Promotional Materials by: Melissa White, District Technology Coach

Calvin Smith teacher, Meredith Harker, worked with two coaches at her school on the Ed Tech Champions Communication challenge. Krystal Plott, the Technology Coach and Jennifer Pinegar, the Reading Specialist collaborated with Meredith on the following lesson.:

Summary

We are working on descriptive writing. This includes writing simple, compound, and complex sentences with adjectives and adverbs to make our writing clear to our reader. This relates to all of our 3rd grade writing standards. Using AI seemed like a wonderful, interactive way for students to see how descriptive their writing actually is.

Krystal brought Adobe Express text to image to my attention when I was discussing with her how we could teach descriptive writing to our 3rd graders. She showed us the app and how it could be used to generate a picture depending on the words you used to describe what you want. I knew that my students would love using this technology! It was the perfect way for my students to see if they were writing in complete sentences and using enough details to make a picture. 

I also worked with our reading specialist, Jennifer Pinegar, to get ideas on how to make this better match our core standards. We made sure that the students planned out what they were going to describe before actually typing it into the AI. Students had to write some simple, compound, and complex sentences. They had to use adjectives to describe what things looked, smelled, tasted, sounded, and felt like. This will lead into writing narrative stories in the next few weeks. 

This has been a several step process.

1. We started the experiment whole group with the fuzzy sentence, “The dog is mean.” We put this into the text to image AI program to see what it would produce. Every picture was different since we didn’t put in any details about what kind of dog or what it looked like.

2. As a class, we came up with several sentences that described a “mean dog” such as what kind of dog, what his teeth looked like, what color he was, where he was, etc. We put that description back into the AI and the pictures were much more similar to each other and showed our details.

3. Students were then put into groups of 3. Their fuzzy sentence was, “The _________ is a mess” with the blank being a room in the house (bedroom, office, bathroom, kitchen, etc) They put the fuzzy sentence into a Google Doc and into the AI to generate a picture.

4. Students looked at the picture and picked 6 different things to describe in sentences. They made a plan, then each student took a turn writing one descriptive sentence to add to the “clear paragraph” to describe the AI picture.

5. After all 6 sentences were written, students put their paragraph back into AI to see what it would generate. If they didn’t describe it well enough, they went back to their paragraph to add and change things. They continued doing this until they were satisfied that their picture matched their description.

6. I printed out all of the “fuzzy” and “clear” descriptions with the pictures and we did a gallery walk around the room to read each other’s writing.