meet Julio. duplicate thank you duplicate thank you so much okay haven't been on a work computer in a while either um keep changes and take that okay meet Julio so back in September I had the lovely opportunity to teach yoga in a fabulous resort in the Dominican Republic And it turned out a lot of the guests, a lot of my students were Spanish speakers.

I have some basic Espanol, but I did not really know how to teach a yoga class in Spanish. And so during my free time, I thought this is a fun challenge. Let me let me work on this and to make it more fun. I devised Julio.

And I could ask Julio, you know, you can use Google Translate, of course, but Julio knows about yoga and Julio knows Spanish. So I could say to Julio something like, how do I instruct lift arms as in sun salutation?

All right, he is bilingual, so he's going English here, let me see. Hmm So what I love is he's combining he you know, I'm personifying but he's combining the context now he's drawing information Language English Spanish from the internet also yoga stuff Cool when I came back to New York.

I started my intermediate teacher training and I had to learn exactly how to teach things in the manner of the school where I was studying.

That's not information that is just out there on the internet. So I went to configure Julio a little bit more, right? So I had very basic instructions for him in the beginning.

But what I did is I uploaded PDFs of our school's manuals. So these are, you know, maybe they're out there somewhere on the internet, but they're not like, generally publicly available.

Okay, so becoming an intermediate teacher, I'm teaching level two classes. And there are some distinct differences between level one classes that I've been teaching for a while and level two. And these are the kind of things that I'm going to be tested on.

So here, I start to get some details about how the two classes are different. So this is knowledge that it feels like Julio has learned. It's not exactly learning, but he's synthesizing from this knowledge that I've uploaded, plus everything that is available on the web.

Client Success Stories

So one of my clients is very talented. She is writing a young adult novel as a side project. And she told me, I've got all this great content. I've got these characters. I'm kind of stuck on how it all ties together. And I have specific problems I want to resolve. And I want to do this all and get an outline in time for a writer's workshop that I'm going to.

And I said, I can help you with that. And at first she said, no, you know, I don't want AI to be writing for me. That feels like cheating. I want to use my voice and so on. I said, I hear you. Let me try.

Now, I know nothing about young adult fantasy. I don't know if there's any fans here. So I asked her who are some of her favorite authors and series and so on. And I configured this, I called it her genie, to know about all these things. And then I made up some conversation starters and gave it to her.

She was completely thrilled and blown away by this because she could ask it. She knew all these things, but she could really ask it patterns and it could help her understand why it was, what did these books have in common that she liked about them that she wanted to bring to her work. And she was able, I'm just clicking one of the preset prompts here, but she interacted with it in some cool ways.

Let me, just show you if you're totally new. I know we're at all levels here.

So here I was showing you some customized GPTs that I created. You do need the paid version for GPT to do that, ChatGPT. But there are tons of publicly available GPTs, so you can search to learn on lots of different topics of interest.

For example, I'm hoping to learn how to play Mahjong soon. I know zero about it, but there are probably millions of people in the world who do. I don't even know how to spell it, but I'm going to search.

These are GPTs that are available, which you get to here by tapping on explore GPTs. And I'm going to see up and look at that. Look at that. I don't know how to spell it, but I know how to find it.

And I am not expert, but let's see. Help predict your go-to pal for tips. I don't know. I can try one of these and I won't get into it here. But just to show you, whatever it is out there, there's probably a GPT for it already.

Live Demonstration

Now, I promised I was going to show you some total magic. Remember that wavelet transform that took me two hours to do the code and get it running? Now, this is Claude AI, and I believe this is something you can do for free.

I can say, create a web app to show a wavelet continuous wavelet transform based on data in a text file that is in two columns, two numbers per row.

Okay. Come on, Claude. Pondering, standing by.

I find that I've experimented with different man. I think I have Claude Pro, man. Try it one more time.

Wrap it up, OK. I feel like Copilot, the Microsoft version, its voice is kind of very USA Today, right? ChatGPT is maybe a little more like, hmm, approaching New York Times. And Claude, I feel like it's very like, I don't know, New Yorker.

Anyway, I think this is amazing. Look, it's generating the code. And... I think the connection maybe is a little, so trust me, and when I did this earlier, it was like. Okay. That's the joy of a live demo, right?

But trust me when I say that you can do that and boom, there was, there's a, I had it coming up here, a button, upload the file. I might have a screenshot to show you.

I'm going to show you just one more thing. In case you're not familiar with Perplexity AI, fabulous tool for research, and you can even Use it.

Research Tools

So this is one final point. Even though you can use AI brilliantly to teach you lots of things, you can also use it to guide you to other resources, books, videos, and so on, even meetups.

I didn't rig this. Look what the first result is. I love perplexity. Love perplexity. Yep. All right.

So a rapid takeaway for here. Showed you how to create a web app.

It's okay to be sloppy. Don't be shy. It might be iterative.

Create your custom GPT mentors. You can personalize them. Think of them as a team.

And be creative. And last but not least, have fun.

Conclusion

There are some silly ways that AI is perhaps misused in education. If you haven't seen it, Google this AI software SNL. It is a hoot.

And I would love to be in touch. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Happy learning.