Ep 171 | AI: Classroom time saver or distraction?

SPEAKER_02 0:00

So we talk about having like another teacher in the room, right? Sarah's mentioned in the past it's like having a TA, right? And so imagine the difference having someone on hand, an assistant, who can remember the things that you give them, who can understand the things that you are talking about, and who can work with you to help facilitate some of the more like tedious tasks. It's a game changer.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome to the Voices United in Education podcast. Each week we showcase the teachers, administrators, and community members who go the extra mile to contribute to the success of every child in Escambia County. You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support your child's success. We've all used AI to find our way driving from A to B and certainly enjoyed a talking baby or two on social media. But could AI be an up-and-coming tool for teachers? One that could open up access to greater student outcomes, increased teacher satisfaction, and a wider range of creative lesson plans? My next guests are two teachers in Escambia County doing just that. One is a world history and AP Human Geography and AP World History teacher, and the other a math teacher. Two very different subjects, but both with at West Florida and both using AI in interesting and innovative ways. Today they're going to give us a peek into their classroom to educate and inspire parents and teachers alike, merging ingenuity and technology, bringing tomorrow's tools to today's classroom, Sarah Wallace and Gary Moore. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Thank you so much. Did I get the math wrong? I saw you laugh. Was that wrong?

SPEAKER_00 1:49

It was just like very, very specific for me. And then just like, I know he's math.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

He does geometry and statistics. Geometry and statistics. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:00

I maybe have to redo that because you'll probably lose a bunch of folks as soon as you say the word geometry or statistics. Because that's just it's like a trauma. Whatever, whatever works best for you.

unknown 2:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Roger that. Well, you're both doing the Lord's work and we appreciate that and just want to recognize that because can I tell you something that happened the other day?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

My husband used Gemini, which is an AI tool, to make himself into a transformer.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Oh, that's that's perfect. That sounds fun.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Yeah, but when we think of AI, this is what we're thinking of. In fact, just a few hours ago, Mark, who's in the room with us, part of our podcast team, he was showing me uh two puppies on a podcast using AI. And it was life-giving. But I think there's an opportunity here for AI to do bigger and better work, to do serious things with important outcomes like reducing teacher burnout and organizing your classroom. Even I think, Gary, it was you that you said you're using it to kind of rework the efficacy of different lesson plans and finding out, okay, this is working, that's not, let's tweak this, move that. Is that you said that?

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Yes. And so, like, we'll take a lesson plan and we'll deliver it and we can load it up into there's several when we're talking about lesson plan specifics. You know, chat GPT is what we're mostly familiar with, but there's also Magic AI school, and it's got a specific tool for making lesson plans. And so it's still a chat bot. You can still interact with it and you see a load up lesson plan and say, Hey, this did not work so well. The examples were kind of wordy. We got non-integer values for solutions when students wanted integer values or whatever, and it'll modify things on the go for you.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Wow. Is that the conversation that you have open all year?

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. So in chat, I have a just an ongoing thing. The reason why is that we'll give the lesson plan, you know. I say we mean the chat, right? And we're going back and forth, and then months or weeks or whatever down the road, hey, we talked about this one thing this one time, and it's very relevant now, but I can't think of a really cool way to culminate that previous discussion with what we're doing now. All right, chat. Uh, you know, when have we discussed the binomial theorem? Oh, okay, there, cool. Well, now we're talking about continuous probability distributions. How can we incorporate a binomial probability distribution question from there to here? And it'll, you know, you'll go back and forth with it.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

So it's almost like having a second teacher in the classroom. And this is your 11th year teaching?

SPEAKER_02 4:40

12 in March.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

12 in March. When did you start using AI as a tool in the classroom?

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Well, I guess that depends on how we define AI, right? Because, you know, uh uh predictive text, uh, Google in general, in terms of like generative AI, that's probably been here in the last two or three years.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Yeah. And what difference has that made before and after for you?

SPEAKER_02 5:05

So we talk about having like another teacher in the room, right? Sarah's mentioned in the past it's like having a TA, right? And so imagine the difference having someone on hand, an assistant, who can remember the things that you give them, who can understand the things that you are talking about, and who can work with you to help facilitate some of the more like tedious tasks? It's a game changer. Ask any person, any teacher, instructor, educator, whoever, who has a an aide, a TA, a G A, whatever, the difference between doing it by yourself and and having someone there to help.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Has it made a difference on your student outcomes?

