I'm hoping the dog is settled. I do have another trick up my sleeve if need be.

Oh, nice.

Good evening, everyone.

K. So let's see. I could hide this. People are arriving here. Hello, everyone.

Hello, people.

Thank you for being so patient joining us here as we got things situated for our first connecting the dots digital event.

As you can tell, we're really organized.

Yes. Super organized. Marty, what did you teach before you became, the tech special extraordinaire?

Third and fourth grade is where I spent thirteen years, twelve years in third and fourth grade, twice in absolute, which was amazing.

Oh, that is awesome. Nice.

Well, good.

I just like, I remember. I thought it was I thought it was elementary. I couldn't remember, if it was, like, lower l, but, that's awesome. And and Jen's got her high school ELA. Yeah.

But I get to see ninth graders and twelfth graders, and sometimes the twelfth graders are the same people I taught when they were ninth graders, and that's a lot of fun too.

It's a little bit like looping, but not quite.

Yes. Oh, I told miss you that.

Because they're, like, way more functional. Mhmm.

Mhmm.

I I mean, they're used to high school at that point.

Give me a little bit chart. Oh, there we go. Thank you. Yeah. Feel free to say hello and where you're from, in the chat.

If you want to go ahead and even let us know what you teach, that's awesome. I love to know that information as we start going here. It's at eight o'clock right now. One of the things that's really important to me, as a former classroom teacher with two, educators right now is that I wanna respect everyone's time.

So people this is gonna be recorded, and so we wanna make sure, that everyone can get a shot at this. So after, I don't know, after today, probably tomorrow, it'll be posted within the community, and I'm sure it'll go out in an email from our awesome marketing team. But I'm gonna get started because there's so much we can talk about when you're talking about everything that's going on in education right now. It's a nice nice super topic.

Whole topic there.

Okay. Just go anywhere.

But this is our first connecting the dots, digital event. I'm really excited. It's hosted by me. If you don't know me, you might have seen me on the interwebs at some point at the nerdy teacher.

Possibly could have even been a Myspace friend at one point if you go that far back.

So, you know, I'm all over the Internet at the the nerdy teacher.

I'm also here with two friends, Marnie and Jen, and we're gonna talk a little bit about their awesomeness.

Now this is me. I joined in at School AI in October. I am the community content and training manager.

My favorite cartoon growing up was ThunderCats. I still actually have a Thundercats sleeping bag that I use when I can't. My wife hates it, so I love it even more.

My favorite food is I love ribs, and my favorite AI trick is actually having AI parse, CSV files, that I could never process on my own. And just it's the best thing AI could do for me. It's tell me what's important in this and do it quickly, and give you that information, is super, super helpful.

Next up, we will have, our friend here. I got it right here. I'm gonna make sure I read the bios because reading the bios are the fun part. Nothing like making your friends uncomfortable or reading their bios right to their face.

Alright. Marie is a Marie is a former classroom teacher who is now the tech coordinator at a pre k eighth grade school. She has always been a technological adventurer no matter where she is. Marnie is a regular presenter at tech conferences and is a certified Google educator, Seesaw ambassador, BrainPOP certified educator, Google certified one and two, and, Breakout EDU certified and is certified in ambassadorized on many other platforms.

I could've said that way wrong. It could've been real weird. Marnie loves helping people get to, yes, in their teaching and learning. She excels at helping others use technology to make curriculum come alive.

Marnie is the current president of the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning. When Marnie isn't working, she'll be spending time with her nieces who thankfully live nearby. She also loves snuggling with her rescue pup and devouring books. Say hello, Marnie.

Hi, everyone.

I'll apologize in advance if my rescue pup who's down there starts barking. I do have some distractions for him.

Yeah. That's a really complete bio, which I love. Thank you, Nick, for the intro. My favorite cartoon was always will be rainbow bright, the original.

No. She's coming back, but I am all about original.

My favorite food is either my mom's sweet noodle kugel or just a really good bowl of cereal.

And I think my favorite e I AI trick is when I have a really good idea and I put it out in stream of consciousness, and then I ask AI to make sense of it for me.

It's very, very time very much a time saver for me, and it's all my original idea. I just need it organized in a way that I can execute.

Awesome. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Marnie and I have been friends for well over a decade, close to fifteen years. I would imagine we've known each other for quite some time. So it's always awesome to be able to connect with my friends, but also people that are local in Michigan. And my state organization, McCall, could not have a better leader at the moment, so I am very happy, with what we've got going on there for our state.

Next up, another old friend of mine. We've got Jen. Jen is a nationally board certified high school English teacher with twenty five plus years of experience teaching English language arts and social science in grades seven through twelve. She is a coauthor of Power Up, Making the Shift to One on One Teaching and Learning and a Google for Education certified innovator since two thousand and eleven. Her interest include literacy instruction and literacy technology leveraging technology, excuse me, to make her teaching more efficient and effective. She blogs at lit and tech dot com. Say hi, Jen.

Hello. And now that I know Nick was gonna, like, read those word for word, I really wish I'd used AI to, like, turn it into a limerick or something just to torture him.

I think my favorite cartoon, and this is gonna explain a lot, would probably be the Jetsons.

My favorite food is probably the sourdough bread I made yesterday, and I'm still on that kick. I have not given up. I have very short attention span most of the time, but I've continued to make sourdough bread from the same starter since the pandemic.

And my favorite AI trick is asking it to do things I have no idea how to do, like write Google Apps Script for me. I took a picture of all of the theater tickets that our local theater sent us, like, you know, six or seven different shows, took a picture, gave it to AI, and said, I need to Google Apps Script to put all these dates on my calendar. And three minutes later, all those dates were on my calendar, and I didn't have to enter the one at a time. It was fantastic.

