Artificial Intelligence in Education: Opportunities, Challenges, & Practical Tools

PRESENTERS

William Thornburgh

Dr. William Thornburgh graduated with his Ph.D. from the University of Louisville in Science Education. His research interests include informal science education, teacher professional development, pre-service teacher preparation, and artificial intelligence. At EKU, he has taught Assessment in Education, Culturally Responsive Perspectives, Middle Grades and Secondary Science Methods, Environmental Education Essentials, as well as the graduate-level course, Leading Achievement Change. In addition to teaching, William also acts as a clinical educator for students during various clinical placements in the teacher education program.

Emily Zuccaro

Dr. Emily Zuccaro graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Louisville in Curriculum and Instruction in 2019. Her research interests involve language and literacy learning, as well as artificial intelligence. At EKU, she has taught Children’s Literature, English Language Arts Methods, graduate literacy courses including Literacy Leadership, Trends and Issues, Literacy Programs, Instruction and Assessment, and courses in the English as a Second Language (ESL) endorsement.

TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hurdley:

I’m happy to be joined by our two presenters from Eastern Kentucky University. Dr. William Thornberg is an assistant professor and clinical educator in the teacher education program. Dr. Emily Zu Carro is an associate professor in the education department at EKU and specializes in literacy and ESL. I will turn the time now over to you both. Welcome, and we look forward to hearing from you. I’ll jump back on our q and a.

William Thornburgh:

Thank you so much. All right. So the first thing I want to do with you all is let’s share my screen and Emily just make sure that, oh, here we go. Okay. Emily, do you see our presentation?

Emily Zuccaro:

I do not. Your screen up. Sharing.

William Thornburgh:

Sharing. Okay. Let me try it one more time. Sorry. Here we go. This is the one.

Emily Zuccaro:

It’s still loading.

William Thornburgh:

Yeah, I see it. I’m getting a screen share. It is paused and it was just working a minute ago, so can we get a little assistance with that?

Emily Zuccaro:

I’m seeing everybody in the chat introducing themselves from all over.

William Thornburgh:

Yeah, while I’m trying to figure out why Google Chrome is not opening up here, I would just like to say, yeah, my name is Bill Thornberg and I’m an assistant professor here. My field is science education and I’ve had an interest in AI over the last couple of years. I’ve worked with Emily quite a bit on various presentations and activities in our department, and I use AI frequently with my, yeah, Emily, go ahead and see if you can. I use AI in the classroom on various assignments, and I have my students. I really think it’s important that we teach our students and I work with pre-service teachers from elementary through secondary, helping them to become more AI literate, understanding various tools that are out there as well as how they can use those tools better and make great prompts and come up with better outputs.

Emily Zuccaro:

And I’m Emily Zaccaro and I’ve been at EKU for five years now, and I teach a lot of literacy and language classes in our undergraduate and graduate programs. So I teach children’s literature. I teach a lot of classes in our graduate literacy specialist program. I teach a lot of classes in our English As second language endorsement program, and recently I have been exploring a lot of artificial intelligence in all of those instructional settings. So it’s been really cool to try on, and I say try on because I’m still very much in the exploratory observational stage of it all and how it’s working and how we’re learning from it. So I’ve been using it in my undergraduate children’s lit class. I’ve been trying to design opportunities for multilingual classrooms and artificial intelligence and how that might support a classroom teacher in making content more accessible for their classroom students. And so yeah, lots of different things in terms of, and asking our pre-service teachers to try it as they will enter classrooms that classroom teachers are already using artificial intelligence for all kinds of things. So you ready to start?

William Thornburgh:

Yeah, let’s do it. And always the worst case scenario is when you’re presenting on something with technology and technology doesn’t work. It’s one of my favorite things. So just an overview as I know that many of you have likely dabbled with some AI yourselves. What Emily and I have found with various presentations is that students are using it to some degree, mostly chat GPT, and there are very few professors who are using it regularly. So it’s still underutilized in the university setting. And I think that for good reason, there’s a lot of fear associated with it and obviously worried about student cheating and academic integrity as well as I think privacy concerns at the university level. But I’m here to say that it should not be so scary that it’s got its time and place and education to help us to be better teachers as well as helping our students to learn and be the best student that they can be.

