Tag: edtech

What Will We Do with AI Tools in Education?

The buzz around AI writing tools continues in the education world. Of course, there are several AI tools that we’re already using, whether in the classroom or not. We were using AI tools long before anyone thought about them invading our classrooms, but we didn’t think they had classroom applications.

But none have gotten the coverage that ChatGPT has gotten since its launch on 30 November 2022.

I fear that the first response many educators will have is, “we have to block it right now.”

I understand teachers’ very valid concerns about any new technology tool, but blocking is horribly inefficient and the equivalent of burying our heads in the sand.

As tools proliferate, they become more and more difficult to block School IT departments get enough of these types of requests already, and in most cases, blocking one site only leads to students finding ten more that offer them the same access.

It’s not that I don’t think we need to have good conversations about the responsible usage of tools like ChatGPT. Without rails to guide the path, there is a strong possibility of misuse or poor usage. If there was ever a time when we needed more focus on digital citizenship and media literacy, I can’t think of one.

But we can talk about responsible usage of any tool in the classroom. The concept isn’t new. Before we had Google Docs, kids passed notes in class. The pen was once accused of the oncoming downfall of the education system.

How many times have you had to prevent your classroom from being invaded by ruler helicopters? Abusing tools in the classroom or, perhaps more correctly, using tools to avoid boredom in the classroom is nothing new.

So what do we do with new tools that are certain to disrupt the status quo?

My hope is that more of us have this outlook on new tools available to use in schools:

Obviously, our classroom activities should challenge students to do more than regurgitate information. We should challenge students to create from their imagination.

We must strive for deeper learning in every classroom in every school.

If teachers design student-centered learning experiences that allow students to write with support in class, ChatGPT won’t be nearly as disruptive as some articles claim.

Catlin Tucker

We should provide opportunities that stimulate their brain and make neural pathways come alive with dancing dreams of great design.

When we don’t embrace new technologies, we deny students options. We prevent them from learning about how their world is changing.

I love me some disruptive technology. There’s no point in beating our chest about how technology x has made y obsolete. The business world can not ignore disruptive technology or they will go out of business. As educators we are in the business of preparing students for THEIR future. The future for students includes AI (Artificial Intelligence).

– Alice Keeler

But not only do we prevent students from experiencing new tools that can be very useful in their lives, but we also overlook what we, as teachers, can use these tools for to make our lives easier.

The emergence of AI education disruptors like ChatGPT reveal the need for more diverse teaching models. The COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst, spurring teachers and administrators into action. We can’t return to “normal school” any more than we can ignore new educational advancements.

We must embrace change. We can’t move forward without it.

How Disruptive Will ChatGPT Be?

I introduced Minecraft: Education Edition to my school district last school year and made the statement in a school board presentation that it was likely the most disruptive tool I’d brought to the district.

But ChatGPT? Oh my. I hope it breaks more barriers and causes more people to rethink daily what they do in classrooms. We already know (or we should know) that students will use AI tools to write papers. I hope educators use it, and many other technologies, to completely redesign education for the future.

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Small Moves: The Key To Digital Leadership

This post was first published in August 2014, so please forgive any outdated references. I began my student teaching and carried many dreams and plans in my mind. Looking back on these words, I still carry many of these ideas with me eight years later. Maybe I was on to something…

I’m a huge movie fan. Many of my favorite films are science fiction, which, if you know me, is probably a foregone conclusion.

I love Star Wars, Star Trek, The Last Starfighter, Dune… the list goes on for days.

One of my favorite sci-fi films is Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan. If you’re unfamiliar with the book or film, the plot revolves around what might happen if the human race received a message from another world.

Spoiler alerts ahead if you haven’t seen this nearly 20-year-old movie yet…

In the film’s climax, the main character speaks with a member of an alien race in the guise of her dead father. He explains a bit about how they were able to contact our planet and how things will progress in the future.

Our fearless heroine wants all of her questions answered at once, excited at what this incredible discovery could mean for science and the human race. However, she doesn’t get her wish.