I love it. I love little things like that. I'm like, that's brilliant. That's a genius. Like, when we talk about AI and we're talking about time saving, like, sometimes you have to take that creative, like, thought step to be like, well, how can this really save me time? And, like, little things like that can save you a ton of time and hassle, and it'll help eliminate mistakes, especially when it comes to putting stuff in calendars, which I am notoriously bad at.

Like, super duper bad at.

So we're gonna dive right on in. I'm gonna pull up these questions, because I don't mess around. Like, I have some bangers on here I'm really excited about.

I told, I told Jen before we got on here, I would look super anxious. You know, it's my first connecting the dots. Like, all these people are here. They're gonna be paying attention.

I've got really, really brilliant educator friends. So I had all this stress, then I realized actually, I just have to ask the questions. I don't actually have to sound smart at all. All of the friends are already in jed.

So I'm like, this is gonna be easy for me. So, my job is just to sort of moderate and let this bounce, back and forth. I'll vary between the two of you, and we'll just sort of go where this takes us. And that's what I sort of, like, love about this.

So we're gonna start with, the subject line is unfiltered classroom truths.

That's the subject line of this group of questions.

Like I just pulled a card in that NPR game. Right?

So we'll start we'll start with the softball.

And I I like this one, so I'll be curious, especially in the comments, to see how many people can relate.

And we'll start with Jen.

What's the biggest challenge you're navigating this year?

You know, you gave us these questions in advance. These are softball questions. But, honestly, I've been looking at that one trying to come up with an answer because I'm finding this year to be a lot easier than last year.

My biggest challenge in the classroom is usually the personality interactions of my students.

And this year, my kids are just all really awesome. So I'm not finding that that one challenging kid or that one challenging parent. Like, this time last year, I was in, you know, email battle with a parent over something that she said I said that I didn't say and, you know, those kinds of things. And this year has just been calm, and everybody's happy. And I think it's because I've been using AI to write parent letters, like, every couple weeks about what's going on in the classroom. And everybody just feels like I'm in that they're informed, and I know what's going on, and everything's under control. So they've just left me alone, which is fantastic.

But I really I gotta say not not finding this year to be nearly as challenging as last year or the year before. So I don't have an answer for you, Nick. Sorry.

Wow. Really, really dropping the ball on this first one for me. I'm really taking this straight to heart here. How about you, Marnie? Any challenges for you?

Well, I have to first agree with Jen. This year, for whatever reason, is a feels a lot smoother.

With that said, there's always the main challenge that I think every educator, at least in this country, must face is not enough time to do things, training, all of that, teaching, getting everything in.

But the real challenge that I've been facing, and it's partially because AI is advancing so quickly and there's so many new tools out there, is my focus.

I am feel like, you know, squirrel, rabbit, acorn.

There's so much both within school and within the general world climate that just I get so easily distracted. And we talk about that a lot, especially with device distractions. I also get lost in books. But at school, like, I set a goal or I start this lesson, and then I check my email, and there's a tool to check out. And then I'm on the, you know, often running down the rabbit holes, and it's just there's so much I wanna do.

And it's there's a lot of which is good. There's a lot of good happening. There's a lot of scary happening that pulls away from the good. So trying to stay focused on my goal of embedding technological adventures into the kids' and teachers' learning experiences.

You know, it's really interesting. And it was things that each of you said. Jen, you talked about using AI to help with parent communication. And one of the things that from a technology standpoint, as an early adopter like I was, I remember I was one of the very first teachers to have a class website.

And parents were excuse me. Teachers were like, you can't have information up on there all the time. Parents will grow to expect it. And it was like this you know, you're really setting this bar of, like, information. And I said, I get zero emails from parents.

Zero. Because they're informed. So a little lift on my part eliminates the possibility of miscommunication through email or phone calls and things like that. So I think using AI is like a lift on the front end, but, right, you're saving all of this time in the back end when you're not having that miscommunication.

You're not having, you know, these back and forth potentially. And I think, Marnie, with your time, it is it is a tale as old as time. I mean, as teachers, one of the things as I was a classroom teacher to an instructional coach is there are only so many hours of the day, and you're trying to whether as a teacher, do all the things your admin wants you to do. As a an instructional coach, do all the things your admin wants to do, which is to have the teacher do more of the things.

There's only so many minutes within that. And at the same time, the focus is on the teachers or, excuse me, on the students and trying to set them up for success by setting the teachers up for success, which sometimes as an instructional coach is sometimes coaching the admin for them to learn how to use these tools to set the teachers up for success. Like, it's a back and forth, and so I'm so happy that two of my friends are having a nonchallenging year. I mean, that's the best part of this.

Like, okay. Also, like, it really destroyed the question, but from a friendship level, I'm feeling really good about that.

I mean, my refrigerator died, and it took six weeks to get a new one if you want challenges, but it wasn't about school.

I I it's yeah. Really, I was approved to order seventy five new Chromebooks for ninety two students for the fall. So I'm seven like, if you want that kind of challenge, we do have those. You can pull them up.

Do have those. Yes.

Here's the next question. I like this one.

Why do you wish, what do you wish educators in other schools understood about your students or setting? I love this one because I got two awesome teachers in two very different parts of the the country in two very different schools.

So I really am a fan of this question because I wanted to make sure, as part of connecting the dots, I wanna bring this varied voices as possible. So, Marnie, we'll start with you, and maybe talk a little bit, about where you teach and and and what that looks like. And what do you wish other people knew?

Oh, this is this is a loaded question, and I'll preface it by saying, I am my official title is coordinator of technological adventures.

When I was hired in, it was gonna be educational technology director, but what does that mean to my students and teachers? So words matter. With that said, I work at a private preschool through eighth grade school in an affluent area of Michigan.