SPEAKER_02 5:40

Oh, absolutely. So I mentioned before where, you know, it's math classes notoriously. We'll have uh examples, right? And it's very difficult, given the nature of some of these contents, to be to come up with examples on the spot. If you've been doing it for a really long time, you're embedded in the mathematics, you can do it, but it still takes a little bit of RAM. But when a student says, Well, Mr. Moore, what if instead of the value being this number, what if it was that number? What does that do overall? And we can have a discussion, we can talk about theoretical, but to come up with in the moment examples, it's right there. And so we can address these things with students. Also, we can, after getting back our evaluation, like our assessment scores or whatever, trends, things that we may not necessarily notice. We can say, hey, look at these things. I can take student assessment scores, for example, and I might say, Hey, here's student assessment scores, and here are paired with that student absences. This kid was gone seven days. It's because now, and again, we're not inputting student information, right? So student A, B, C, et cetera. And you can look and and chat, you know, or or whatever AI can do, like, you know, rudimentary association, you know, and say, hey, we're noticing, like we would expect, the students who missed more school had the lower scores or whatever. And so you can do more data analysis with your assessment scores to now go back and say, okay, well, even though maybe the average was kind of low, I noticed that the scores that were bringing the average down come from students who maybe they're more involved in extracurriculars, they're not in the room as much, et cetera. And so we can use that to help address possible issues or to help remedy certain situations instead of just saying, oh, well, the whole class sucks, so we're moving on, you know?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Right. So that's interesting because you the human tendency is to generalize. And especially if your emotional state is in maybe you're fatigued or feeling like, oh, I'm overwhelmed as an educator who's also trying to live the human experience. And so this is lifting that from you, but also allowing you to basically run statistics on your statistics students. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:43

And it doesn't require any real background. Because you know, we talk about like in order to do some of these analyses, you have to have certain backgrounds, right? AI is there to help with that. You know, you say, because we can anyone can ask the question, is there a connection between my scores and the number of absences students have? Right. And there's lots of ways to answer that statistically, but AI knows those processes too. Now, the more familiar with the processes you are, you can, you know, go back and check because we always want to check our outputs. But if nothing else, it gets the conversation started. For example, if you're not a coder, it can output things in code and then you can throw that into a compiler. And it so you don't need to necessarily know the syntax, the, the, the minutiae, in order to get an output that you can use. And that's helpful.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Which leads to broader conversations within the classroom because a student will feel like, oh, we have time to have this like theoretical conversation about maths. I'm gonna use steal from our British cousins here in all of your math teaching, the maths. Whereas before, maybe if you weren't able to answer that, then the student wouldn't be able to bring that up because there's not time to change input A for B and see what happens. Sarah, you're using AI in the classroom to speed up a lot of time-consuming tasks also, but yours kind of look different because you're in a different area of study. Can you kind of share some of your favorite ways to use AI?

SPEAKER_00 9:07

So there's kind of a variety of different ways that I go with it. I'm having to redo a lot of curriculum stuff for world history this year. So being able to plug in standards and be like, hey, here's my notes, here's what I'm covering, here's what I already have. Like, what am I missing? What do I need to add in? Have I covered all of these standards that I need to make sure that the kids know that they they have all the information for? The other thing that I do is because I teach two AP classes, like making sure that everything that is together and detailed enough for them at the level that it needs to be for the AP class is important. One of the more curious things that I'm I was doing earlier today was I realized that my attempts last year of making my directions more clear for a big project, I kind of went the other direction on it. I made it a little too wordy, a little too high level, a little too convoluted. And so I kind of threw it all back in there. I'm like, okay, I need to bring this back down. It's a little too confusing for the kids. I need it to be more clear and concise for ninth grade level students. And so being able to kind of see and compare what I had to what it was suggesting, I was able to kind of make some adjustments to make it easier for them.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

And this is your first year teaching, correct?