The alien explains to her that progress and communication will come slowly over time. He tells her…

“Small moves, Ellie. Small moves.”

Change is a good but incredibly difficult thing. Especially in education. No matter how great we think some new technology or process is or how much we will benefit from it, the implementation will not come quickly. Not will it come free of pain, problems, and complaints.

Learning Transformed: 8 Keys to Designing Tomorrow’s Schools, Today

Small moves.

Writing this post, I’m in my second full week of student teaching. Of course, I bring with me a fairly large amount of tech experience with a boatload of tools that teachers can use in the classroom. I am not, however, an experienced classroom teacher.

But, I can still show other teachers a few small ways that technology can make their lives easier, engage students, and bring some 21st-century methods into their classrooms.

But it has to start small. A friend of mine introduced Plickers in his classroom as a way to perform formative assessments. He called me over to see the trial run.

Of course, the students loved it. It was cool to see this app grade their responses instantly rather than waiting for their answers to be graded. I knew the kids would love it, and I knew my friend would love it, as we’ve been talking about using it since long before school began.

What I didn’t know would happen was the response from other teachers around his classroom. The buzz in the hallways after school about this little app was astounding. One of the guys from the district IT department even came over to see what we were doing.

Small moves.

Sometimes as tech evangelists, we forget that not everyone is as comfortable with tech as we are. There are teachers in your building right now that have been teaching long enough that they can remember a time when the only computers in the school were in a computer lab, and no teacher had a school email address.

And now we’re asking them to implement tools like GAFE, Microsoft LYNC, iPads, laptops, Chromebooks, and tablets….

Small moves.

If we really want to be great digital leaders, we have to be willing to meet others where they are with tech. Too often, we get carried away with the latest and greatest shiny app that will “revolutionize” our classrooms. We don’t understand why EVERYONE doesn’t use it the day it becomes available.

It’s not about beating other teachers and administrators over the head with new technology. It’s about showing them how one tool can improve or help them. How one tool can ignite a student’s interest in a new way.

It’s about small moves, not giant leaps.

We must be ready to make those small moves quickly and guide others to do the same. When that happens, teachers, administrators, and students win.

Sure, there will always be those asking, “Well, why are you doing this? What’s your motivation? What do you want to get out of it?” They balk at every suggestion and idea made.

But if we’re making small moves, those people will soon be drowned out by the gathering crowd of people making their small moves toward a better system for us all.

And soon, that gathering crowd will no longer be the minority that wants change; they will be the overwhelming majority that drives change and sends our education system in a new and exciting direction.

But it all starts with small moves.

Small moves, Ellie.

As leaders, that’s what we have to do.

Thanks for taking a stroll down memory lane with me.

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Real-World Learning – Content is Nothing Without Context And Application

Do a Google search for Real World Learning. Then take a look at the number of search results.

Depending on where you are in the world and what day you perform this particular search, you will likely get a different answer, but you should still come to the same conclusion I have:

Real-World Learning is a popular topic, with many people contributing ideas as to exactly what it should be and how it should be accomplished.

But what is real-world learning? What does it look like in a classroom? Is it a goal that can only be reached by the most progressive teachers and schools? Can you actually cover content standards while engaging students in authentic, real-world tasks that involve more than just giving them a “scenario” that mimics a real-world situation?

Giving Context and Application to Content Standards

Real-world learning is a topic that educators have discussed for many years. Research on the topic of integrating social, interactive processes into learning stretches back to 1938 (Maxwell, Stobaugh, and Tassell, 2015) and carry into today with schools offering internships and even job shadowing as part of their curriculum.

But, can real-world learning incorporate standards that students will be tested over on the all-too-emphasized standardized tests taken at the end of every school year for most public school students?

The answer is: yes.

Standards for math, science, ELA, and social studies are not prescriptive in the methods used to teach the standards, only in the content that should be covered. This flexibility provides ample opportunity for educators to design and implement programs that meet the required content standards while providing students with real-world activities that reach beyond the classroom walls.

By doing so, students can see how the content they learn in class has practical applications in the real world and is not just information that must be stored in their brain cells for a year-end dump on a standardized test.