And I wish people would understand that money isn't everything, but it's something. Being at a private school right now really does have its advantages.

Yet at the same time, seventy percent of our students are on, tuition assistance.

You would think that being in an affluent area in a private school, you would have an abundance of parent support, and we do.

But sometimes that's not so helpful when you have parents breathing down your neck for every little thing and asking for everything and not trusting you to do your job. So that's something I taught previously in an affluent public school.

That is something that is a struggle. And then on the flip side, we have some kids that are that spend most of their time with nannies.

And so there's just you have the gamut. Just because you're paying for private school tuition doesn't mean everything is sunshine and roses.

And it's also hard because of the standards. We don't necessarily follow state standards, but our teachers and in general, we're all trying to remember that we're teaching kids. And because we don't necessarily follow the alignment of the state standards, we use standards common core and GSS as our guideposts to ensure that by the kit time the kids graduate in eighth grade, they can assimilate either to the public school or another private school.

But the focus of teaching kids and kids walk in, you know, different every day with different issues, with smiles, with frowns, with who knows what's going on, sometimes pushing the standards aside to deal with the soft skills or the SEL takes priority.

And I think some people not most teachers recognize that, but I think some people who don't work in education or who work in very different settings, it's eye opening.

Yeah. I I it's one of the things, Marlene. I think it's a great point is that and it's something that I didn't fully understand. It's like the first five years, right, for everyone that's, here, in the web, webinar here, the stream, like right?

It's the first five years where you just don't know anything. You are just treading water. Like, all the things that you think you know and then you're actually like, I didn't understand about my school population and my students in that. You know, you you're you're told to teach as a public school teacher.

Teach everyone, and you're gonna you'll be fine. Like, right, just paint it on with broad strokes, and you'll get and it's I don't know. As a person that is very empathetic, who carries a lot of that stuff all the time, looking them as individuals. And some days in class going, you know what?

This is my lesson plan. That's gonna live over here today. It seems like as a class, we just need to some do something else. We need to process something else.

You know, we need to talk or you learn when you become more comfortable in your own self as a teacher to have that flexibility to focus more, as you said, Marnie, on the individual student.

And don't let alternative narratives, which sometimes is from the teacher down the hall. Oh, you've got Billy?

Like, you know, how how quickly I learned, like, to ignore that because I was that kid, by the way. Like, oh, you've got Provenzano and you know? That's it. Like, different teachers and and different students react differently.

Jen, what about you? What is something that you people understood about you? You're in Southern California. Mhmm. What do we wish people knew about what you do and, what your students are like in your school?

So I I'm in Southern California. I'm in San Diego. I teach at a large comprehensive public high school.

And I'm gonna go back in time because my students now are amazing. They come to school every day. They bring their one to one Chromebooks. It's all really great. But in two thousand eight, I was asked to pilot one to one laptops in my classroom, and I was the first one of the first teachers in my district to do that.

And the class I was teaching at the time was American Lit. I teach a really similar class right now for seniors.

And they're those two classes are similar in terms of the demographics. The American Lit at my school was you were either taking AP language or you were taking American Lit. So it was essentially kind of tracking.

Now keep in mind that I'm asked to pilot one to one laptops, and it's two thousand eight. And they won't put Windows on these machines because they don't have enough money for that, so they're giving us Linux boxes. And I said, well, how are we gonna type things? And they said there's this thing called Google Docs, And that's, you know, started me down that path. But what was interesting that year was what happened to my students when that cart of laptops came in, and it was just a cart, thirty six laptops. I had four or five periods a day of kids.

And we got to use those laptops every day in class. And they were big. They were like the big heavy, you know, circa two thousand eight laptops.

But what I realized pretty quickly was it made them special.

Like, they were the laptop class. There were no other classes on campus that got to have laptops in their classroom every day.

And then a researcher reached out to me and said, we're doing research about one to one devices in schools. And I went and it was probably, like, early Twitter I came across this.

And I said, oh, that's cool. I have one to one devices in my classroom. I can I can be part of this research? I love to be part of research. It's always a lot of fun.

And, the first question said, you know, do you have laptops at your school? And I said, yes. I have laptops in my school. And they said, does everyone have laptops, or or are the laptops only for the gifted students?

And I went, I can't answer that question.

This is a researcher who assumed that if this technology was limited, it would be given to gifted students. There was no other option.

Either everyone had it or only the gifted kids had it. And I couldn't answer the question, and it made me mad because I didn't like the built in assumption that if technology was gonna be distributed unequally, that it would really be inequitable.

And that kind of lit a fire under me. And I tracked down that researcher and I told them they were doing it wrong.

But like, those are my students, and those are still the students I have. They're still the students who might not graduate. You know? It is not unusual for me to have a conversation with a student on a daily basis that says, well, if you don't do these things to pass this class, you may not graduate. Like, they are on the edge. Or I go to an IEP meeting and the counselor is sitting there and saying, if you don't turn in your ceramics projects, you're not gonna graduate. Like, that's happening.

And so part of what I try and do every day for my students is replicate that two thousand eight experience of you are special. You you do deserve the the best education you can have. You do need to know how to advocate for yourself and get more education in the future. Because there is still a huge amount of inequality even in a school where every student has a device. There's an equity in the kind of training that their teachers have, their willingness to use technology.

There's an equity around whether or not students have access to AI tools because in the spring of twenty three, I realized that if my seniors graduated and I didn't teach them what AI was, they were gonna leave without knowing. And so in the spring of twenty three, you know, Chatt GPT dropped in twenty twenty two, spring of twenty three. This is the first graduating class that we've had any exposure to generative AI. And I started actively teaching them.

This is what it is. This is what it does. This is what it doesn't do. This is how you can use it, how you can't.

