Tag: Gemini

Masses of digital text. AIs with a large context window can process much more of it!

Gemini’s Long Context Window – a True Spec Cruncher

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Maybe you’ve noticed that Google’s Gemini has been making gains on ChatGPT lately. Of all its recent impressive improvements, one of the lesser-sung features – at least in AI for Ed circles – is its much enhanced context window.

The context window is essentially how much text the AI can ‘remember’, and work with.  Google’s next model boasts one million characters of this memory, leaving other models – which count their own in the hundreds of thousands – in the dust. It blows open the possibilities for a particular kind of AI task: working with long texts.

Language learners make use of all kinds of texts, of course. But one particularly unwieldy (although hugely useful) type where this new feature could help is the exam spec.

Exam Spec Crunching with AI

Language exam specs are roadmaps to qualifications, listing the knowledge and skills students need to demonstrate linguistic competency. But they have a lot of fine detail that can bog us down.

As a content creator, one thing that challenges me is teasing out this detail into some kind of meaningful arrangement for student activities. There is a mass of vocab data in there. And as systematic as it is, abstract lists of connectives, temporal adverbs and helper verbs don’t make for very student-friendly lesson material.

With a massive text cruncher like Gemini, they are a lot easier to process. Just drag in your spec PDF (I’ve been playing around with the new AQA GCSE German doc), and tease out the material in a more useful format for planning:

Take this German exam spec, and create an outline plan of three terms of twelve lessons that will cover all of the thematic material.

Additionally, it can help in creating resources that cover all bases:

Create a short reading text to introduce students to the exam topic “Celebrity Culture”. It should be appropriate for students aiming for the top tier mark in the spec. In the text, make sure to include all of the prepositions from the prescribed word list.

With a long textual memory, it’s even possible to interrogate the spec after you’ve uploaded it. That’s literally just asking questions of the document itself – and, with that bigger window, getting answers that don’t overlook half the content:

If students have one year to learn ALL of the prescribed vocabulary in the spec, how many words should they be learning a week? Organise them into weekly lists that follow a broadly thematic pattern.

Supersized Context Window – Playing Soon at an AI Near You!

For sure, you can use these techniques on existing platforms straight away. However, due to the smaller context window, results might not always be 100% reliable (although it’s always fun trying!). For the new Google magic, we’ll have to wait just a little longer. 

But from the initial signs, it definitely looks worth the wait!

Gemini’s new supersized context window is available only in a limited released currently, and only via its AI Studio playground. Expect to see it coming to Gemini Advanced very soon!

An illustration of a robot scribe writing AI prompts for ChatGPT or Gemini

Power to the Prompts : Fave Tweaks for AI Worksheets

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Content creation is what AI excels at. That’s a gift to language learners and teachers, as it’s the easiest thing in the world to create a set of prompts to run off original, immersive worksheets.

AI isn’t great at everything, though, which is why our prompts need to tweak for its weaknesses – the things that are obvious gotchas to language folk, but need explaining to a general assistant like AI. Fortunately, in most cases, all you need is an extra line or two to put it right.

Here are five of my favourite prompt-enhancers for worksheets, covering everything from vocab to copyright!

Five Tweaks for Perfect Prompts

Cut Out the Cognates

Cognates are generally great for language learners. As words that are instantly recognisable, they’re extra vocab for free. But for that very reason, they’re not the ones that worksheets should be making a song and dance about. It’s not particularly useful, for example, to have “der Manager” picked out in your German glossary as a key word. Yes, I worked that one out!

Try this in your vocab list prompts, bearing in mind that not all platforms will work equally well with it (Gemini aced it – ChatGPT sometimes gets it):

Don’t list items that are obvious English loanwords or cognates with English.

Highlight the Good Stuff

You know what I mean by the good stuff – those structures and snippets of languages that are really frequent, and really reusable. I like to call them sentence frames – you can learn them, and switch in other words to add to your own linguistic repertoire.

You can ask AI to draw attention to any really pertinent ones in your target language texts:

Highlight (in bold and italics) the most pertinent key words and phrases for the topic, and provide a brief glossary of them at the end.

Make It Colloquial

Vanilla AI can sound bookish and formal. That’s no good as a model for everyday speech, so polish your prompts with a wee push to the colloquial:

Make the language colloquial and idiomatic, in the style of a native speaker.

Include an Answer Key

It might seem obvious, but if you’re making materials for self-study, then you will find an answer sheet indispensable. It’s an often overlooked finishing touch that makes a worksheet truly self-contained:

Include an answer key for all questions at the end.

Covering Your Back With Copyright

Copyright issues have been bubbling in the background for LLMs for some time now. They produce texts based on vast banks on training data, which isn’t original material, of course. But in theory, the texts that pop out of it should be completely original.

It can’t hurt to make that explicit, though. I like to add the following line to prompts, especially if I’m intending to share the material beyond personal use:

Ensure that the text is completely original and not lifted directly from any other source.

 

What are your favourite tweaks to make perfect prompts? Let us know in the comments!