According to Maxwell, Stobaugh, and Tassell (2015), “When a student learns from, interacts with, and has an impact on the real world, higher retention of learning will occur” (p. 21).

Clearly, when a student can move from solving problems or answering questions on a worksheet to solving problems that could have an impact on their community, region, country, or the world, the likelihood that they will work harder, engage in deeper thinking, and ultimately learn more from the problem then we, as educators, must move to more of this learning in our classrooms and schools.

Let’s look briefly at each content area and see how real-world learning can occur around content standards.

ELA Standards and Real-World Learning

In the ELA Literacy standard for 7th graders W.7.1.A, students are tasked with introducing claims, acknowledging other claims, and organizing thoughts and evidence logically (English, n.d.).

From reading just the standard, there is no detailed method for teaching this standard to students, nor an evaluation of any type that can measure student mastery of this topic. Teachers must be able to create or find lessons or projects that can address this standard, leaving much room for introducing real-world learning.

I looked for a sample lesson that might give an example of real-world learning for this standard and found this lesson that tasks students with tracing an argument on whether or not schools should get rid of sports (Doolin, n.d.).

While this lesson does incorporate some real-world learning, I believe it would attain a Level 3 on the Create Excellence Framework (Maxwell et al., 2015, p.19).

Students are engaged in a real-world activity that could have possible consequences but is not asked to create their own argument, and the task is guided by the teacher rather than allowing students to take the lead through inquiry.

However, a project like this could be easily modified to a more real-world task that could be presented to a school-based committee or school board.

Math Standards and Real-World Learning

Applying real-world learning to standards in mathematics is a task I am involved in every day. I teach math to 6th & 7th graders and am always looking for ways to bring real-world learning into the classroom. However, after reading several articles, I now understand that many of my efforts are far from meeting true real-world learning standards.

In the video Individualized Real-World Learning (Teaching, n.d.), we see a senior that is working in a veterinarian clinic as part of an internship program.

While a great many life skills are incorporated into this experience, the student does reference using math to complete tasks such as calculating correct dosages of medicine for animals.

In this example, the math standards are not the focus of the learning but are an integrated part of the entire learning experience, along with many other subjects. As Maxwell et al. (p.29) noted, Real World Learning “is integrated across subject areas” and takes place not necessarily in a classroom but in the real world.

I am beginning to see how the math standards allow for much flexibility in teaching the necessary content while providing rich and meaningful tasks to students that incorporate ideas and standards from other subject areas to make the learning more meaningful.

Social Studies Standards and Real-World Learning

Social Studies standards have direct tie-ins to real-world learning. The guiding principles for the standards give direction for the standards and how they should work with other standards and benefit students. Principles include “Inquiry is at the heart of social studies” and “Social studies prepares the nation’s young people for college, careers, and civic life” (College, n.d.)

Science Standards and Real-World Learning

As with every other content standard area, the Next Generation Science Standards allow for ample real-world learning opportunities for students. Amy Abbott created a project for her class involving analyzing environmental controls in factories that produce clothing and how the dyes are disposed of (Abbott, 2016).

Students were asked to investigate the impact of chemicals being dumped into water sources and draft a portfolio for submission to the United Nations. Included in the lesson are not only standards for science but also standards for ELA (Abbott, 2016). Certainly, this lesson is a fine example of real-world learning with applied content standards.

Conclusion

From the evidence above, we can clearly see that standards for many academic content areas in public schools can be taught using real-world learning.

The opportunity exists for teachers, both current and future, to create programs that are more concerned with creating experiences and authentic learning for students than simply ensuring that content standards are covered at a basic level.

As educators, we should focus on teaching students in environments that mimic or are based on the environments they will have when they are finished with their formal education.

In the video Taylor Mali: In My Middle School (Mali, n.d.), Taylor Mali provides an overview of what he thinks middle school based on real-world learning might look like. Perhaps more educators must work towards creating an ideal environment for our students.

References:

Abbott, A. A. (2016, March). Chemical Connections A Problem-Based Learning, STEM Experience. Science Scope, 39(7), 33-42.