So the way I look at it, just its overview, its role in education is that it can be a fantastic teacher’s assistant. When we are struggling to come up with creative ways to teach a certain topic or we’re looking for engaging activities, it’s easy. We get stumped. We could be focusing on the wrong things. So I think that the AI can really help us to expand our thinking and to come up with interesting ideas. It’s great for brainstorming and idea generation. I use it and I introduce my students to its ability to create unit plans and lesson plans as well as homework and assessments. Of course, we have to teach our students that foundational conceptual knowledge. So they have to always be able to critique the outputs, which we’ll talk about later. It’s very good at helping teachers to dev design student-centered activities. That’s something that Emily and I are very passionate about, that we are not just lecturing to students that our pre-service teachers shouldn’t be doing didactic direct instruction. They should be finding ways to get the students engaged and really have them at the center of learning. Emily’s going to talk to us a little bit later about some of the differentiation that AI can help us with, and then it can really be great for helping teachers to come up with questions and scaffolding questions to really improve learning and make that a better process for students.

So as I mentioned, the capabilities of ai, and if you have dabbled with it, you’re well aware that it can do so many great things from the everyday teacher planning to thinking about choice boards and specifically in science five E lesson plans. But AI can also help us with translating materials for students differentiation. It can help us with recommendation letter writing and just so many amazing things. But one of the things that’s so important is that we think about the inputs. What are we asking the prompting? What are we asking the various AI tools to do for us? I always tell my students that a cruddy prompt will result in a cruddy output. I typically use different words, but we really want to then make sure that we’re learning, that we’re teaching ourselves as well as teaching our students how to write better prompts. And then once an output is there that we always have to revise it, we have to evaluate it, be critical of it. We need to edit it so that the AI is producing something that’s more in line with what we’re asking it to do. I often get my students saying things like, well, AI doesn’t know my students. I do. It doesn’t personalize. So I tell them, of course that’s true. The AI cannot know our students, so we need to make sure that we are feeding it more so it can give us better outputs. And then obviously it’s really great for academically and linguistic diverse classrooms, which again, Emily will talk about more.

Emily Zuccaro:

Yeah, so we’re going to be spend some time talking about demonstrating artificial intelligence. We have two platforms, magic School and dfi that we’ll be talking about today and thinking about how we can use it for improved efficiency as an instructional tool, and then how we can really improve and enhance the student experiences in the classroom and how we might be able to use AI in helping us lesson plan, differentiate instruction, looking at assessments, even giving feedback on those assessments. And of course, really debating the issues of bias, misinformation, and privacy concerns as we really need to consider those.

Especially about, I was thinking about my, I have a 16-year-old son and I asked him about ai. He’s like, yeah, it’s like Google. And I was like, Ooh, we got a lot to learn about. And lots of young folks are growing up and they might have misconceptions about things that could come back and be a problem later with misinformation, privacy, and bias. So it’s good to really get in the weeds with our students, our pre-service teachers and the people who are graduating, entering the profession and thinking about how they’re conceptualizing AI and how they can use it in safe ways.

So as Bill has talked about, AI can really help simplify teaching. I know I have been in the classroom for 16 or 17 years, so I have been teaching and teaching students and thinking about how artificial intelligence can really help us create, innovate, redesign, student-centered classrooms by creating lessons, activities, accommodations, assessments, and ways that really make students the center of instruction. As I mentioned, I teach a children’s literature class, and in the fall, whenever I teach it, I usually do a Latinx Hispanic heritage activity of some kind. And this past fall, I felt as if my materials and activities had gotten a little stale. I felt like I was, I don’t know, it had been effective, but it wasn’t really doing what I wanted it to. So I asked Chachi PT to help me conceptualize a better idea of how to teach my pre-service teachers in a children’s lit classroom, how to engage with Latinx Hispanic heritage texts and activities and that kind of thing.

