A group of college professors sued Texas today for banning TikTok on state devices and networks, as reported byThe Washington Post. The plaintiffs say the prohibition compromises their research and teaching while “preventing or seriously impeding faculty from pursuing research that relates to TikTok,” including studying the very disinformation and data-collection practices the restriction claims to address. The plaintiffs say the ban makes it “almost impossible for faculty to use TikTok in their classrooms — whether to teach about TikTok or to use content from TikTok to teach about other subjects.”

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed the lawsuit in the name of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, an academic research advocacy group the Texas professors are members of. The lawsuit names Governor Greg Abbott and 14 other state and public education officials as defendants. “The government’s authority to control their research and teaching… cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny,” the complaint says.

One example cited by the plaintiffs is Jacqueline Vickery, Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, who studies and teaches how young people use social media for expression and political organizing. “The ban has forced her to suspend research projects and change her research agenda, alter her teaching methodology, and eliminate course materials,” the complaint reads. “It has also undermined her ability to respond to student questions and to review the work of other researchers, including as part of the peer-review process.”

The lawsuit says that, although faculty at public universities are public employees, the First Amendment shields them from government control over their research and teaching. “Imposing a broad restraint on the research and teaching of public university faculty is not a constitutionally permissible means of protecting Texans’ ‘way of life’ or countering the threat of disinformation,” the suit says, citing Abbott’s comments that he feared the Chinese government “wields TikTok to attack our way of life.” The suit also condemns the double standard of claiming to care about Texans’ privacy while still allowing Meta, Google and Twitter (all American companies) to harvest much of the same data as TikTok.

“The ban is suppressing research about the very concerns that Governor Abbott has raised, about disinformation, about data collection,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Washington Post. “There are other ways to address those concerns that don’t impose the same severe burden on faculty and researchers’ First Amendment rights,” he added, as well as their “ability to continue studying what has, like it or not, become a hugely popular and influential communications platform.”

This is the third lawsuit this year challenging state TikTok bans. Two Montana lawsuits funded by the Chinese social media company claim the prohibition violates free speech rights. According toThe New York Times, TikTok is not involved with the Texas suit.

Instead of pen and paper, many students are now carrying a laptop with them, using it for everything from taking notes to doing research. Companies are responding with programs designed for tech-centric learning, including Figma, a cloud-based design tool. The company has announced that Figma is now free for all US students in K-12, in partnership with Google for Education. The initiative started in beta last year, with 50 high schools across the country getting free access to Figma and FigJam, a collaborative whiteboard.

While Figma offers a free version, it only allows users to have three files for each program. Instead, schools can access the company's most advanced tier, Figma Enterprise, for free (typically $75 per person monthly). It includes unlimited files, individual and shared project options, dedicated workspaces and more sophisticated design features, among other perks. Schools will need Chromebooks to utilize the program, but they can apply for access if they have non-Google systems. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 94 percent of schools provided devices like laptops and tablets to students who needed them for the 2022 to 2023 school year.

Figma's fate is a bit up in the air after Adobe entered into an agreement to buy the competitor in September 2022 for $20 billion in cash and shares. Regulators across the US, UK and EU are investigating whether the deal violates antitrust policies, with the first barrier emerging in February with reports that the US Justice Department was preparing an antitrust lawsuit to block the deal. The UK followed in May with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announcing it was launching an inquiry into the agreement. Most recently came reports that European antitrust regulators plan to initiate an investigation into the merger later this year.

As for free Figma access for students, the initiative holds promise, with the company sharing positive reviews from educators involved in the beta program. Educators can now sign up to bring Figma to their schools in the US — plus, the company is taking its Chromebook partnership global, starting with Google schools in Japan.

Google is making it easier for people with reading challenges, such as dyslexia, to be able to make out articles and text posts online. The tech giant has launched "reader mode" for Chrome, which takes a site's primary content and puts it into the sidebar to reduce clutter and distractions. Users will also be able to change the text's typeface, font size and spacing, as well as its color and background color, to find the combination that works best for them. 

Reader mode is but one of the new features and updates Google has rolled out for education users. Another new feature for Google Classroom gives educators the ability to add interactive questions to YouTube videos. That will allow students to answer them and get immediate feedback, giving teachers an insight on how well they understand the subject matter. 

Google is also giving teachers a way to share practice sets with other verified educators in their domain, so that they can expand the availability of materials their students have access to. For particularly difficult mathematical and scientific concepts, for instance, more examples mean more opportunity to better understand them. The company has released a new web player for Screencast on Chrome OS, as well, allowing users to watch casts in any browser on any platform. Plus, it has expanded language options for Screencast closed captions and for practice sets. 