College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.socialstudies.org/c3

Doolin, K. (n.d.). Should Your School Get Rid of Sports? Retrieved September 11, 2016, from http://betterlesson.com/lesson/559859/should-your-school-get-rid-of-sports

English Language Arts Standards Âť Writing Âť Grade 7. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/7/

Mali, T. (n.d.). Taylor Mali: In My Middle School. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/the-perfect-middle-school

Maxwell, M., Stobaugh, R., & Tassell, J. H. (2015). Chapter 1: Real-world learning. In Real-world learning for secondary schools: Digital tools and practical strategies for successful implementation. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree. ISBN: 9781935249443.

Teaching channel. (n.d.). Individualized Real-World Learning. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/high-school-internships-bpl

Asking the Right Questions about Educational Technology

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question. — Jonas Salk

When we make decisions about the technology we use in our classrooms, we very often ask the wrong questions.

We think about how we can use the latest, greatest, coolest tools and gadgets available to get students in a desperate attempt to engage them in learning while ignoring what we should be focused on in education.

I was the world’s worst offender of chasing the cool factor. Whatever came down the edtech release line, I was there for it. I would watch the Twitter stream during the yearly ISTE conference waiting for new announcements from old favorite companies or to see what the hot, new tool would be this year.

This was a time when every educational technology conference was filled with “60 apps in 60 minutes” sessions that were not unlike the opening of floodgates upon unsuspecting teachers as a skilled pitch person wowed them (most often a classroom teacher themselves) dazzling them with what you could do with kids with this new fandangled whizbangadoodle.

What a time to be alive. And what a sad time to look back upon.

The problem was that there was so much new technology appearing from seemingly nowhere and being adopted by teachers far and wide that we weren’t really sure what to do with all of it.

And no one was asking any questions. If they were, they were shouted down by the cheers of the edtech Illuminati.

If one doesn’t watch the introduction of new technologies and particularly watch the infrastructures that emerge, promises of liberation through technology can become a ticket to enslavement. 

— Ursula Franklin
Photo by Daniel Josef on Unsplash

The failure to seriously consider how new technologies might be weaponized reveals a stunning degree of either naivete, hubris, or recklessness.

— LM Sacasas (@LMSacasas) June 1, 2021

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s be clear: I don’t think that educational technology is being weaponized. But I think that we have serious questions to consider before we implement new tools.

The technology we use with our students isn’t just about the tech. It’s about the environment that is created by using technology. Technology usage changes the world around it for either good or not-so-good.

But once a given technology is widely accepted and standardized, the relationship between the products of the technology and the users changes. Users have less scope, they matter less, and their needs are no longer the main concern of the designers. 

— Ursula Franklin

As the number of devices in our schools continues to increase and our reliance on technology to complete even the most mundane tasks in schools increases, we should ask better questions about the technology we use and how we use it.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Yes, our questions about technology usage need to be about how these tools are used to support student learning outcomes. We need to know what students will create with the tools we provide them.

We need to ask about issues of access and equity. Not just access to devices and programs but to qualified teachers with the training and support to appropriately leverage any technologies.

Technology distributed and used equitably enables opportunity and voice, dismantles barriers around learner exceptionalities, democratizes access to information, and disrupts racial and economic privilege hierarchies. 

— Ken Shelton

We must ask questions about how we use devices in our classrooms and shift the focus from low-level digitization of paper activities and ineffective repetition of skills practices for intervention to deeper learning activities that provide personalization and student-centered learning.

But we should also ask questions about how our technology usage affects us as humans.

LM Sacasas has compiled 41 questions concerning technology that would be excellent conversation starters among teachers, administrators, and students.

Here are the first five of those questions:

  1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
  2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
  3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
  4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
  5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?

I don’t write this article to overly criticize my fellow educational technologists. Several great things are happening in our schools that are directly related to the recent influx of technology and the support that continues to be offered by experts in the field.

We’re doing good work. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do better work or that there are things we haven’t thought about in our race to improve.