And it gave me some really fresh, creative, innovative ways of thinking about the activity. And I implemented it later that week, and it was phenomenal. I also made sure I double checked. It gave me a list of texts, so I made sure I double checked that the texts were accurate, authentic, actually texts because sometimes it hallucinates. But it was really helpful in thinking about that. And then usually I try to do black History month in the springtime, and it helps me make a really great choice board for Black History Month texts that don’t just talk about oppression and civil rights, talking about black joy, black achievement, black love, and so all of these things. And so it was really great in helping me conceptualize really meaningful and innovative ways. And then as a result, sorry, working with Pro as a result of redesigning and innovating these assignments, students are more likely to be engaged and motivated and participate in the lesson because it’s a little bit more student-centered and more meaningful for them. So students really took up the activities in my children’s lit class, for example, and if we make assignments more student-centered, it’s just a natural progression to student engagement and participation in motivation in our classrooms.

And then this really comes from in terms of supporting differentiated instruction, this really comes from the work with multilingual classrooms and teachers and their students and thinking about how there are a lot of great tools out there that are able to generate, customize, provide instructional resources that really differentiate instruction for your students and thinking about the needs or the learning profiles of all your students and what they might need. So adding visuals, taking something that is an audio delivery and making it more written communication, adding visuals to that written communication and that sort of thing. So AI can really help educators design and implement differentiated instruction and also make it more efficient because they’re helping you think about all the time it takes for us to design the accommodations to make content more accessible. AI can be, again, like Bill mentioned, an instructional assistant to help you make those differentiated curricular or instructional materials.

We also mentioned using AI to provide feedback. So we can use AI to make assessments, but also I have experimented with using AI to grade assessments. So obviously de-identifying the student material, and you have to find a student exemplar to train the AI platform on to make sure you’re looking for the look for of a really solid student exemplar. And then once the feedback is produced, going back to the original student document and making sure the feedback actually and the rubric, going back to that and making sure it’s actually giving you feedback that’s able to be used. And there are some challenges to do that. For example, it’s a lot of time at the beginning to you, so you have to really scour through all of the assessments, find the right one that’s exemplar, train the AI to identify what’s the look for is for that student exemplar, and then go back and forth between the AI feedback and the student work to make sure that everything is aligning.

William Thornburgh:

One thing, Emily, let me add in there, please. I have heard the concern that the feedback could be too generic, and so it is important that I think that teachers don’t just solely rely and living in this AI world where the AI is always giving the feedback. We still need to be reading student work. We still need to be monitoring their progress. We still need to personalize and stay connected with our students and realizing that AI can’t do that for us.

Emily Zuccaro:

And in that example, I would have a student example and the rubric. So the rubric already has the outlined language and the things to look for in providing feedback, but you’re right, going back and making it more personalized, really critical for student success. So what we’re going to do now is we are going to walk you through two AI tools that we really like to use a lot. So Bill is going to be explaining and exploring Magic School with you, and I’ll be using diffit, and then these are really great instructional AI tools to help you with your lesson design, diverse learning needs and thinking about how you can become more efficient with all of your work tasks.

William Thornburgh:

Okay. Yeah. So Emily, go ahead and stop share and let’s hope that I can open up Magic School. How’s it look?

Emily Zuccaro:

We’re all set, bill. We can see it. Okay, great. See your screen? Yep.

William Thornburgh:

Okay. So for those of you who may not know what Magic School AI is, you’re looking at it, one minor difference you can see in the top left is I have Magic School plus, but I will tell you I only have the plus version because it was given to me for free. The free version is in fact the free version of any AI tool is what I use. I don’t feel the need to pay. I find the tools that work for me, so don’t let that scare you. The free version looks very similar to this. And what I’m going to do is just I’m going to start with a lesson plan. And so my field is science education, and I did used to teach ninth grade biology, so I’ll just plug this in on the spot. Let’s say that we’re going to learn about cells, organelles, and cell function. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, the more information that you give the ai, the better it’s going to be able to help you. So because I’m giving it very broad, very little to go off of, we do have to take that in mind. If I have a specific objective or standard, I can add that in there as well. Additional criteria, I think I’m going to ask it to provide some assessment ideas to ask students, and then also provide an interactive activity.

And I am going to say NGSS. Okay. Of course, depending on the discipline that you teach, if you have a certain set of standards that you work with, you can plug those in. As you see here, you can also upload files if you have those available. Okay, so real quick, we’ll hit generate and you’ll see Magic School immediately is doing its magic. I have used this unit planning and assessment lesson planning with my science methods students, and one of the ways that I’ve used is I’ve said, okay, you create a lesson first and then ask the AI to create a lesson and then really dig in and compare and contrast the two. And so obviously students really like that. It does this so fast. It takes students quite a bit of time pre-service teachers to come up with a fully detailed lesson plan. So allowing the AI to do it so quickly, they really appreciate, but they oftentimes point out some of the downfalls to it that maybe it’s a little too broad.