SPEAKER_00 10:09

No, this is my seventh, eighth. I started in February of 2019. So it was the 18, 19 school year was my first school year.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

And what's been the before and after for you using AI tools?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

It makes it manageable teaching a hundred AP students in a year, because just there's there's so much that I have to be able to do that it's just having like again, like that TA, just to kind of help with just even just compiling information together so that I can go through and then set things up and and go through it at the level that I need to for for all of that. Like it's I can't, everything that I use it for is stuff that I can do. But it when it takes an hour or 90 minutes or two hours, it while it doesn't seem like necessarily that much time on the surface, when you're talking about an hour for every single day, like that adds up a lot when you've, you know, with as many different things that I've got. I'm one of the main supports for AP human geography and AP world history for my entire school. So I've got other teachers that are also kind of depending on me and my knowledge and everything that I'm doing. So I've got a lot of different things that I'm juggling. So doing those things that can save me half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour, like they add up very quickly for me.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Not just in practical time, as in like the duration of time, but also in mental energy. Absolutely. Right. So if you have that freed up, I'm assuming that that would mean you'd have more creative energy for um, you know, playing around with those curriculums for students who maybe need a different approach or just simply for the AP and then the non-AP. Absolutely. Yeah. Tell me about your ADHD hack. I find this so fascinating. I definitely want to look into it for myself.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

So I have I have real bad ADHD. Um, and it's it's something that I've kind of learned various different strategies to deal with that I had stumbled across, and it's an AI platform. It's called Goblin Tools, which always makes me laugh. But it's it's literally designed for your people with ADHD. It can make these like detailed checklists. And I I've recommended it to students that have ADHD, that have trouble like getting overwhelmed with where to start. Because one of the things with ADHD is that it's not that you can't focus, is that you're trying to focus on everything all at once. And being able to figure out that starting point can be very overwhelming to some kids and that executive dysfunction that comes along with it. And Goblin Tools, you can quite literally copy and paste like your directions from an assignment in and it'll make a checklist for you. It's not going to generate literally any materials, but it's going to go through and say, okay, you need to start here and then need to, you know, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three. And you can go through and have it break down more or less detailed depending on what you need.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

That is so brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

So you just brain dump it and then it's Yeah, that's one of the functions actually is literally the top brain dump. Yeah. Where you just quite literally just say, okay, I, you know, and you can use it for, I've used it for like, you know, spring cleaning when I'm like, okay, I need to make sure that I do everything. I'll like go to the brain dump function. I'll just be like, okay, I need to, you know, do this in the the kitchen. I need to do this and, you know, and just dump everything in there and it'll export it itself into the checklist maker and put everything in order and organize it and can break it down into smaller steps to make it make that starting point more manageable.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

I'm totally gonna take a picture of my garage and just put it in there and be like, what now?

SPEAKER_02 13:18

So many AI platforms have options to upload media. You might just be able to do something with that.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Okay. Well, this is very exciting. What I love about the underpinning, if you will, of this idea is although AI has different opportunities to be cautious and informed, and we'll talk about hallucinations in a minute, but it really seems like it can help humans human a little bit better. And for teachers, this seems so valuable because we need teachers to be creative and to be innovative. We need neurospicy teachers to because we neurospicy people are pretty great and we have a different way of looking at the world. So if the barrier is just a long to-do list, how wonderful that there's a tool that can help us share our gifts with other people, right? What's your take, Gary, on AI tools helping with teacher retention and burnout prevention?

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Oh man. So when you talk to any teacher and you ask them, give me a list of the top 10 things that give you the most heartache in in terms of, you know, your day-to-day, you know, outside of like catastrophic events, obviously. 11 out of 10 of those things is are gonna be, you know, the paperwork, the planning, the, you know, I had to come off my planning period because I had to go cover this person, I had to do this. And we're all a team, we're all always trying to help each other out. But it just seems like the things that aren't related to the actual instruction, right? To actually talk to your students, to interact with them. And so it's just tedium. And it's the the little things. And so absolutely these things can be alleviated by, like what Sarah is saying, you know, using a tool that helps us to organize our thoughts, to prioritize the tasks we have to do, to modify our lesson plans. You just found out, oh, by the way, next class, uh, we're gonna have some kind of a drill. And so you only have 45 minutes instead of an hour and a half. Well, all right, chat. This is what we were doing. Cut it down by half. And so it's there to just kind of help ease the burden of all these things that to me personally come to us outside of our control. You know, that's to me what causes me anxiety is having to deal with things outside of my control. And it helps to alleviate that. And so I think we have an easier time sticking with it when we feel we have a little bit more control. Like anything, we have a better time when we are a little bit more in control of what's going on around us.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