Right? So what I want people to understand about my students is that they're amazing, but they really need to know what people really need to know that that old euphemism about the future is already here, but it's not evenly distributed is really true about schools.

Like really true. Again, I get around and I go to other schools and I go to other places, and I see the same kinds of things being replicated, where pockets of people are using the technology in new and more advanced ways. And other people are like, yeah. My kids are just gonna write their essays on paper, and that's just gonna be good enough, because I don't wanna deal with the new stuff. And that makes me frustrated.

It's so hard to see that. And I like, within same grade, two different teachers, it's really hard.

And that to me goes back to time.

I just haven't had enough time to sit with those teachers to help bring their comfort level Mhmm. To where they're willing to try.

Mhmm.

Yeah. It's, again, I felt a level of guilt being as I taught high school ELA, when I got the grant for the, set of iPads. So we I was the first one to one device in my school. But even before that, I wrote a grant to get a overhead projector to get rid of the TV in my room.

Like and, like, the teachers like, they were looking at it going, well, one, okay. I don't got the bandwidth to do this. Like, right, there's that first part. But when they see what's going on and then I would have, like, parents of, you know, the next year's class emailing counselors, requesting me.

Mhmm. And, like, it it it's just heartbreaking because I work with amazing teachers. My entire English department was phenomenal. Like, there were days where I'm like, I wanna learn in your class.

Like, I wanna be there instead of do but this idea that it was new, it was different.

I created blogging stations, and I created two Chromebooks and, spots.

And kids would argue over whose turn it was was to take notes for a class. The whole idea of the blog was student bloggers would take notes during the class period, and then they would be available for anyone who needed to follow-up with it. Like, kids were arguing over fighting. Like, just I wanna take note.

It's my turn. And, like, they don't realize that what they're doing is that. But like you said, making them feel special adding this technology. But, again, who's getting it and who's not?

I taught some of the special ed remedial American lit classes as well, So it worked really well for my students that were neurodiverse, who had a lot of different, fours IEPs.

Them having access to the technology was huge. It was, like, game changing for them because they were able to communicate more effectively than handwriting things on paper, which we know can sometimes be an issue.

So I see the inequity, but I also see the potential of tremendous equity in at least leveling in some way these playing fields for some of our neurodiverse students that just don't have the processing capabilities yet to do a lot of the things I think their peers do. And I think that's where we see some of that. And I think all of us and the people in the chat here so it's, like, the best chat I've ever seen. You guys are super awesome in your comments. Keep it up, please.

Are all experiencing the same thing.

I wanna jump to the next topic, and there's no awesome segue to do that other than just saying let's jump.

What's changing and what's not? This is the next one. What's changing and what's not? And the first question will go, we'll go back to Jen, and then we'll we'll switch over there.

What has actually shifted in your practice over the past few years?

So is there anything that stands out to you that, oof, I don't do this anymore?

Not too much has shifted in my practice over the last year for years. I mean, I'm an English teacher, so we still start every day with independent reading and things like that. Those kinds of things are consistent. I I've definitely been able to add in some fantastic new tools.

Right? Like, you know, the, you know, giving the the we still do the reading. We read the article. We dissect the article.

We discuss the article. But now I can also give the article to an AI space or a chatbot and say, have a conversation with my student about this article. And that just takes it another level further. Right?

So things that have shifted are are being able to do some more creative projects.

Like Adobe Express projects have come into my classroom a lot more in the last couple years. And, I used AI to write a grant to get a color printer for my classroom, which got approved. And now I'm able to print out their projects and hang them in the hallway, and that has caused other teachers to come to me and say, how did you do that project? Could you teach me? So we're starting to to spread a little bit more. I'm looking for ways to make my practice visible so that other teachers do start to be curious and say, how can I help with that or how can I do that too?

So, engaging my students more with AI, using it more in front of them, looking at it together, treating it together as a useful tool, so that we can learn about what it can and can't do, so that it it jump starts our thinking.

Awesome. Marnie, what do you think?

For me, the biggest shift that I've seen over the last couple of years is digital literacy.

I am teaching lessons that I used to start in third and fourth grade. I'm now starting them with first graders because the availability of tech, not necessarily in school, but the the kids are spending a lot more time on tech younger, so we need to have conversations younger than in the past.

And that's been a really big focus, especially this year, but I've been revamping over the last two years our whole digital literacy curriculum.

Because with AI coming in, ethics have entered the conversation way not ever something I thought I'd be talking about aside from making sure you use copyright properly, citing sources, and checking your sources with lateral reading. We now have whole discussions.

Today, I had fifth grade. We were discussing the ethical use of AI generated images.

It's conversations that I never thought that I would have.

And with that, because I now am exclusively technology, but where I am teaching my school, technology is not a siloed special or an elective. Mhmm. I push into the classroom, and the teachers are there co teaching and supporting with me as a way to model the text so the teachers can utilize that on their own time with the kids. And so everything we do has become so embedded into the curriculum, And it's really kind of cool because it's exemplifying I wanna say PBL, but it's not all PBL. It but it's in exemplifying that integrated learning experience where I know what they were doing in language arts.

So now we're going to use Seesaw and go on a word hunt for the different morphemes that they've been looking for and the different phonemes they've been looking they've been working with during word step. So everything has is really coming together versus a lot of the technology teaching in the past that I did was those siloed skills. Okay. Now we're gonna learn how to use this tool.

Now we're gonna learn how to use this tool. Now we're gonna learn how to use Google Docs.

And now just weaving everything together because I think it's just more meaningful to the kids and starting those skills younger and younger, which I don't necessarily love. But like you said earlier, John, if you didn't teach your kids about AI before they graduated, they weren't going to get that.