Maybe the learning objective is written at a level that’s too high or too low compared to the students that they work with. But as we just scroll through a little bit, you can see a nice objective to begin with identifying the organelles in the cell and explaining functions. I would talk to my students about learning objectives, giving them reminders that it’s preferred to have only one action verb per objective. So I would have them take this and separate it and make it into two more concise objectives. I would have them look at the assessment and it’s completing a worksheet, which I don’t love worksheets, but labeling diagrams, I think that’s great. Describing the various organelles. That’s a great thing that students need to be able to do. I do like the idea of a group presentation, and so it looks like they are choosing a specific organelle.

It’s not super clear in here, but it gives me something that I can work from. So as an experienced biology teacher, I can immediately see some areas that I don’t like, even just in the first two, but as a very novice pre-service teacher, they’re not going to know where to start. So this is really helpful, I think to just point them in the right direction. Looking at key points, you can see there are some of the important things which are true based on the input that I gave the ai. And then we get into the, okay, here’s the meat of the lesson that I have an opening. The engagement looks like it’s a short video or animation. Now it’s not telling me where to go to get that. So I could maybe ask it a follow up to provide me with some ideas on videos.

It does have the ability that I can, and Emily will show you this with DFI as well, where you can pull YouTube videos and you can import the links and it will create quizzes and questioning and some things you can do with students, which is really great. It gives me a beginning question about what would happen, but you can see it gives a very nice general overview, but it doesn’t do all the work for me. So it asked me to present a PowerPoint including visuals and functions, which I think is important for students to know that visuals are really good, especially in science education, that there are models and other diagrams with how organo fit in. So it’s a really nice start because I didn’t give it a lot of information. It provided just a little bit of information back. If I would’ve been more thorough, it would’ve been a more extensive activity lesson plan for me.

But then you can see there, just by adding the NGSS, it went in and it pulled out a couple of the high school standards, which looks good to me, life science one and life science two. So I like it. That is lesson planning in a nutshell. But again, really important that we dig in that we are critical of the output. Another one that I’d like to show you is the worksheet generator. And I think just for time sake, I’ll probably end it with this, Emily, since we did cells and organelles, that will be what I’m going to ask it to generate at that ninth grade level.

And within seconds, here it is. Now, one of the things right that we need to consider is a worksheet, meaning homework that we want them to complete, or worksheet meaning we want to ask them questions. So what it has produced for me is more of a question or some kind of review. I think that this is fine because we could take this, we could break it up, we could use certain parts of it and then bring in our own, if we wanted them to do a worksheet over the word bank, these are very important organelles within a cell. But I also could then bring in images of cells and have them labeling or coloring or doing matching or written definitions of organelles. So I don’t have to use this as a traditional assessment, but it’s a really good way to say, well, look, these are good questions.

These are things that students need to know. And then I could either stay in magic school or I could pop over to chat GPT and ask it to give me further ideas on using this material to create student homework. And so I imagine most of you out there are teachers or interested in assessment in some way. And so you can see not only do we have selected response questions, but we scroll down and we get more constructed response. And then of course, the great thing is it always provides us with an answer key, but linking back to something that Emily mentioned a moment ago, it would be really important, and I would encourage my students to check the answer key for accuracy before they start to grade student work. So there’s just a couple of tools, but currently Magic School does have over 80 different tools for teacher use. It’s very versatile, it’s very user-friendly, and I would encourage you to dig in and learn a little bit more. I

Emily Zuccaro:

Great. Thanks, bill. So I am going to share with you, dfi, lemme move all my tabs here. Okay, so diffit is a differentiated platform and it’s phenomenal. And if you haven’t heard of difference, I encourage you to bookmark it, set it up, look into it later kind of thing, because especially with, again, going back to the use of it with my supporting ESL teachers, they’re multilingual students. So you can basically, and it’s funny, it says literally anything right here. So you can type in a topic, theme or question, and it aligns to some standards and you can customize it to a reading level, a language, and a type of reading. So I’m going to show you two different ways. So basically I’m going to choose glaciers. I’ve done this before, glaciers, and I’m going to go to science, and they have standards listed here. I’m going to go to that. I’m just going to choose and bill, correct me if I’m not, I’m not a science educator, but I’m going to pick one right here that I think is relevant to,

William Thornburgh:

Doesn’t work.