It’s sometimes important to take a breath, get perspective, and ensure we’re on the right path.

The decisions we make with students make impacts that we may never see in our time on this planet.

Let’s be sure we’re asking the right questions.

What is a Hyperdoc?

The reason HyperDocs work is because each one begins with strong lesson design, curates quality instructional content, and packages learning in a way that engages learners. A HyperDoc shifts the focus from teacher-led lectures to student-driven, inquiry-based learning, allowing students to actually learn through exploration.

– The HyperDoc Handbook

HyperDocs are an emerging tool in education. They offer teachers an effective way to design and deliver interactive lessons that keep students engaged, organized, and on-task. But what exactly is a HyperDoc? What are the benefits of using them in the classroom? And how can they be used to improve student engagement and understanding?

What is a HyperDoc?

Developed in 2016 by Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hinton, and Sarah Landis, Hyperdocs are a digital lesson hub designed by teachers and given to students.

A HyperDoc is an interactive document created by teachers to provide students with an engaging learning experience. A HyperDoc is a digital document, accessible through any number of devices, that contains all the components of a learning cycle in one place. Within the document, students can find hyperlinks to all the resources they need to complete the learning cycle.

The earliest known example of a “digital lesson hub” was WebQuest, which used only online resources to guide students through a lesson.

This makes it easy for teachers to monitor student progress without searching multiple documents or websites. It also provides students with a clearly defined structure to which they can refer back as needed.

Benefits of Using HyperDocs in the Classroom

HyperDocs have several key advantages over traditional paper-based documents or worksheets.

First, they allow teachers to easily incorporate multimedia elements such as videos, audio clips, images, or animations into their lessons. Whatever resources students need for the lesson can easily be linked or embedded into the Hyperdoc.

Second, they give teachers the flexibility to offer extra support for students or enrichment opportunities for others. Since the hyperdoc is digital, teachers can easily use a template to differentiate instruction.

Lastly, Hyperdocs make it easier for students to collaborate with each other as well as stay organized throughout the lesson plan.

How Can HyperDocs Be Used to Improve Student Engagement and Understanding?

HyperDocs can be used in many different ways to help improve student engagement and understanding in the classroom. For example, teachers can use them to create virtual field trips by incorporating videos and other multimedia elements into their lessons. They can also use them for project-based learning activities by having students work together on a single document instead of individual worksheets or projects. Finally, they can use them as online portfolios where students can showcase their work and reflect on their progress throughout the course of the year.

HyperDocs are quickly becoming popular among educators due to their flexibility and ease of use. They make it easier for teachers to organize their lessons and provide students with an engaging learning environment that encourages collaboration and critical thinking skills while helping them stay on track with their assigned tasks. Ultimately, using HyperDocs in your classroom will help you save time and help your students become more engaged learners who understand the material better than ever before!

More HyperDocs Resources:

The HyperDocs Handbook

How HyperDocs Can Transform Your Teaching

9 reasons why HyperDocs can transform your class

How HyperDocs Can Make Schoolwork More Student Friendly

Simple or Easy: Edtech Edition

I read Ev William’s brief thoughts on the question of simple or easy. In short, Ev states that we often decide to do simple things rather than easy things.

I contend that we do this in education when dealing with technology. We go through our days doing simple rather than easy things.

It’s simple to pass out papers to a class of students and collect them later. Teachers have done this for decades. But it’s easier to have students complete work in a digital format. Especially when dealing with large numbers of students.

But this task isn’t simple. Teachers have to create what they want the students to complete. Teachers have to create this assignment, whether it’s a quiz, a document, a spreadsheet, a presentation, etc.

Even if that means posting the assignment in a learning management system, the task is not as simple as passing out papers. This task might be impossible for teachers who have been in the classroom since before there were any computers in the classroom, and no one had a school email address.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not easy. It’s not simple.

Simple is comfortable. Simple gets the job done without question.

But easy? Easy might involved work upfront. Easy might involved setting something up or learning a new tool.

And that’s when the issues begin.

Teachers are, in case you didn’t know, stressed out. They always have been. Amid a global pandemic, their stress levels haven’t lowered. They’ve raised.