I feel the same way. Now if I don't teach these first and second graders about being safe citizens online because they're playing games like roadblocks where they're talking to all sorts of people everywhere, they're not gonna get that.

It it's very interesting.

Yeah. I think when they look about when when you really look at the again, the technology as a whole, we we take we're talking about AI now. Obviously, super duper important, with what educators are doing, an executive order saying every single school needs to teach AI, and a lot of us were like, yeah. We're here. We're we're already been here. We're already putting in the time, to get this done.

But couldn't we replace AI with cloud computing a handful of years before that with, you know, website navigation? Like, I feel like it's always going to be a thing.

And so does that mean and I'll throw this out to either one of you. This is off script, because you guys are giving me such great answers.

Is there a singular approach that educators should be taking to EdTech implementation so that it doesn't seem like everyone's recreating the wheel every time a new piece of technology comes out? Or does it need to be super personalized, individualized with every single shift in technology?

Whoever wants that can go first.

I think there's a a big piece of something that happens when I go around to schools and I start to talk to teachers about AI is I find out that lots of people have been using it, but they haven't been talking to each other about it. Because in among sort of general teachers who are not ed tech, you know, if they weren't ed tech before, right, if they weren't into educational technology before AI came along and now AI is kind of moving them in that direction, but it has the AI still has such a connotation of cheating.

Right? That that they're so worried that, like, they feel like if they use AI to make a rubric, that's cheating. Right? If they use AI to help them give feedback to students, maybe that's cheating.

And because they're not sure where those lines are and because districts have been slow to put out guidelines and all those things, nobody wants to talk about what they're doing with AI with their colleagues because they don't know where those boundaries are. And so the one thing I always say to teachers whenever I go into schools is talk to your colleagues. You need you know, we we have a we have time together. We have an hour together or we have a day together.

And all these things come out of the woodwork about all these great things teachers have figured out how to do with AI and all these fabulous tools they're excited about. And everyone else around the room is going looking like, well, how come I didn't I knew about that, but I didn't know about that. So what I'm seeing over and over again is they have this great wealth of knowledge in their school, and they're not talking to each other about it enough. And so I always leave them with, you need to make a regular practice of talking to your colleagues about your EdTech uses for AI and other things because you're going to grow together.

And you have to establish some some, psychological safety for that that says, you know, if I come to a meeting and I say I used AI to grade an essay, are my colleagues gonna judge me? Or are we gonna have an authentic conversation about the pros and cons of AI grading?

Because there are pros and cons of AI grading, and I'd be happy to have that conversation otherwise. But, you know, if if you come in thinking that anything you did with AI is questionable or suspect or is gonna make someone possibly think that you're less than professional, then you're not gonna talk about it. And if you're not gonna talk about it, you're not gonna grow together. And so the opportunity for growth comes in collaboration and cross pollination and and getting to connect with your colleagues and and brainstorming.

Because the best thing is when someone says, oh, I use it to do this. And someone else says, oh, wait. If you could use it to do this, I could use it to do that. And those are completely different subject areas, grade levels, whatever.

But just like we used to learn stuff from each other at EdCamps and, you know, a fifth grade teacher gave me one of my best tricks with Google Forms, right, for a completely different reason, we can grow together. And that's the part that's missing. There's still a stigma around AI. There's still a stigma around using it for teacher efficiency.

There's stigmas around using it for student evaluation. There's stigmas around having students use it in the classroom that if my students are using AI, then I'm not doing my job. Or if my students are using AI, it's gonna take my job or I'm just gonna facilitate it taking my job. And instead of having all of that sort of, you know, negative emotion around it, let's talk to each other.

I I have to tell you, like, this is the part of being an English teacher I don't miss, this AI ready change in the landscape. Like, I was there for I know. But, like, I I think back to where I was, and people were losing their mind that my kids were writing digitally almost at all. Like, I actually this is just really quick.

So I I had my, department chair come and visit me during my prep period and says, Nick, there's some concerns that your students aren't writing enough. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe my fifth year in, and I freak out. I'm like, oh my god. I'm a bad teacher.

I'm not writing enough. And I'm like, well, let me show you. And I I quickly show him. I go, they're writing here.

They're writing this. This was a quick response, and I'm showing them all of the student logs. And I'm showing them all of the writing. And about halfway through this, stop.

Stop. You do more writing than I do. Like like, I go I go, well, what is they go, you're not you're not using, like, journals. Right?

I go, no. He goes, you're not walking out with the milk crate, are you? I go, nope. I'm not walking out with the milk crate.

He goes, that's why. They they like, teachers assume, like, oh, writing was the milk crate full of, you know, journals that I would have to carry with me to the car and back.

Yeah. If you don't spend your weekend going through those notebooks, you must be a bad teacher.

Oh, and then I must not be giving feedback. Mhmm. Right? When my feedback was a comment on the blog, and I could crank that bad boy out, and they could read it. It was legible Yes. As opposed to, like, number twenty eight in that one class.

But I there's some sparked up in the chat, but I definitely wanna to to to bring it to the forefront. Jennifer s I'm just gonna say Jennifer s so I don't destroy your name. Saratan, perhaps?

It's not always, it is it is not always appreciated when teachers overuse AI and replace their feedback with interactions with AI. Kids want to hear from you, not a machine. And I think I would like to think everyone would agree with that. I think that personalized feedback is key. There were some great responses in regards to that. It's a first round of feedback, balanced tech.

I think when we look at technology, there is that element, and, Marnie, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, how about balance. But how do we find balance? As as a tech integration adventurer, how would you help teachers find this balance? Like, where does that exist, and are you gonna get it wrong more often than you get it right?

Oh, you're muted. Oh, Marnie, you're muted.

It's her job, folks.