And, you know, to add to that, the other aspect of it is that like we are human, like we do get sick, and you know, things happen in personal lives that can pull us away. And having something that I can, okay, I have half an hour to put something together for tomorrow that I'm not gonna be there and I wasn't planning on it, having tools that I can go in and I can actually put something together that's not, you know, go read this chapter in this book and answer the questions at the end, because the kids hate doing that, and understandably so. But having tools that I can take and actually put something together that they find at least mildly interesting, or at least not read the book and answer the questions at the end, having something that I can throw together quickly because I unexpected life happened moment helps as well because that that stress level of trying to make sure that you're doing everything that you need to for your job is it can be very overwhelming sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Has there been an opportunity to use an AI for continuity with substitute teachers?

SPEAKER_02 16:47

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

What's that look like?

SPEAKER_02 16:49

So again, like what Sarah's saying, you know, you'll have an issue where you're not there, right? And so depending on the content, the material you're doing, you can leave independent work for the students to do where the sub doesn't necessarily have to interact with students outside of the normal, you know, helping making sure everyone's on task, whatever. But if you have something that you absolutely need an adult, someone to instruct at least a little bit, you can absolutely use it for that. Okay, so chat, you're a high school math teacher and you're not gonna be in your class, and a substitute's gonna come in with very minimal background information in the content, help me write some kind of lesson plan that would be something they can deliver. And so we're talking about taking the instructional vocabulary where normally we want to use like high levels of rigor, we want to use appropriate vocabulary, you know, and maybe we water it down just a little bit because giving something is better than nothing. And it also helps that substitute because now instead of having this complicated material in front of them that they're like, Oh, I listen, I haven't done geometry in you know 10 years or whatever, you know, they get to say, okay, I can follow along, read through, and maybe there's even prompts for this person. Hey, just so in case you forgot, you know, this, that, and the other, and they can help to deliver, right? And so you can certainly go from a handwritten note with good luck guy to something that can either give them the idea of what's going on in the room and they can then help the students as they go through their independent work or give them the material they need to deliver whatever level of instruction that you know is is appropriate and then follow through and help.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Do the two of you exchange notes on what AI is working in your classroom? Because you seem like we didn't just throw you together at a microphone today, like you guys have good work chemistry. Yeah, our rooms are right next to each other. Okay, so I'm not I'm not hallucinating that that is there. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

So when I got hired on in 2019, I was in the same building as Gary and got basically told, like, if you have any questions, go to him. And he and I kind of clicked in like very similar mindsets and all that. So even though our subjects are completely different, we have very similar approaches to things. And so we just kind of like, oh, you understand me. So now now once we moved campuses, we're side by side. And so we we yeah, we we chat a whole lot. There's like a couple things he's found, like especially with the generative AI stuff with like substitute or being out, he's found the podcast creation one and the what was the other one? It was the was it the chatbot? Yes, the chatbot, which magic magic school AI has that where you can quite literally have it create a chatbot for your specific subject so you can give it parameters, you can you know, and then it gives the kids something to kind of interact with. But taking the podcast idea, i.e. know, for history, I could take a couple of different documents and kind of throw something together and like, okay, here, make a podcast, do a thing with this. And it's they're still reading the same material, they're still talking about the same stuff, but that engagement goes up and it's more interesting for them. And so it makes doing the same thing that I needed to do, the same thing that I needed to cover, it's doing the same thing. But if the kids are more interested or at least a little bit more connected to it because it's it's in more of their language, then you can help that the understanding of the material because of that.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

And that matters a lot. Absolutely that it feels relevant to the kids because there's a temptation for people not in school as a student or a teacher to go, what's the big deal? Here's the info, here's the test, do the thing, move on with your life. But student engagement can really make the difference for being a lifelong learner or deciding, you know what, education's not for me.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

