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Meet Chat GPT
Meet Chat GPT
This was a professional learning session I put together for a large regional digital learning conference in the summer of 2023. The challenge was to get classroom teachers hands-on experience with AI tools, spark meaningful conversations around usage, and leave them inspired and curious about how they might be able to integrate it into secondary traditional classroom contexts. Most attendees were public school employees, which in Texas means that most of them would likely have no access to any AI tools whatsoever. I engineered a structured header prompt with instructions and a library which defined a few "pseudocode" functions to help participants navigate the exploration. You will find some snapshots of our workspace in notion and a walkthrough video below!
Meet ChatGPT - Workspace in Notion
With my sessions I always like to leave participants with something they can reference later. Notion is not (currently) a familiar platform for educators, but it's a nice option in a public education context because it's free, it lets you publish and share simple pages, and the embed options are essentially limitless. When I use it I almost always get follow-up questions after the session. I'm currently in a coaching role, so I naturally try to capitalize on any opportunity to follow up with participants later to offer support, coaching, collaboration etc.
As a former coding teacher, I believe that computational thinking and algorithmic thinking skills are beneficial in almost any content area. If it makes sense to, I will sometimes use a learning algorithm rather than a list of instructions, as I used to in my coding classroom!
Here is a demonstration of how the AI-guided exploration works. I made this in the spring of 2023 (for a session in May of 2023), so custom GPTs and assistants weren't available yet. My solution was to use a structured header prompt. Teachers were engaged in the session and we had some great discussions about how they could create similar structured prompts for their own content areas. They left curious, which is always my number one goal.
Learner-Centric Collaborator
Learner-Centric Collaborator
This was an experimental project I started looking at when OpenAI first launched custom-GPTs. It helps educators come up with creative learner-centric experiences that combine desired outcomes, real world use cases and contexts that are actually relevant to learners! It was created with a structured prompt and a few other files to train on (the limit at the time was 10). To get around the small context window, I put most of my instructions in the structured prompt and uploaded it as a text file, which is one of the quickest/leanest formats to use for quick information retrieval. At the moment, the collaborator works really well for coming up with creative ideas and outlines. Where it struggles is in creating the actual materials needed for lessons.
If I were making it again, I would try to link it with APIs to some other AI creation tools, or with other custom GPTs in a work flow. This is a really helpful tool for lesson design, precisely because it is so adept at coming up with creative ideas and combinations incredibly quickly. The ability to quickly and easily reformat and re-contextualize existing ideas is also a game changer in terms of saving both time and mental capacity.
Now | Next | Inevitable
Now | Next | Inevitable
Session Description:
The present moment has much to teach if we are willing to pause and pay attention, and in this session, we will do just that. Instead of looking at AI tool usage in educational contexts, we will examine what is happening in the world beyond the K-12 classroom. What do machine learning experts believe about AI’s impact on the world of today and tomorrow? What do today’s trends mean for the learners in our classrooms, and how do we prepare them for what’s coming?
We will reflect on these difficult questions, and catalyze a collective dialogue about how educators can leverage the opportunities hidden within the barriers and equip learners to meet each moment, no matter what it brings.
We are at the end of something. We are at the beginning of something. Whether we identify with the end or the beginning is a choice that each of us will have to make. The challenge with this session is not reframing AI, but disabusing ourselves of the notion that we'll be able to continue on with business as usual in it's wake. This is the beginning of a workshop series that explores infrequently asked questions (IAQs), and exposes educators to information and developments which they would typically not be exposed to... including many examples of current capabilities, emergent trends, and research around AI-driven innovation. We also examine recent research around public attitudes towards AI, job market gaps, and the education system in it's current form. All of this comes together to paint a cohesive picture, empowering participants with an up to date understanding about what's happening out there.
Below you'll find a slide deck which I used to drive group discussions, but the session was designed around multiple stations with videos (which I designed and created), targeted discussion questions (which I wrote), posters with data visualizations (which I curated and stylized), and mechanisms for collecting data from participants (which I designed). I've posted a couple of the videos I created below, and a snippet of a notion page with databases I maintain for participants and district decision makers to keep them up to date on new developments in AI-Driven science, technology, and related trends.
In Your Element
In Your Element
Guiding Questions:
What does aligned work look like for you?
What does unaligned work look like for you?
How might LLMs like GPT-3.5 help you to streamline, abstract, or automate your unaligned work?
How might LLMs help us to streamline and enhance our PLT work?
How might we utilize LLMs to maximize individual aptitudes and passions in our day-to-day roles, and in our PLT work?
Toward the end, we will do some basic prompt engineering with GPT-3.5 and share out our ideas and discoveries. I will then compile those into a collaborative prompt library for session participants.
In this session the challenge was to get teachers hands-on experience with AI, in a way which provided them a clear benefit. I created a slide deck and gathered participant responses with Pear Deck. In addition, each participant had their own personal Figjam board to access session materials, organize their thoughts, and store all of their discoveries to reference later. Teachers were very engaged and had really deep and meaningful discussions. They were also very excited to share out discoveries they made, including simple prompts which they engineered during the session.