My dog is dragging his toy around, so I'm muted to spare everyone the sound effects.

Well, there's that saying, you know, you need to fail a thousand times before you can spark the next light kind of thing.

I wanna go back real quick, though, Jennifer.

Yeah. Jen, what you were saying, one of the best PDs I have ever had in my twenty three years in the classroom now, was there were there was a two year period where twice during each year, my district got all the third grade teachers together in one building and gave us an entire afternoon.

They got Oh.

Grade level at the elementary level. I honestly don't know how they stood up the middle school and high school, but we got a whole afternoon as a grade level. And that was the most powerful professional development I have had in my life because they gave us the time. And that element of time, we say teachers need to talk to each other, but then we fill their schedules so they literally have three minutes between passing to go to the bathroom and set up and talk.

And during lunch, we've got them in meetings or doing duties. It it's yeah. But going back to what you just asked, Nick, the balance. So here's an example of I showed, an AI tool to one of my fourth grade teachers who is a quick adapter.

She's not early, but she when I show her something, she's like, okay. Let me try it.

And the fourth graders had written this paragraph. I don't even remember the topic, probably westward expansion or something along there. And it was, like, the fifth time she was reading and editing their paragraphs.

So she had read them many, many times.

She fed them into this AI.

It wasn't it wasn't a rubric. It was providing feedback, and it gave glows and groans.

And it's an an add on right in Google. So she opened up the Google Doc, clicked the glows and grows. It gave you glows and grows. You could edit them to the way you wanted. And then when you clicked insert, it put them at the top of the document in a in a table for them.

By that time, she had read those paragraphs so many times that this point was now giving and feedback with the kids and put the comments in and work through it. That gave each child personalized, direct, and specific feedback on their individual writing.

Was that cheating?

I think that was smart use of technology.

It wasn't just letting the AI do it, and I've seen teachers do the opposite. Have the AI read it. The teacher reads it the first time, then AI feedbacks the second time and then goes back and reads it themselves.

It's just like it's hard to help shift perspective sometimes because I think using AI to create a rubric is phenomenal.

I enter my criteria.

It updates it. I tweak it. That literally just saved me forty five minutes. It takes a solid hour to put together a really good rubric. And if I choose AI to save me forty five minutes, that just gave me forty five more minutes to focus on student relationship, building that relationship, or, god forbid, forty five minutes to spend with my family.

Nick, this this tool right here, I loved when I first started using Seesaw.

I would have the kids posting on it, and I'd be standing in line at the grocery store checking and responding and putting audio feedbacks and typing all right here.

Mhmm. And I wasn't seeing the crate.

It's you know, you talk about feedback. It's so interesting because my my policy for the essays in my class were three people should see this before I get it as a final product. Right? I would tell the kids.

I'm like, listen. Mom, dad, aunt, uncle, neighbor, older brother, like, three people should review this before I get it. But, also, they would sometimes give it to, like, their friend. And I'm like, that kid's not doing great.

I That's really not the person I want to, but at least it was a set of eyes. Why not having using something like an AI submission, you know, app or whatever like that? Isn't that better than having your aunt, uncle read the essay and give you feedback where they don't fully understand the assignment? They maybe were missing some of the nuances of it.

Is that cheating? I mean, when we talk about equity, one of the things that stands out for me is with having some type of app or AI where every single student could submit and get, like, a first round of feedback.

Well, what about those kids who don't have people at home to review that essay? Who don't have easy access to aunt, uncle, brother, sister bond like, what right? Family dynamics are so different.

You know, they're at a disadvantage.

Right? Like, that is something that as I think about, right, we talk about that equity.

Having the tool, especially if a school if you can agree on a tool, that everyone is going to use and the school has access to, well, you've brought a level of equity where now you know every single kid will have the opportunity to get a specific type of feedback on their writing to help them grow as writers, not just the kids who have family members that are accessible or parents that pay for subscription based models of different tools, to get them access to it. So I think it's really good. Crystal had a great comment here. I think that's when people would say, all you do is read from the textbook.

All the tools we have, whether paper or tech, need to be treated and viewed as tools to create resources and as a starting point, that is where AI can come in.

Yeah. I think Chrisley hit the, nail right on the head there. I think that's exactly what we're looking to do with everything that we've got going, hopefully, with all of technology.

To to fast forward ahead, this is my next question, and we'll we'll go to Jen here.

What do you think educators, so the big all of us, need to focus on in terms of EdTech for, like, the next, I'm gonna say two years. Because anything beyond that, and even really a year could be nuts. But let's say two years. Like, what do you think that focus should be? Should it just be AI? Should it be agents? For those of you who don't know, agentic learning when it comes to AI is like that next level.

Jen, what do you think needs to be the focus? Is it just pedagogy? Like, what do you think?

So you're asking me, like, what teachers should focus on for the next two years, three years? Okay.

So What's the next thing that we should be focusing on?

Someone's I think it was, Ethan Wallach said something about, like, even if all AI development stopped right now, there's ten years of change built into the system that hasn't even percolated through yet. Right? So I'm seeing colleagues who don't yet use any student facing AI tools at all, period.

And that's where I find the biggest wins for my students. It's it's it's I mean, yes, it's nice that AI will build me a rubric, but I have a lot of rubrics and I'm, you know, perfectly capable of doing that. And I can really go to any large language model and say, build me a rubric. I don't need any specialized tools, but it is tools like SchoolAI, Magic School, and Brisk, and those kinds of things that are building those COPPA and FERPA compliant tools that are student facing.

And those are the places that I've you know, whenever when someone says, do you use this tool? I'm like, yeah. They're the student part of it is great.

You know?