And expectations are higher than ever. So when teachers face change after change after change and deal with things they’ve never dealt with before (hello, temperature checks & social distancing), why would they not choose to go with simple?

This is the challenge for us in the educational technology world. We have to find ways to encourage easy over simple. We have to be there to support.

We have to understand what teachers are going through. We have to be patient. And we have to accept when some say “no.”

We have to make our own choice of simple or easy. It’s simple to create some videos or documents to support teachers and then walk away.

But it’s easy to support and empower a small group of teachers who will run with their version of “easy” and help you spread the work to others.

What will you choose? Simple or easy?

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The HyperRubric: A Rubric for the Digital Age

I’ve long been a fan of Hyperdocs; a lesson-building format that focused on providing students with the resources they need to work at their own pace throughout a lesson or unit.

Hyperdocs also gives teachers the chance to support students in a lesson exactly when they need it most. The format works well in either virtual or blended learning environments, giving students control over the pace of the lesson.

With a bit of a different twist, there’s now the HyperRubric.

Think of it as a traditional rubric super-powered with examples and supports that will give students the resources they need to complete a task.

HyperRubrics can give help students answer the “why” behind what they are doing in a lesson rather than just the what. We’ve all had great lessons that students loved, but at the end of the lesson, students can’t really express what they were supposed to be learning during the lesson, only remembering the cool stuff they did.

Image from Cult of Pedagogy

Using HyperRubrics can provide a focus for students and help teachers think critically about what support students will need to achieve outcomes.

Thinking about Lesson Redesign for Deeper Learning

There’s a project that I’ve wanted to begin for a few years. I thought I’d have the chance during my first year as a full-time digital learning coach, but then COVID happened, and things went off the rails.

Now, my project is running. I’m working with a group of teachers in my district; the Future Shift Fellowship. The teachers represent grade levels from K-12 and several different content areas. Our focus is on redesigning lessons to create deeper learning experiences for students.

In case you weren’t aware, this process isn’t easy. But, with the right outlook and tools to help, we’re making some headway on this journey.

The Right Tool for Framing Conversations

We’re using the wonderful 4 Shifts Protocol as our guiding light during all our conversations. If you’re not familiar with this protocol, here’s an overview:

The 4 Shifts Protocol is a questioning protocol that focuses on redesigning lessons in four areas: deeper thinking & learning, authentic work, student agency & personalization, and technology infusion.

It’s a simple tool to begin using, but it opens the door to much deeper conversations about what we ask students to do and how those tasks align with meaningful work in settings beyond the classroom.

purple and black computer keyboard
Photo by Syed Ali on Unsplash

Before this week’s meeting, I asked the fellows to read through the 4 Shifts handbook to guide our discussions. From the group, here are some of the thoughts they shared and their takeaways from the book:

The 4 Shifts Takeaways

My fellows know that one of my rallying cries about any change we undertake in our classrooms is to “embrace the suck.” It’s a military term used by trainers to get their trainees to understand that you must lean into being uncomfortable and push through difficulties. I use it to encourage teachers and students to keep going despite whatever difficulty they face with technology usage, rethinking lessons, or anything that “sucks” about change in education.

The fellows agreed that this book and protocol give them some support and encouragement to embrace the suck. And to know that things won’t always suck.

Next, they realized that lesson redesign will look different for different people because of the protocol’s flexibility. The 4 Shifts protocol respects teachers as professionals and masters of their craft. There is no dictation to use certain tools or methods in any of the shifts, merely yes/no/maybe questions to start conversations about how to change. It’s up to each teacher to determine how to best change each no to a yes.

people sitting down near table with assorted laptop computers
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

One fellow brought up how, when used properly, infusing technology into lessons can give students greater control over their learning. Good technology integration should provide students with greater agency and provide them with opportunities to present their work to an authentic audience and setting. Thinking about lesson redesign with deeper learning in mind makes this possible.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

We talked about our overachiever desire to do something spectacular with our students. If we’re going to redesign a lesson, we thought, we need to do something that’s never been done before and end the lesson or unit with some impressive technology project to show off to as many people as possible.