And talking about easing the burden for teachers, it also eases the burden for students. You know, we talk about making those checklists and stuff. A lot of the barrier to entry for students in education, be it they have difficulties with ADHD or their teenagers or what have you, is if they could just sit down and just focus on the one thing at a time, they would find more success. But they're inundated with all this information, uh, stuff coming from social media or the six other classes they have to deal with. And so having an assistant themselves helps them to mitigate the the extra stressors, lowers the barrier to entry so that they can focus more easily on the material. And now we're talking about hey, learning's starting to become a little bit more fun. And so it helps them too.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Yeah. How do you help uh kids understand uh AI hallucinations? And I would love for one of you to explain AI hallucinations for those who maybe aren't familiar.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

So an AI hallucination is where the generative AI produces a result that is like factually incorrect, right? There is a popular example of having, and I think it was in chat, count the number of letters in a word, and it was like, no, it's not. And you have to sit there. And so another basically having students understand that the results we get are not going to be 100% all of the time. They could be factually incorrect or they could be providing an opinion that doesn't have the context or perspective of the whole question or problem. You know, for example, if we ask chat, is it okay to eat animals? depending on the length. Which model that that particular AI was programmed with, or what have you. It might say, no, you know, eating dogs is not okay, eating horses is not okay, or whatever. When the context was given the kinds of animals that we domesticate for the purposes of consuming, is it okay? And so students will get these responses back and not understand that it's nuanced.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

That's a great way to explain it. I think I myself, as a we I shared with you off mic learning about how generative AI works, what it means. I tend to vacillate between tech cool girl and complete Luddite, which actually I'm finding is an appropriate exercise to go back and forth. We as humans, we love to complete that loop, right? Like our Apple watch, I think it even has like you've completed your loop today. So if Apple can create an entire product based on our human desire to check things off the list and never think about them ever again, then certainly it's important that we acknowledge that aspect, good guy, bad guy, the end, right? And so I'm learning that AI isn't quite like that. So it's important to kind of go back and forth. And would you say that it's correct to describe like Chat GBT, which is the one I think most people are familiar with, it's learning the language that we humans use on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

So that can be really gnarly, right? Because let's think about Twitter. It's a little group, like everyone, it's all inflamed. Everything's inflamed on Twitter, right? X, whatever. And so if the language learning model is learning how to respond based on how humans speak to each other on Twitter.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Yep. And also, too, you know, the social, I don't want to say social norms because I don't want to say this is a social norm, but the ways that we present to the internet how our society views certain things. If you go and ask a generative AI to give me an image of a boardroom of executive, whatever's for a company, it's gonna come back with all males because that's how when we see people discussing this thing on the internet, you know, it's it's very much a male-leaning whatever. And chat just says, Oh, okay, well, that's that's what must look like. And it doesn't say, well, what if, or actually there's examples everywhere of, you know, going the other way. It just doesn't know because it's basing this response on not only the language that we use, but also the imagery that we're posting onto the internet.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

So how do you help kids understand that? It's a challenge. Um, it's something that I I'm still having to kind of struggle with because it's explaining to the kids and having them understand that it's a tool to help. It's not a replacement, is is a really big barrier to get across because understandably, you know, they have my class, they've got six other other classes, they've got extracurriculars, they've got, you know, their own life going on. It is very tempting to just take it and just dump your assignment in it and just take back whatever it gets. But it's meant to be used as something to help with and not something to replace. And there's a big, I don't know if gap is quite the right word, just big divide between that I've seen, especially more and more in in recent years, where kids don't understand the why behind their doing something. They just see it as I have to do this as a as a as a checklist, but they're not understanding the reasons behind it. And so because of that, they're not taking the time to actually learn the material. And then that gets to be a problem because again, you can't trust everything that it gives you. It can give you very convincingly wrong information. And it can sound incredibly correct and very authoritative of that very wrong information and having to get the kids to understand that, like, yeah, you can use this to help, but you still have to go back and check everything. So everything that I'm using it for, I'm going through and checking and making sure that it hasn't changed India to China or something like that while I'm trying to explain something because something like little from chat, it may look pretty minor, but like little changes like that can be very, very detrimental in education, all that. So going through and fact-checking is imperative to using it correctly.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