PBL Robot Golf
PBL Robot Golf
Session Description:
In this session, participants are immersed in a blended learning experience that combines Project Based Learning, station rotations, and computational thinking via a fun STEM activity. Participants discover how PBL can be delivered in quick "bite-sized" chunks, and integrated with other strategies and activities that make the process fun. PBL generally has four phases, which in this session are performed at four stations. Each of the four stations/phases are situated within one of the four core content areas.
In between each station, participants try their luck at “robot golf”. The object is for them to program a mini Sphero to navigate each hole and achieve a hole-in-one. They use a scorecard to track how many trials it takes to get a hole in one. A self-paced PearDeck guides participants through the course and collects their responses.
In this session the challenge was to get teachers hands-on-experience with PBL and STEM in a way that was approachable and fun. Teachers often steer clear of activities like these because they imagine it'll take too many days to complete. The goal was to leave them informed and inspired--and this fit the bill. The teachers who participated in this session had an absolute blast, and the high school students who happened to catch a glimpse of it were also very interested and wanted to know when their class was going to get to do it. High School teachers and students can be a "tough crowd," so seeing real engagement from both parties was encouraging. Below you'll find some pictures along with resources I created for the session.
This was a blended learning experience with participants interacting with materials at stations, while being guided from station to station and providing responses with a self-paced pear deck. Curiosity is the engine of learning, and it's difficult to have curious learners without curious educators. So the chief goal for me is to always leave participants more curious than when they arrived.
To that end, I try to include a variety of good digital learning strategies and tools in the experiences I design, so that the majority of teachers will be exposed to something new and inspiring. In this experience, they were exposed to a blended learning environment featuring self-paced station rotations, project based learning strategies, and an engaging STEM activity that combined computational thinking skills and robotics in a gamified format.
PBL print outs.pdfProject Based Learning generally has four phases. Those phases are:
Defining the question/problem/task to be completed
Generating Ideas
Prototyping Solutions
Testing
Each station combined one of the phases with a "core" content area (math, science, social studies, and ELAR).
I created the first PBL concept, and then used it as an example for AI to help me come up with similar examples in content areas for which I had less experience.
In order for an activity to be an experience, it has to be experienced! I do my best to add small details that add up to a true experience. Golf pencils and decent looking scorecards help in that regard. In addition there was a live scoreboard and a golf-course soundscape to set the mood.
Digital Learning Cohort
Digital Learning Cohort
The Digital Learning Cohort was a voluntary, asynchronous, online community of inquiry (COI) designed to influence teacher practices in ways that enhance student learning. Members of the cohort read and reflected on peer-reviewed learning research, evaluated and designed engaging digital learning environments and implemented new digital learning skills in the classroom through careful pre-planning, observation, self-assessment, and feedback. Throughout the learning experience, members regularly evaluated their own learning, participated in productive discussions, formed collaborative partnerships with colleagues, and shared digital media artifacts and reflections through a comprehensive ePortfolio.
The digital learning cohort was an idea which I conceived, planned, designed, created, and facilitated on my own initiative. At first it was something which I planned to offer to only one campus, but upon review district decision-makers gave the go-ahead to offer it to every secondary campus. It had over 100 participants ranging from teachers and librarians to counselors and school principals. Below you'll find materials I created for the cohort, along with a quick video tour to give an idea of what it was all about. Every resource including all of the verbiage was created by me without the assistance of AI.
We hosted the cohort through Canvas LMS, and worked hard to make sure it was visually engaging with intuitive navigation. The home page featured buttons to quickly take participants to the current module, or to navigate to whichever module they may have left off on.
The design of the course had a dual purpose, to save teachers time and to model best practices. We emphasized that online learning environments ARE true environments, which ought to receive the same amount of attention that teachers typically devote to traditional classroom environments.
We had modules dedicated to the design and maintenance of effective digital learning environments with a human touch. To emphasize and model the kind of interaction oriented pedagogy (IOP) which enhances online learning, I decided to design the course as a community of inquiry (COI). This format meant that participants developed artifacts and reflections, but also participated in lively discussions with me as the course facilitator and (more importantly) with their colleagues.
The ability to offer this across the district was a great benefit because it created an opportunity for faculty and staff to interact with people in different roles and locations throughout the district.
I strived for the kind of rigor you might encounter in an introductory graduate-level digital learning course offering.
I designed the cohort using the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework. For standards I looked to the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards for educators. I am extremely familiar with the backwards planning process, and have written curriculum for core content areas, CTE courses, and professional learning for adults. I've used UbD for years in multiple contexts, so it was a natural choice for the cohort. I shared out the unit framework document with leadership so that they understood exactly what we would be covering, and made sure to include the same information when and where appropriate to ensure teachers also knew what they would be getting out of the cohort.
DLC Flyer.pdfIt was important to me to make sure that all frameworks and targeted outcomes were obvious. The cohort was a considerable time commitment, so I made sure to emphasize the potential to earn up to 36 CPE credits for full participation. That would mean that participants would receive all the required hours for a full year just by completing all modules in the cohort.
Digital Learning Cohort Course Tour
Digital Learning Cohort Course Tour
Here is a quick tour of the cohort just to give an idea of how it was structured. I am not sharing out any participant artifacts, because this is a public facing site. However, I'm glad to share out my own artifacts with anyone who would like to see them!
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