Emily Zuccaro:

So let’s say I’m just thinking out loud. Let’s say I have in my class a Spanish speaking student who can also read in Spanish. So they also have literacy in Spanish. They can listen to Spanish, they can actually read in Spanish as well. So I would generate a third grade Spanish collection of materials on glaciers with the standard in mind. So giving it a second, and as you’re generating DFI will give you tips on how to use DFI and how to do different things with dfi. So right now it’s giving you tips as well. And so you’ll see that it gives you images with the standard here, and then you’ll see an adapted reading passage in Spanish. You can also customize it. So for example, I might say it’s a little too long, I just want to use it in one to two paragraphs, so it’ll have the original one and the new text next to it and I’ll accept it. And there’s the new A method reading passage. It also has summaries, it has key vocabulary words. And what we know about teaching ESL is that a lot of times our students with academic support, academic vocabulary is that they need support with visuals or that sort of thing. So you can add images in dfi.

And so you can just add from Google, I’m going to choose this really pretty picture of glaciers and that sort of thing. So you can add images to support this third grade Spanish speaking and reading student and adding some images so they can make sense of it there. They have multiple choice questions, short answer questions, open-ended prompts. And then on the right you can see, you can actually have things provided for you that you can save for later. So let’s say I want to do the Frayer model for vocabulary. I just want to export it a second. It’ll give you choices for how to export. I’m going to do Google Slides. That’s usually my favorite.

It’ll give you all kinds of instructional support here. So it has the Frayer model template here with the Spanish word and Spanish definition and so on and so forth. So you can adapt and adopt this with different languages. So if you want to do it in Spanish and in English, you can provide the same instructional materials to your student. The other thing I want to show you is, let’s say I want to do glaciers, but I have a really great video that I like to use about glaciers. So this is all about glaciers for kids. So I’m just going to type in into the YouTube link right here.

Let’s see here. Let’s pretend I have, I’m in fifth grade and see they have all these different languages, which is amazing. And so I’m going to choose, I know for example, where we are, Swahili is a pretty prominent language, so I’m going to generate resources that way. Give you tips about how you can share it to Google Classroom from dfi. This is all free, by the way. I’m not paying for diffit at all. Bill has the fancy magic school account. I’m using the totally free version of all these AI platforms. I only use the free versions. I don’t pay for any AI platform. That’s really important to note, especially with working with pre-service teachers. I never require them to pay for anything that we do in class.

So this is an example of the Swahili. It’s coming from this YouTube link that I had right here, and they get to have all these adapted materials for them. And there’s all kinds of student activities here. So vocabulary, 3, 2, 1, reading summary, bubble map with image, workbook, Google Forms, quiz, all kinds of things. We’re going to discussion questions. So that’s what it’s really great at in terms of thinking about the reading level, the language, the type of text, incorporating the standards, instructional materials. If you have a Newsela or any kind of existing curriculum that you want to use to differentiate, you can feed it to diffit and it’ll provide that kind of stuff for you. So going back to our presentation,

William Thornburgh:

And I can completely vouch for diffit and it’s capabilities it it’s probably my second. So here’s the thing. So many great tools out there, where do you start? And what I would encourage you to do is just start small. Maybe it’s Magic School or dfi after today. I do encourage people to stray away from chat GPT. I think chat is great, but I mean, I do think there are other tools out there, especially for educators that are really important and better. So again, my go-to, I see a little note in the chat. My go-to is Magic school, ai. My second one would be dfi, and my third would be aid. And so really think about how you can get yourself to be more comfortable with ai, which is just play with it, get on and just see what it’s capable of doing. Find the one or two that work best for you, and they seem to be in line with your needs and practice.