And I think you hit on something important that you also kind of touched on when we were talking earlier is that there's value in that struggle. Like the why are you learning it? Why, why do I have to read this? Why do I have to show my work or whatever the why is? It's important that the struggle happens, just the analogy of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly. And since we're a coastal town, we could say the analogy of the sea turtle struggling its way to the ocean. Like if those little muscles aren't developed, little Susie'd sea turtle ain't gonna make it. So, how do you help students understand that the value is in the struggle? And that's actually one of the most beautiful things about being human. That's pretty deep for like a math and history teacher, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:59

It's a good question. It's just it's it's kind of hard to answer. For me, it's gonna vary based on the classes that I'm teaching because there's gonna be kind of variance in what I'm teaching, how I'm teaching, the level that I'm teaching at. For my my upper level like AP World History class, it's I can explain it to them and that it's the best way that you're gonna learn how to write this argumentative aspect that you need to be able to do is you're just gonna have to do it and see what you get wrong and learn from that. And convincing them that it's okay to be wrong, that it's not a bad thing to be wrong is one of the bigger barriers that I have that I have to clear with any of my AP students, and that I'm taking high school students and giving them college-level instruction. In social studies, it's there's so many things that have you can ask a very straightforward question. You can have 50 different answers that are all correct. And getting them to understand that, you know, it's okay to be wrong is one of the first hurdles, really, to get through with that.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

That's a great way to frame it. That is one of the finish lines is oh, congratulations, you were wrong.

unknown 28:03

You did it.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Gary, in our pre-chat, you said that it's important to view technology as a tool without a moral assignment, which I think that's lived free in my head since he said it. Can you unpack that a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 28:15

Yeah. So we talk about AI is not, despite the fact that it can be our friend sometimes, right? It is not a living thing. It does not have good intentions, bad, it has no intentions. And so it is itself simply a tool. It is neither good nor bad. It is simply how we use it that will determine its, I guess, the morality, and in this case, a student who has an assignment and they complete the assignment and are given a rubric for this assignment, right? And they say, okay, well, I have this rubric and I have my written response, my own written response, definitely mine. And so they they take the rubric and they put it into the chat bot and they take their own written response, they put it in the chat bot, and they say, How does my response hold up to this rubric? And it can come back and say, Hey, you missed uh the fact that you're supposed to provide two examples instead of one. Okay, cool. This is a good use for AI. This is a good use. So, but then you know, you have another student who's like, here's the question, here's the rubric, give me an answer. And so we commit the plagiarism, right? And that's not a good thing. And so the tool didn't change between the uses of the students. It was simply the students' intentions and how they used it that changed. And so there is a good and ill use of the tool, but the tool itself is neither good nor bad.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

I love that. Uh let's say there's a teacher listening, uh, and then there's also a parent listening who's not a teacher. What AI tools would you recommend them exploring if they're kind of new to this whole world?

SPEAKER_02 29:45

So the first one I would suggest simply because it is the one that is most people are most familiar with, is just Chat GPT. Getting used to the idea that you can conversate with this AI platform and and it can give you non like outside of Google, right? So if you Google used to, right? We have Gemini now, but you know, before when you Googled what year was George Washington born, and then you you might get like a couple of little highlighted answers embedded in these links, but it was like you asked the question, you got a factual thing. Chat shows us, and all chat bots do this, but chat is a large language model based on generic information, not I guess specifically for education or specifically for math or history or whatever. And you can just conversate with it, just say, hey, chat, you know, what do you think about the weather in Florida? Is Florida a good place to move, given that I don't like hot weather? And so once we become more comfortable with the back and forth, and I think that's where the disconnect is for a lot of people. They're talking to something that is not a real person that is producing responses that feels like a real person. Once you can get past that barrier, I feel like after that, it's just using chat and the quote unquote shortcuts, prompts. How do we use prompts to get better responses? How do we input files and how do we use it to analyze data if we want to do that? All of that comes after you overcome the hurdle of you can talk back and forth. You can have a dialogue with the generative AI. And it's not this weird gonna take over the world kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Right, right. Yeah. Half the battle of using AI tools like that effectively is understanding how to word or phrase a prompt for you to get the output of what you're looking for. And it takes time and takes trial and error and kind of figuring out how to phrase it that it makes sense to that binary machine that's doing the generation.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Should parents be concerned about cheating?