And they're like, well, what about all the teacher tools? I'm like, the teacher tools are teacher tools. You could get that in a number of different ways in a number of different places, but this one has a really effective student facing tool. And so it's those COPPA and FERPA compliant student facing tools. I would never, and I still have never required or asked or even suggested that my students go directly to ChatGPT for anything.

Right? I am directing them only to things that I have some supervision over. Now that doesn't mean that I'm stopping them from going to ChatGPT. If they have an account that their parents theoretically approved, I'm not gonna, like, hose them down and say you can't use that in my class. But I want what I want to be putting in front of them, what I want to be saying, like, here's what you should use. It's those student facing pieces. And that is where I think the majority of teachers haven't caught up.

When I do see teachers using AI and education, it's to support themselves and their own efficiency. And that's great. I fully support that. But when I say, and have you tried the student facing side?

Have you tried the spaces? Have you tried the, you know, whatever the student piece of that is? I'm like, oh, no. I'm I haven't touched that yet.

And that's where their hesitancy comes in. So I would love to spend the next two years watching my colleagues globally embrace the possibility of what could happen when they create and curate an AI experience for their students that is designed by the teacher to facilitate student understanding or to assess student understanding, of content. You know, I I read an article with my students last week. We worked on it. We, we charted it. We did this whole like analysis of it. And when I kind of gave them a group assessment about it, I realized most of them had missed the point of the article completely.

Like, wow, we spent a lot of time on this already and I'm supposed to be a good teacher. And you guys are still missing the point about this author's argument.

So tomorrow I'm giving that to them in a space where the AI is gonna talk to them about the article and help them develop their understanding further. Because I know they need another pass at it. And they don't need another pass of me telling them what it says. That's not gonna help. They don't need another pass of going through it with their classmates. They've done that. They need a pass of individually by themselves talking to a robot who's going to question them at their level and help mix up, you know, differentiate for what their needs are.

And if they get it and they can tell the AI what that article is about really quickly and with solid understanding, they can move on. And if they don't, they're gonna have spend a little more time talking to it, and that's okay.

So it's those tools I want my colleagues to try.

Wow. Yeah. And I think the best part of that, you can talk about the spaces and those one on one conversations. As the teacher, on the back end of it, you get to see what every single student is doing.

So now you can have that level of assessment, you know, as we talk about, you know, formative assessments. But then you can go and have those conversations still with the students. Identify them quickly and say, okay. Wow.

We need to have a conversation, like Mhmm.

You know, about this because I've given you all of the ways to access this information.

What's going on? And I think that oversight that you said, not sending kids to use anything that's not COPPA FERPA compliant is huge. And I think, you know, Marnie and you said I'm so glad you mentioned that, for COPPA FERPA.

What what's your thinking on all of this morning? Where do you where do you sit?

It's COPPA and FERPA. It's interesting because it's my job to vet that. So teachers will come to me with a tool or they'll show me a project they use where they uploaded all of the second grade student faces to an AI gen image generator that they found.

And it it literally, like, it gives me anxiety thinking about that. Mhmm. So it truly is. And talking about the student facing side of things, spaces is currently the only AI tool that I have given teachers the go ahead to use with their students.

They are finding, and I'm sure teachers are doing other things. But on their student Chromebooks while they are in school and on campus Wi Fi, the only AI tool accessible through seventh grade is Spaces.

Every other AI tool is blocked because they're either too young or it doesn't have COPPA and FERPA compliance, or there's not enough information.

It doesn't their their back end, their, policies and terms Yeah.

Aren't clear enough. So even with a tool like Spaces, though, with any tech tool, and this kinda goes back to the question that you posed, Nick, it doesn't matter the technology.

Students need to learn how to problem solve, how to I tell my students act like a scientist. Uncover the things that you need to figure out how to do.

Of course, we're there to support them, but that inquisitiveness, that ability to persevere.

Yes. We need to teach specific tools, and we need to teach specific categories of tools. Because once you know how to interact with chat GPT, you can pretty much interact with Claude and with Gemini.

It's it's different. You learn prompt generation. You've got that.

But it goes back to when we were really focusing on teaching coding.

Coding is more to me, when you're teaching coding, it's more about teaching the problem solving, the perseverance, the collaboration, the try and try again, that perseverance is critical, the breaking things into smaller problems to solve them. All of those skills transfer subjects, chant transfer tools, transfer age level. It's and I don't even think we call them soft skills anymore.

But those the ability to parse information to look at something and go, woah. That is way far fetched. I have to research that. Or, oh, I know clearly this superimposed image of the owl on top of the mountains over a sunset is not real.

Teaching kids and our colleagues to be able to discern, And you used the word earlier, Jen, curate.

To I love that word because we collect, we hoard. But when we're curating the key tools that we focus on learning how to use, skills will transfer.

Kinda like Microsoft Word.

You can use Google Docs, PowerPoint, and Google Slides and Keynote.

I I find, Marnie, and let me sorry for interrupting you, but I I'm just dying to know. The the the number one skill I find my students need when they're interacting with chatbots is they need to know that they can ask it questions, and they don't. Like, when they first start chatting with the bot about something they read, and it's asking them questions, and they're trying to answer the question. They're trying to answer the question. They're trying to answer the question. And finally, a student called me over and he says, it's asking me, like, how this idea sheds light on something else. And I don't know what sheds light means.

Yes.

And and they they thought they needed my help to answer this. And and I said, what if you ask the AI what that means? They're like, we can ask it questions. I said, yeah, you can ask it questions.

You don't just have to answer questions. You can ask it. So ask it like, you know, what do you mean by that? And the AI understood and rephrased the questions, and the student was able to move ahead.

