Checking your work

Maybe those teachers I had in school had it right after all. It wasn’t good enough to just answer questions or do the math, we had it drilled into us that we needed to check our work. It’s amazing what you catch when you do.

It’s actually a skill (technique?) that I use when I write a blog post. I always check my work, my resources, my links, etc. to make sure that it’s as good as I can make it before I post. Thankfully, WordPress has a terrific preview option.

When I was writing daily, I got into the habit of scheduling my posts for the next day rather than post immediately. That bought me a little bit of time to check my work later that afternoon or evening just to make sure it was good to go.

It’s kind of funny to think about how we use artificial intelligence these days. We ask a question or perhaps start a conversation and we rely on the results. Now, these tools definitely are getting better but I think we all know that they’re not perfect all the time. There are the occasional “hallucination” generated and presented as the correct answer. In the technology using classroom, it should definitely be discussed and strategies developed in students as they use this technology with their work.

I was always a fan of Perplexity because it does show links to things that it returns as results.

And, of course, it wasn’t long before Google came onto the scene and it has its own AI Tool – Gemini. I’ve added it to my set of online tools and nothing draws characters better than Nano Banana.

But, there’s a new feature to the results returned by Gemini. You can ask it to double-check its response to you.

I gave it a shot. It was an easy question and I knew the result but shows how it works.

The areas that it double-checked are in green and there’s a down arrow that gives you the link to what it just checked for you.

It’s another tool to add to your media literacy toolkit. Of course, a little bit of common sense should be the first tool in that kit! But, if anyone is going to use online tools for assistance, it’s so important that you know what it does, what it can do, and what it might not be able to do. Those “hallucinations” can be so convincing.

To use double-check – just ask your question or conversation and look for the three dot menu (hamburger menu) at the bottom of the results. This starts a popup menu where the top lets you start the double-check.

May it make your results a little more reliable.

Now I’m off to schedule this for 5am tomorrow morning.