SPEAKER_02 31:35

Oh, yes. Absolutely. But no more than they've always been concerned, right? What was Google and write down the response that we got before or copying my buddy's paper or whatever? It's just the more things change, the more they stay the same. You know, so this is just the next step in students having tools that while are amoral, right, can be used in a way that is not fantastic. And so as educators, as parents, we need to realize that that is a reality, but maybe not necessarily assume the worst. We should educate ourselves on how these tools can be used so that we can help our students to know how to use them better. Instead of saying, don't use AI at all, maybe we say, hey, if you're going to use AI, these are the productive ways you can use it. And for many students, I mean, they just don't know. And so given the option saying, hey, you can use this tool and it's gonna help you grow and it's gonna make your stuff look great, they'll probably choose that output.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

I love the yes and model for things like this because it really exercises the brain. And I like what you said, Sarah, about embracing that struggle because I'm wondering if this is like almost like an evolutionary opportunity for us to acknowledge what makes us human. We're acknowledging, ah, ah, struggle. Struggle actually is a part of our development. So instead of no, don't cheat, which is obviously needs to be said, I guess, you're saying no, don't cheat, and the struggle is important.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yeah, and it's and it's understandably hard for kids to go into something knowing that they could be wrong. Like none of us like to be wrong. None of us like to get things incorrect. And kids, especially, like they're still kind of learning through that. And teenagers, even more so, where it's you don't want that embarrassment or you don't want that shame, you don't want that negative aspect of it. But it's that's a big part of learning, you know, having to and and I tell, especially my EP kids this like you sometimes are going to learn more from getting something wrong than from getting it right.

SPEAKER_01 33:35

Oh, that's so true. That leads me to my final question. I would love to hear from each of you. How has AI made you more human?

SPEAKER_00 33:44

I guess I mean it gives me more time to be able to think of the more fun things instead of going through and creating lecture and creating notes and making sure that, you know, my standards are hit on and that I'm addressing this and I'm addressing this and I'm addressing this. I can think of more interactive game type things or more interactive activities. I can take an hour-long YouTube video that I sat and I watched, and I really liked the documentary and I want to use that, but I don't have time to sit down and watch it two other times to write out the questions. I can kind of at least start out with getting some questions generated from that that I can kind of build on and grow from from there. So it allows you to kind of explore how to do things differently and how to differentiate, to use the one of the education buzzwords there, to differentiate and change up your instruction, like to be able to acknowledge that this generation of kids, this year of kids, even is different than last year's kids and different than five years ago. And so seeing what things they connect with, what things they find interesting, what things you want to be able to explore more of, it gives you more options to be able to do that. And so I feel like I can be more effective as an educator because of that.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

What about you, Gary?

SPEAKER_02 34:56

So talking about how this is like the next stage of our development, right? Technologically speaking as a species. And we see that we're struggling with this new tool, right? Should we use it? Shouldn't we use it? Is it good? Is it bad? How do we use it if we are going to use it? And for me, being right there in the middle of that struggle and thinking, hey, but wait, this is the next chain of all of these other times throughout human history that we've asked the same questions. The internet comes out. Man, is the internet good? Is it bad? Or is it just a tool? All throughout human history, we we've had the same conversation. And so for me, seeing that I am now a part of this long chain of events where at every stage in human development we've developed this tool, whatever it is at the time, that you know, we're debating on its efficacy, on its morality, is it gonna be helpful or not? It it makes me feel a part of that that journey, right? And so now I feel like I've contributed to that story because AI is a large language model. It is based on the stuff that we all put out. We're all pretty much all out on the internet, right? And so we're all in a way contributing to that, which will contribute further to the development of this and other technologies. So we're all just a part of the story now. And that that helps me to to ground myself being a part of this larger story with all these other people.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

Well, I so appreciate that the two of you are joining in the story of this podcast because there's these topics that are evolving. And they're like you said, last year's kids are not the same as the year prior. So it's not about generations, it's about just even year to year. Things are changing, the landscape is changing, and it's so exciting to have teachers in the space doing the real thing, finding ways to innovate that make an impact in a very human way, which is brilliant. So thank you both for being here. You were fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Escambia County Public Schools.