But the key learning there wasn't what shed light means. The key learning there was if I don't understand something the AI is asking me or telling me, I can ask it to explain that, and it will do that in real time. And then I will be able to understand the whole interaction better. And, you know, has this theory about intersubjectivity and it like, how important it is for learners to negotiate meaning together.

And we're, I think, in a point where we need to teach our students to negotiate meeting with AI, and that that's something that they should do. That they're they're not just beholden to respond to it. They are allowed to interrogate it.

It's that questioning that Not your turn, Nick.

Ability, that questioning is a skill. I don't understand this. Explain this to me, and I model that with teachers and students. Explain this to me like I'm in fourth grade.

Explain this to me like I am a new baker and trying to learn this recipe.

Okay. Go, Nick.

Excuse me. You guys are so smart. I love everything you're sharing.

This is a couple of things.

One, for my middle schoolers, I use that scene, because a lot of them watch The Office on Netflix or whatever over and over and where Michael Scott is asking for the lemonade state, like, analogy to be explained to him, like, a sixth grader and he's wait. Explain to me like I'm in fourth grade. Like, the idea of, like, you can have AI breakdown for you anything you want. And I equate it right now to the poor teaching of Google search skills.

Everyone just I had a parent, honest to goodness last year, push back and say, you don't need to teach kids how to prompt. Kids know how to prompt. And I'm just like, kids don't know how to Google. Like, I don't know how many kids came to me, and they've been like, I can't find anything on my topic.

And I'm like, in all of Google, there's nothing on your topic about erosion on the West Coast.

Like like, what do you they go, so I do what I know as a teacher. I go click, click, click, click. I type a perfectly good sentence, and then there it is, all the resources.

And then he goes, well, how'd you do that? I go, you need to learn how to talk to computers. It is a skill.

Yes. You can just blah blah blah, and you'll get some stuff. But if you wanna save time, you need to ask specifically what you want. It doesn't infer.

It'll guess, but the more information you provide, the better it is. That was just with Google and now with AI in particularly.

It's just a guess. AI is just a whole lot of guessing based on all of the information it has access to. The more information you put into there, the better the guess will be. And so telling that to students is that same conversation where we can't just assume and I think we've all seen this as as teachers.

We can't assume that, oh, they're all good at typing. They're all good at using a computer. They're all good at using Google Doc. Like, I have kids who are like, mister p, how do I attach something to an email?

These are middle schoolers, and you're just thinking, oh, I guess if no one's ever sat down and showed them what to do or, oh, that's the paperclip. That's what that thing is? That's a paperclip? Like, yes. Sounds like you would paperclip things.

Like, a whole generation of us know what a the floppy disk is for save. We know what that is. There's an icon now that exists that kids never used in their entire life. Like, that's, like, where things have, like, been established.

So It's it's digital, just like eight and a half by eleven paper.

Yes. Eight and a half by eleven paper. So I think all of these as we wrap those up in the final two minutes, and, you know, it's it's it's a good conversation full of great people and the people in the comments in particular, awesome as well. When you're like, hey. How did we end up at eight fifty eight? What happened?

This is great. So the last thing that I want to to do is I'm gonna I'm gonna tie it all together, and thank Marty and thank Jen for taking the time, out of their Mondays. I mean, oh my goodness. You taught all day. You're busy with students. And for all of you that attended, and some of you had to leave early because of the timing, like, thank you so much for for giving us an hour of your time.

The last thing I'll say is, like, connect the dots. See what I did there, everyone? Connect the dots. Mhmm.

That is is teachers. The thing that I hope everyone sort of leaves with is not one thing is going to solve all that is wrong with our education system. We've talked about a lot of different tools and a lot of different way they can use. But the one thing that brought them all together that I heard was ultimately seeing each and every student for who they were and finding the ways to best connect with them.

And I think there are tools that allow us to do that. You saved me forty five minutes by making a rubric. Well, that's forty five minutes that I can spread out over different class periods to make more individual connections with kids. That allows me to dive deeper into a comment to send that, hey.

Good job and this paper email to the parents. You know, I'm really like, those things. So my big thing is that I believe AI will actually allow for more human connection, not fewer human connections if used correctly.

So thank you, Marnie. Thank you, Jen. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us today. We are at nine o'clock. I wanna make sure everyone, has a chance to relax, kick your shoes off, crawl on the bed, get under the couch, snuggle your puppies, and do all of those amazing things.

Jen, if people wanted to find you on the Internet, where would they find you?

Oh, that's a good question. Probably the best place to find me is my blog. I'm gonna drop a link to it in the chat. That is lit and tech dot com.

And their top post on there right now is about, like, four or five other PD events that are coming up, one of which is free and virtual from the univer from the education department of Nebraska. Anybody can come even if you're not in Nebraska.

So check that out.

Marnie, if people wanted to find you or McCall, and your awesome presidential, vibe that you got going now, where could we find you?

So mccall dot org for anything McCall, and I am on all socials at get teaching tech. So I'll drop that in.

It's my Gmail.

It's Instagram threads, blue sky, no longer on the Thanks, sir.

Yep. Is that your friends' your account too? Awesome.

Well, everything. It's Facebook. It's Myspace. You know? It's it's it's kid blog.

Oh my goodness. Yes.

Holy Do you still have a live binder?

I do. What was it called? Delicious. It's my delicious also. Do you remember that parking site?

Do you have your Gigo account still? Your Gigo account?

Never did that, but I do hope that's my Discord.

Oh my god. This is this is great.

Thank you again, Marnie and Jen. I really appreciate this. I'll I'll reach out to you later this week. For everyone, thank you so much for your time.

We'll be posting this, online in a variety of sources, if you wanna watch us or share this with, teachers and friends and stuff like that. But thank you for taking your time with us today. Thank you for, SchoolAI for giving us a platform here to connect the dots. Have a great night, everyone.