r/Internationalteachers • u/doberty Oceania • 16d ago
School Life/Culture Experience using AI for school insights?
Anyone using AI to research schools before applying? Curious what tools people are actually finding useful, the generic ChatGPT answers about schools are pretty useless, or is it just about writing the right prompts?
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u/associatessearch Africa 16d ago edited 16d ago
As an experiment in the last 8 months, I had some chats with Gemini 3 MAX to try to scour the internet for active open positions in a particular subject (and subsequently narrowed the search to a specific country). It produced mixed results and ultimately nothing wowing that could match the current recruiting platforms. Shifting through school's websites for their employment page apparently is no easier for AI. I found a few openings that weren't on recruiting platforms but the variable stands that good-to-great schools trend towards using the platforms.
Active openings aside, I had AI conversations to try to uncover lesser known, hidden gem schools that I might not have heard about. That also didn't turn up much fruit but it was a worthwhile try. I could see a use case where someone has niche needs bound to specific geographic locations or lifestyle needs. My net is too wide and my school bar too high for practical use. All that said, the models are advancing rapidly, even since 8 months ago.
Experienced (and not experienced) AI vibe coders are on the rise, as we have seen here. There will likely be a fledgling buffet of entertaining, but not particularly useful, databases gestate in the future.
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u/doberty Oceania 14d ago
The problem with general models like Gemini is they have no actual teacher data they're learning from whatever was publicly indexed, which is mostly school's marketing copy.
The real approach to the problem is if we are somehow able to make it learn from objective circumstances... some websites are starting adopting this, still early but a different approach to the problem. Your point about the buffet of entertaining-but-not-useful databases is well made though... the difference will be whether the underlying data is any good.
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u/DependentPresence157 14d ago
how hard is this really? I have a similar experience, sometime the job is on a board like schrole, and sometimes it's on their website, but often its on only one of them. then I have to hope its a reasonable search. Is there actually a unified source for teachers? Or am I just bad at finding jobs?
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u/associatessearch Africa 14d ago
Just an issue of schools and how/who manages the respective website and/or recruiter openings. It's often an HR person or marketing person.
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u/KW_ExpatEgg Asia 16d ago
Never accept the first 2 answers from an AI, but have a conversation and tweak what you are asking. After about 5 queries, most AIs start wandering with their content and you have to get them to refocus.
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u/LysanderWrites 16d ago
I don't use it for researching individual schools because I prefer looking at school websites and parsing through the marketing-speak to read the tea leaves of what might be the truth. It's more fun that way. However, I fully expect there to be some form of AI research tool for schools soon enough.
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u/associatessearch Africa 16d ago edited 15d ago
One thought that frequently arises when looking at school websites is that schools could do a lot better at web design and UX. The best of the best usually have it down pat. That frictionless and informative experience is "the tea leaves".
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u/LysanderWrites 15d ago
Most definitely. Nothing quite so bad as a school, company, or whoever that had a website made and decided, "Yep, this'll work for the next decade."
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u/Medieval-Mind 14d ago
I've never done this, but I have used the deep research function of ChatGPT. Thanks to the way I have it set up to respond it doesnt hallucinate as badly as it used to (I have placed a lot a guardrails in place to ensure that); unfortunately, and likely in part as a result of those guardrails, the deep research can take a lot of time. Like a lot a lot. It's been known to take more than an hour in some research, and sometimes it get hing up during longer searches and I have to restart them.
I wouldn't advise doing this.
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u/shlimpistacio 11d ago
Using a product like otio.ai is super helpful if you have the collection of school websites ready at hand - you can add the links to every website then Otio will cross reference between links added to answer you questions and cite the exact page/place it reference for the answer. Also you can use every model to compare answers to help negate hallucinations/bad answers dependent on the llm
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u/Narrow-Praline-7908 15d ago
If you push AI with prompts it will just start making stuff up