And then once you’re feeling more comfortable yourself, then that’s where you need to think about how you can have students use it or how you could alter your assignments to bring in AI use. But here’s a couple of other ones I played with. Ghibli is pretty cool. Goblin tools and Study Fetch, but Perplexity is very similar to Chet, GPT. It’s more directed, I think for academics in building citations. But AI is not going to go away. It’s going to continue to get better. And as teachers, we need to stay on top of it. And again, not only so we stay relevant, we keep our materials up to date and fresh, but so we can help to teach our students how they can use AI more responsibly.

Emily Zuccaro:

I’m a big fan of Claude. Claude is one that I use a lot. And then my students use Canva a lot because it already has, Canva has AI in it. And then even instructional tools like Padlet. Padlet has an AI image generator and that sort of thing. And I think importantly, as Bill and I have demonstrated, we have ones that are favorites and ones that we use for different reasons, but we also show our students like, this is why I use this. This is how I use it for this. So it’s a lot of self exploring, self directing, and then showing our students and then sharing with our students our think alouds. Like, Hmm, I might use it for this reason. This one does not serve my purpose or what I need this assignment to do. So we’re constantly thinking about exploring it ourselves and then showing our students our think aloud process and what it may accomplish, like Bill mentioned with the prompts at the beginning of the session.

So thinking about all the things, I usually talk with my students about how to document ai, use my students, make AI agreements in their class. And then also I do a stoplight system. So red, yellow, green, red is absolutely no ai. Yellow is AI in a limited way. Here are some guidelines and green is like use ai. I don’t really have any guidelines, but document it so I can see how you’re using it. And that’s been really fun this semester to see how students are doing it. And the red flag policy in our student agreement, we have a, if you violate the policy, this is what happens according to our student agreement. So we’re going to quickly go through this. I know there’s some questions and answers in the chat, but we really want to talk about when we’re using it with our students at EKU.

We also have to revisit academic integrity and thinking about how it’s really important to unpack with our students. I mean, we are not naive to think that people are concerned about the use of cheating and stifling creative and critical thinking. So the idea is using a think aloud or working with your students and actually using it alongside them actually can create an environment where they’re not going to use it for cheating. They’re going to use it for more assistance, but not replacing their critical or creative thinking. So we really want to think about how do you foster environments where students can use it to help their thinking but not replace the necessary critical creative thinking that they need in that classroom. We also have, I don’t know, bill, you want to talk about the perpetuate biases data they’re trained on?

William Thornburgh:

Yeah, it’s the last I heard that it’s about 90% of the information that AI is using to create its outputs is coming from basically white sources like North American and European sources. And so there then is inherently a bias in the information that’s given. So we have to be aware of that. We have to be aware of bias, we have to be aware of the hallucinations, we have to be aware of academic integrity issues. And there are just so many things, right? Emily mentioned earlier like de-identifying not using full student names, not using maybe exact locations if you’re writing where they’re talking about your school, pulling out information that could be potentially used. I will tell you that I saw a score. There’s a company that goes around and rates privacy, and Chad, GPT was in the 40%, I think high forties. And Magic School was up in the high eighties, low 90%. So magic school, the free version is still way better than a chat GPT. And in fact, teachers can actually sign their students up to have student accounts in magic school. And when you do that, it makes it even more private because it kind of goes into a different realm where magic school really protects the information and how it’s being used by school groups.

Emily Zuccaro:

I think it’s important too to mention that. I mentioned I only use the free version, what we said previous is the over-reliance on artificial intelligence. I don’t use it for everything, so I often don’t reach the daily language limit that the free version imposes and that sort of thing. So when we think about using it instructional assistance, it’s really because it’s, we doing all the work, we’re just using another, it’s like a think partner, a brainstorming partner, that kind of thing. So thinking about how the free version is still doing so much for you in that respect.

William Thornburgh:

So

Emily Zuccaro:

I don’t know, would want to stop for some questions right now.

William Thornburgh:

Yeah. Well, and I wanted to throw this one up there. I saw somebody through it in the chat, but there are different versions of this, but this is similar to what Emily was talking about, this stoplight system where green is like you’re encouraged to use it, go for it, have fun. But of course having a policy is important. So Emily’s policy is you have to be transparent. What did you use? How did you use it? What were your prompts? What were your revisions? I tend to use this other one. I have to move a bar around here. I tend to use this one, which comes from Leon Furs and his work group. And there’s a few more stages to it and it’s gone through some iterations, but it’s the same idea that it’s going from the level one, which is red all the way up to level five, which is green. And then there’s a variation of it where it adds a sixth level where it’s like AI to infinity. You’re just having students go hog wild and really soak up the AI experience and really beef up the learning possibilities.

