Creating Postcards

Recently, our CE2 created postcards. They had to write the text of course, but their teacher asked them to write a second one, one that would generate an image. You may have heard of generative intelligences like GPT, which can produce text. Others produce music. Mubert or Aiva come to mind. Some allow you to generate images. This is the case of Stable Diffusion, Dall.e or Midjourney.

So this teacher’s idea was to ask the students not to find an image to illustrate their postcard, but to create it. I think this is a great idea for several reasons.

First, I think nothing appeals to us as much as something that is both old (the postcard) and very new (artificial intelligence). Second, there is a magical side to handling AI: in the beginning was the verb. Indeed, to produce content, you need to know how to handle language, and in a school context, what richer idea? The students had to write twice for the same exercise: the text of the postcard and the text generating the pictorial creation.

There was also a geographical constraint in the exercise since each student (each group of two students, to be honest) had to describe a place. I like to think that we could add a touch of chance to the activity. If we use Google Earth by clicking on the I’m Lucky button, the app takes us to a random place to discover. What a fun geography lesson we have here!

There is definitely something here to spark the creativity of the students and it did! One of them exclaimed, “Can we create the stamps?” We hadn’t thought of that, and I find the idea particularly appealing.