Of course, that’s not the point of this process. And the redesign doesn’t have to be difficult to implement or require huge changes to lead to deeper learning. Even small tweaks to your existing lessons can open new doors for students. Changing one small part of your lesson can give students a greater opportunity to think more deeply or, if appropriate, lead them down the path of becoming creators of content rather than consumers.

Ultimately, our goal in lesson redesign is moving students from inert learning to active learning, getting away from simple test prep to acquiring knowledge that sets them up for success in the world beyond our school walls.

What Happens Next

Our journey is just beginning with this fellowship. We’re starting small to spread this work across our school district. We will learn much along the way, and I’ll be sharing our work with all of you as we go. It’s an adventure for us and, we hope, for our students, too.

Change does not happen quickly, especially in education. However, our students are worth whatever changes we can make to help them be successful and live the life of their dreams, whatever that may be. The struggle is worth it because our kids are worth it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you’ve enjoyed the insights and stories, consider showing your support by subscribing to my weekly newsletter. It’s a great way to stay updated and dive deeper into my content. Alternatively, if you love audiobooks or want to try them, click here to start your free trial with Audible. Your support in any form means the world to me and helps keep this blog thriving. Looking forward to connecting with you more!

Will Students Use AI to Write Papers?

Since the dawn of time, students have been looking for ways to get out of writing papers. How do I know this? Because I was a student who tried to get out of writing papers.

I was terrible at it since I’d mostly just end up not writing the paper (Have I told you how horrible I was as a student in middle school & high school? Or maybe I wasn’t horrible, I just didn’t want to do things that were busy work and it all seemed like busy work…) and placing all my hopes for decent grades on awesome test-taking abilities.

Regardless of the wonderful technologies our students can use today, at some point, they are going to write a paper. Until we convince every teacher in the world that there are other ways to demonstrate learning mastery, there’s a paper in every student’s future. And there are times when a paper is the best form of assessment or communication.

With advances in artificial intelligence, we may need to rethink writing assignments for students.

Rethinking Writing with AI in Mind

As we think about creating deeper learning experiences for students and moving past work that doesn’t have applications outside the classroom and only asks for evidence of low-level learning, we educators need to know what’s possible with AI writing programs.

If you’re asking students to give an answer that looks something like a “listicle” you might find on a website, an AI writer can craft an incredibly decent response.

Without AI, innovate_rye says the homework they consider “busywork” would take them two hours. Now homework assignments like this take them 20 minutes.

from Vice

And some budding entrepreneurs learn quickly that if they know how to use AI writing software, they can make a quick buck from classmates.

I quickly searched for “ai writing apps” and retrieved around 82 million matches. The first page of the search results is littered with articles like “21 Best AI Writing Software Tools of October 2022 (Top 3 Picks)” and “21 Best AI Writing Tools of 2022,” amongst many others.

My point is this: students will find a way to game the system. They will put more effort into getting out of work than they will in doing the work if the work they are asked to do seems pointless.

white robot
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Can we honestly say we don’t want to do the same? If we could have an AI attend the average staff meeting in our stead, wouldn’t we?

You could even use AI to write up some helpful tips for other teachers if you want to. The quality of the work may not be what you’re looking for, but is that wrong?

Technology is a tool that we can leverage to complete mundane tasks. The part of that statement that is difficult to define is the mundane part. Who decides what tasks are mundane and which ones aren’t?

A Plea for More Authentic Tasks

I’m not saying that papers can’t be authentic; I’m saying that we have to think carefully about what we ask students to write about. As with all the work we ask of students, a move toward more authentic, student-centered learning is essential in our modern world.

Planning frameworks like the 4 Shifts protocol can help us think about the tasks we ask of students and how we can modify those tasks for more authentic work.

And maybe worry a little less about software writing student responses.

BONUS: I had this newsletter ready to launch when I saw an AI-generated podcast between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs. Disturbing? Yes. We need to know what’s out there and what it can do. The future is now.

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