Classes using Meet for online lectures will also find a new and useful feature: Hand raise gesture detection powered by AI. Apparently, when a student raises a hand in real life, the video conferencing app can now automatically activate its Hand Raise icon. In addition, two teachers can now also manage slides concurrently on Meet and co-present lectures together. Google has been growing and improving its education-related tools for years, though it has perhaps kicked things up a notch after schools shut down during the pandemic. It released a slew of updates to make virtual classrooms more usable since then, and it looks like it hasn't forgotten online-based education even though schools have mostly gone back to in-person learning. 

You most likely know Duolingo as an app you can fire up when you want to learn a new language or at least familiarize yourself with the local tongue of a place you're visiting. It has ventured into other subject matters over the years, though, and now it looks like the company is also hoping to be the one people turn to when they want to learn about music. According to a job posting (seen by TechCrunch), Duolingo has a small team that's currently working to build an app for teaching music. 

The job ad is for an "expert in music education who combines both theoretical knowledge of relevant learning science research and hands-on teaching experience." Whoever gets the job will be in charge of making sure that the app is "well-grounded in learning science." They have to translate "research findings into concrete ideas" that can be used for "learning by doing" activities that Duolingo is known for. They also have to take the lead on curriculum development, which signifies that the app is still in its very early stages. 

If and when Duolingo's Music app comes out, it will join the company's growing list of learning applications that include its ABC app, which teaches kids how to read and write. It also has an English Test app for language certification and a Math app that uses colorful animations and interactive exercises to help people learn multiplication, division, fractions, geometry and measurements. As TechCrunch notes, the company is most likely diversifying to ensure its survival and income growth in the future. And its plan seems to be working so far: In its earnings report (PDF) for the fourth quarter of 2022, Duolingo revealed that it enjoyed a 67 percent increase in paid subscribers from the year before. 

Microsoft announced new AI-powered classroom tools today. The company sees its new “Learning Accelerators” as helping students sharpen their speaking and math skills — while making teachers’ jobs a little easier — as children prepare for an even more technologically enhanced world.

Speaker Progress is a new AI classroom tool for teachers. Microsoft says it saves them time by “streamlining the process of creating, reviewing, and analyzing speaking and presentation assignments for students, groups, and classrooms.” It can provide tidy summaries of presentation-based skills while highlighting areas to improve. Additionally, it lets teachers review student recordings, identify their needs and track progress.

It will be a companion for Speaker Coach, an existing feature Microsoft launched in 2021 that provides one-on-one speaking guidance and feedback. For example, it uses AI to give real-time pointers on pacing, pitch and filler words. “Speaker Coach is one of those tools that kind of was a lightbulb tool for a lot of students that I’ve worked with,” said an unnamed teacher in a Microsoft launch video. “Being able to practice and get real-time feedback is where Speaker Coach really comes in and helps our students, and it even helps us as adults.”

Microsoft

Microsoft’s AI math tools are its answer to nosediving math scores during the pandemic. Math Coach deconstructs problems, walking students through the steps to solve them while encouraging critical thinking. Meanwhile, Math Progress is the teacher-focused companion tool, helping them generate practice questions and provide more efficient feedback. The company says the features work together: Math Coach uses teacher input from Math Progress to develop new lessons. Additionally, it says schools can use the tools’ overall math fluency data to track progress and better meet their goals.

Speaker Progress, Math Coach and Math Progress will launch in Microsoft Teams for Education in the 2023-24 school year. Meanwhile, Speaker Coach is available now in Teams and PowerPoint.

There's plenty of concern that OpenAI's ChatGPT could help students cheat on tests, but just how well would the chatbot fare if you asked it to write a graduate-level exam? It would pass — if only just. In a newly published study, University of Minnesota law professors had ChatGPT produce answers for graduate exams at four courses in their school. The AI passed all four, but with an average grade of C+. In another recent paper, Wharton School of Business professor Christian Terwiesch found that ChatGPT passed a business management exam with a B to B- grade. You wouldn't want to use the technology to impress academics, then.

The research teams found the AI to be inconsistent, to put it mildly. The University of Minnesota group noted that ChatGPT was good at addressing "basic legal rules" and summarizing doctrines, but floundered when trying to pinpoint issues relevant to a case. Terwiesch said the generator was "amazing" with simple operations management and process analysis questions, but couldn't handle advanced process questions. It even made mistakes with 6th grade-level math.

