📚 Crucial PD that teachers need

📺 NOW: AI sessions at the FREE Ditch Summit

There’s plenty of AI content available now at the Ditch Summit.

It’s our free online conference for educators. It just opened on Monday and stays open until Jan. 5.

FYI: If you know educators who want to get quality FREE PD hours for license renewal, this is a great way. There are ~100 sessions and ALL of them offer a certificate of completion.

Register at ditchsummit.com to start watching right away.

Among the AI-related content available during the summit …

• My session — AI in the Classroom: Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond — does a bit of predicting the future of school and classwork based on the trajectory AI is taking.

• Another session — Demystifying AI with Fely Garcia Lopez — is a fantastic AI primer for educators new to it all.

• AI & Media Literacy with Julie Smith talks about the impact of AI on digital citizenship, truth, and the media.

• In AI: Navigating a New Era in Education, the PD team from Five Star Technology breaks down AI implications from multiple perspectives: admin, coach, and teacher.

I highly recommend registering for this free PD (available until Jan. 5), and feel free to recommend any other educators you think would benefit!

🗣 On the discussion board

This week, we talked about the potential impact of AI on student thinking and learning.

View the whole discussion here. (It’s not too late to participate!)

Some highlights and summarized responses:

• “I would like to see students learning how to create and refine a query that yields more sophisticated results. In addition, I hope that students will go beyond being able to use prompts effectively … learn more about what happens behind the scenes when utilizing an AI tool, and will create their own AI tools.” — Kim Brown
  

• Caleb J Wilson AGAIN wrote a great detailed post. (Thank you, Caleb, for sharing so freely with us!) He connects to NGSS standards. Plus: “In the short-term, I hope that students begin to see AI as a tool to accelerate and augment their learning from class.” And … “Long-term, educational priorities need to shift. The shift from product to process. Recall to relevance.” This summary doesn’t do the whole piece justice … read it yourself!
  

• “AI will introduce a brand new frontier of brainstorming for students (and educators). The brainstorming process for a project can take quite a bit of time (for good reason), but AI will most definitely be able to help become a crucial thought-partner.” — Paul Dietrich

🛠 David Cloutier’s fave AI tools

Shout out to David Cloutier for sharing these tools that his teachers love:

• ChatGPT: for levelling, rubric optimization, lesson plan ideation, parent email optimization, organizer/consistency

• Goblin.tools: as a formal/informal converter, task list generator, brain dump organizer, tone reader, and to help students with executive functioning

• Diffit.me: Easily create a variety of resources from a generated text, article (through URL), or pasted text

• MagicSchool.ai or Eduaide.ai: interactive platforms, rubric optimization, choice board generation, multiple choice generator (from video/text)

• Edpuzzle.com: Increase engagement with video learning supported by AI tools

View his whole post here. 

🗓 This week’s discussion topic

I just created a new discussion board: AI Professional Development. It’s for sharing PD ideas, resources, tips, etc. Feel free to drop anything helpful in a comment in this discussion board!

Here’s this week’s new discussion topic:

What kind of AI-related professional development do you think teachers need most right now?

Click here to view the AI Professional Development discussion board to reply

PS: Have a suggestion for a future AI-related discussion for the group? Hit reply to this email and let me know!

🎙 Quote of the week

I have a nontraditional set of standards through which I encourage my students to evaluate their work (curiosity, criticality, communication, conscientiousness). This year, perhaps in order to get at Gornick’s why, I added a new Turing-esque test to my list of rubrics: expressiveness. It has three simple criteria:

1. It feels like it came from someone. It contain evidence of complex, emotive human detritus. Feeling human-like isn’t enough: it couldn’t have been made by “just anyone,” and instead leans into the unique perspective of the specific person/people who made it.

2. It feels like it was meant for someone. It is a work concerned with and designed for a particular audience, and the audience can feel that intention when they consume it.

3. It feels like it belongs in a particular context. It is aware of the place, time, culture, and artistic medium in which it will be consumed. Its form and content are in conversation with each other. It is not afraid to converse with the past, elevating, rather than concealing, its inspiration.

With this rubric, I never need to accuse my students of using AI. What matters is that the work is expressive, and contains evidence of the human that created it. If something feels robotic or generic, it is those very qualities that make the work problematic, not the tools used. I can simply say "I want to see more of you in this" or “who is this for?” or “seek out inspiration.”

— Elan Ullendorff, from “The New Turing Test” from the Escape the Algorithm newsletter

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ AI is forcing teachers to confront an existential question (via Washington Post): An editorial about how some professors at the University of Mississippi are thinking about cheating and plagiarism in light of artificial intelligence

2️⃣ Tips and Resources for Introducing Students to Artificial Intelligence (via Edutopia): Jorge Valenzuela shares tips to expand our teaching about AI-related content.

3️⃣ Unlocking Cyber Safety: Protecting K12 Education in the Digital Age: Carl Hooker moderates a conversation with a chief tech officer and a school district CIO about cyber safety and security.

4️⃣ New episode of the Digital Learning Podcast (that I co-host with Holly Clark): How to Shift Classwork to Respond to AI: In this episode, Holly and Matt share ways to prepare students for their future by adjusting what we ask students to do.