There's room for improvement. The Minnesota professors said they didn't adapt text generation prompts to specific courses or questions, and believed students could get better results with customization. At Wharton, Terwiesch said the bot was adept at changing answers in response to human coaching. ChatGPT might not ace an exam or essay by itself, but a cheater could have the system generate rough answers and refine them.

Both camps warned that schools should limit the use of technology to prevent ChatGPT-based cheating. They also recommended altering the questions to either discourage AI use (such as focusing on analysis rather than reciting rules) or increase the challenge for those people leaning on AI. Students still need to learn "fundamental skills" rather than leaning on a bot for help, the University of Minnesota said.

The study groups still believed that ChatGPT could have a place in the classroom. Professors could teach pupils how to rely on AI in the workplace, or even use it to write and grade exams. The tech could ultimately save time that could be spent on the students, Terwiesch explains, such as more student meetings and new course material.

On Tuesday, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT from school devices and WiFi networks. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, released by OpenAI in November, quickly gained a foothold with the public — and drew the ire of concerned organizations. In this case, the worry is that students will stunt their learning by cheating on tests and turning in essays they didn’t write.

ChatGPT (short for “generative pre-trained transformer”) is a startlingly impressive application, a sneak preview of the light and dark sides of AI’s incredible power. Like a text-producing version of AI art (OpenAI is the same company behind DALL-E 2), it can answer fact-based questions and write essays and articles that are often difficult to discern from human-written content. And it will only get harder to tell the difference as the AI improves.

“While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for New York City public schools, wrote in an email to NBC News. Still, the organization may have difficulty enforcing the ban. Blocking the chatbot over the school’s internet network and on lent-out devices is easy enough, but that won’t stop students from using it on their own devices with cellular networks or non-school WiFi.

OpenAI is developing “mitigations” it claims will help anyone identify ChatGPT-generated text. Although that’s a welcome move by the Elon Musk-founded startup, recent history isn’t exactly rife with examples of big business putting what’s best for society over the bottom line. (Relying on AI powerhouses to self-regulate sounds as foolproof as trusting the fossil-fuel industry to prioritize the environment over profits.) And artificial intelligence is big business: OpenAI has reportedly been in talks to sell shares at a $29 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable US startups.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Not everyone in the education community is against the AI chatbot. Adam Stevens, a teacher at Brooklyn Tech who spent years teaching history at NYC’s Paul Robeson High School, compares ChatGPT to the world’s most famous search engine. “People said the same thing about Google 15 or 20 years ago when students could ‘find answers online,’” he toldChalkbeat. He argues that the bot could be an ally for teachers, who could use it as a baseline essay response, which the class could work together to improve upon.

Stevens believes the key is to invite students to “explore things worth knowing” while moving away from standardized metrics. “We’ve trained a whole generation of kids to pursue rubric points and not knowledge,” he said, “and of course, if what matters is the point at the end of the semester, then ChatGPT is a threat.”

No matter how schools handle AI bots, the genie is out of the bottle. Barring government regulation (unlikely in the near future, given the US Congress’ current trajectory), AI-powered answers, essays and art are here to stay. The next part, dealing with the potential societal fallout — including the automation of more and more jobs — will be where the real challenges begin.

Duolingo isn't just about helping people learn languages anymore. The company has released Duolingo Math on iOS, over a year after it first teased the app. Naturally, Duolingo Math shares a lot of DNA with the language apps, including colorful animations and interactive exercises in bite-sized, gamified lessons.

There are two main components to the app: an elementary-level math curriculum that goes over classroom topics and a brain-training course aimed at adults, with more advanced topics and a focus on improving mental math skills. The former covers topics such as multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, areas, geometry and measurements. The brain-training side has similar topics with tougher exercises. Duolingo hopes to help folks learn practical skills, such as converting between ounces and pounds.

Duolingo conducted a survey into math anxiety. It found that 93 percent of adults in the US have experienced some anxiety over math, while around half of high schoolers have "very high math anxiety." With its latest app, it aims to make math "accessible and fun" for everyone.

While this is far from the only math learning app around, Duolingo's name carries some weight with many folks. Like Khan Academy, Duolingo Math is free. The app is available on iPhone, iPad and some iPod Touch devices and it's only in English for now. The company hasn't revealed when it will be available on Android.

Duolingo is holding its annual Duocon event today to show off some of what it's working on. One of the big things the company has in the pipeline is an app called Duolingo Math, which marks its first move outside of language learning.

The app has two main elements. The first is a math course designed for elementary school-level kids. As you'd expect if you've used the main app, Duolingo will offer short, gamified math lessons. The app also has a brain training component geared toward those aged 13 and older. The idea is to help you improve your math and everyday thinking skills. 

Meanwhile, Duolingo is set to add another language course. This time it's for Zulu, which is the most widely spoken first language in South Africa. Duolingo said the introduction of the Zulu course is part of its efforts to increase cultural awareness of lesser-studied and endangered languages.

In addition, the company will offer a look at a redesign for Duolingo ABC, a literacy app for kids. Duocon will also include details on some upcoming social features. One of those is called Friends Quest. Duolingo says it hopes to help folks have more fun while they work toward their language learning goals.

When you think of study aids, TikTok is likely not what comes to mind. And, there’s probably a good reason for that. Scrolling your For You page may be entertaining, but it’s rarely productive.

But, a growing group of study influencers might be changing that. From #booktok, #studytok and #edutok, there are dozens of accounts that can help with study tips, math tutoring and even college admissions advice.

To be clear, it’s still a good idea to limit how much time you spend scrolling. And watching study-themed TikToks is not a substitute for… actually studying. But, videos from academically-minded TikTokers can offer advice on learning tough subjects and serve as inspiration for building new and productive study habits.

What to look for (and avoid)

If you’re looking for study help, well-established hashtags like #studytok or #edutok are a great place to start. Many tutors also post to TikTok, and you can find subject-specific content by adding “tutor” or “help” to the topic, like #mathtuor, #physicshelp etc.

But, as with everything on TikTok, not all study content is equal. And for every helpful account, there are also those who are sharing unhelpful shortcuts and too-good-to-be-true “study hacks.” So avoid accounts that post shady “advice” that’s actually cheating, like how to get an AI to solve your math homework or write an essay for you. And be wary of anyone who is more focused on selling products than usable advice.

Here are a few accounts that actually do a good job in the studying space.

Gohar Khan Goharsguide

Gohar Khan is most well-known for his college admissions advice, which he shares on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The 22-year-old recently graduated from MIT, but before that he was also accepted to Yale and Stanford. Now, he makes videos advising teens on how they can boost their chances of getting into Ivy League and other top-tier schools.

He shares videos with advice on all aspects of preparing for college, from application and essay-writing help, to how to choose a major once you get there. Even if an Ivy isn’t your ultimate goal, he also posts more general tips that will be helpful for students of all levels, In fact, some of his most popular content is geared around how to do homework more quickly, how to find the motivation to study and how to improve your test scores.

Kyle Johnson

Book lovers will appreciate Kyle Johnson’s TikToks for his concise but thoughtful book reviews and reading recommendations, but Johnson, who posts under the account panic_kyle, shares more than just reading lists. He also shares analysis of literary classics and other popular books you may often find as assigned reading in English class..

If you’re looking for a shortcut to avoid reading altogether, Johnson’s account won’t help much. He typically only gives a very brief summary of the books he covers. But if you want to think more deeply about literary themes, or get inspiration for an essay, his videos break down complex literary themes in an easy to digest way. He also shares more general advice, like how to take notes while reading fiction or how to analyze literature.

Your Bummy Math Tutor

I was awful at math when I was in school. Like, truly, awful; I had to repeat algebra three separate times. To the surprise of absolutely no one, I did not score well on the math portion of my SAT… or any other standardized test. And while I don’t know if any amount of TikTok-length videos would have helped back then, Your Bummy Math Tutor’s content makes me think it might have.

YBMT takes math questions from the SAT and practice tests and explains how to solve them, along with strategies for approaching different types of problems. It’s all fairly straightforward and yet, as a lifetime hater of math, the content is also way more engaging than any math class I can remember. Luckily for everyone, I haven’t had to do any algebra for more than a decade. But after watching enough of YBMT’s videos, I kind of feel like maybe I could solve a few problems that would have completely stumped my teenage self. At least, I might have had a few extra tools to try.

Study with soybean

You’ve probably heard of bullet journaling, the note-taking fad that’s part habit tracker, part diary and part to-do list organizer. While it can seem intimidating to start mapping out your entire life in a bullet journal, the system can be a useful study aid.

Study with soybean is a bullet journal pro whose content combines journaling inspo with study tips practical advice on how to take better notes. Her videos break down different styles of note-taking, and how to transform your notes into flashcards and other study aids. She also posts more creative content, like how to make your own greeting cards and improve your handwriting.