Jessica Hurdley:

Okay, awesome. Well, we’ll jump into a quick q and a. There are a couple questions. Emily, I saw that you have answered a couple of the questions in the chat. One person had asked in the q and a is diff it more for K 12?

Emily Zuccaro:

Yes and no. I mean, I think it definitely is for practicing classroom teachers, but I think about our methods and student teachers in all of our educational program at EKU, they’re talking about unit planning, lesson planning, all that stuff. So I think introducing a tool like DFI could show them how it’s another instructional assistant to do the things that they need to prepare for classroom teaching. I just know that when I work with in-service teachers, D, it’s a tool, but a lot of people don’t know about DFI yet, which is we’re all learning about all of this. So I personally think just the more we can talk about these tools and share the better. So I think it’s K through 12, but definitely pre-service teachers benefit from knowing about it.

Jessica Hurdley:

Awesome. Could you tell us about which AI tools you use for what?

Emily Zuccaro:

I tend to ask multiple ais at the same time. So I’ll ask Che. Pt, Claude Perplexity. I tend to go across a couple at one point mostly to see what I really want, kind of like grocery shopping or online shopping. I kind of want to see where I can get the best bang for my book. So I usually will ask them. So with my Latinx Hispanic heritage example, chat two BT gave me the best version. Magic School gives me really great choice board, but sometimes Claude gives me a great choice board that I really need. So I think the best practice is to look at different tools and then ditch that textbook has a 40 AI tools to try. So I think becoming familiar with a broad range of AI tools and then just trying across and seeing which one is the best. And then also Bill’s mentioned the prompts, making sure the prompts that you feed it. Like I am planning for a pre-service children’s lit class. I have to, and they’ll start remembering it later, but it’s important to always be as specific about what you’re looking for or else what they give you is not as great.

Jessica Hurdley:

Absolutely. I have a lot of people that also focus on the input and helping to teach your pre-service teachers how to focus on those inputs and make them as detailed as possible. Can you use diffit for Canadian standards?

William Thornburgh:

I just responded to Paul. Okay. That’s a great question. I

Emily Zuccaro:

Don’t know actually.

William Thornburgh:

I don’t know, but I think because it’s free, give it a quick sign up and see what it can do for you. I’ve never tried, but I just want to jump on and kind of piggyback what Emily was talking about and thinking about what do you use and when do you use it. And if you’re new to the AI game, I listed a couple of resources there, AI Explorer, and there is an AI for that. Our websites that you can go to where you can ask it for specific things. So let’s say you’re wanting to use AI to just help you create new PowerPoint presentations, but you don’t want to put in hours upon hours for each unit. So you can go onto those websites and you can search and find out which AI tools can do that for you. Some of them will be free, some of them will be free, but restricted. Some of them will be paid, but it’s just going to require a little bit of legwork on your end to see which tool is going to be best for you, especially if you’re trying to avoid paying for it.

Jessica Hurdley:

Absolutely. Absolutely. One last question that did come in through our q and a. Have either of you used Brisk?

Emily Zuccaro:

I have not used Brisk, but I’m adding it to my list.

William Thornburgh:

Yeah, I have, but not a lot. I got as far as making sure that it was downloaded and stuff, but it’s more just a personal preference right now of sticking with Magic School that I haven’t played around with it more, but I’ve heard good things about it.

Jessica Hurdley:

Awesome. Well, that concludes our q and a. Thank you, Dr. Thornberg and Dr. Zuccaro for sharing your expertise on AI and education with us today. The concept of leveraging AI as an instructional assistant is particularly compelling as well. I know that all of our attendees have gained valuable knowledge regarding AI that can be implemented immediately to enhance participation, motivation and engagement in their educational endeavors.

Emily Zuccaro:

That wraps, I put our email in the chat, so if you want to reach out to Bill and I, we’re happy to brainstorm more, think partner work, all that kind of stuff.

Jessica Hurdley:

Perfect. That wraps up this session. We’ll take a 15 minute break before the next session. It’ll actually be more like a 12 minute break this time around. If you haven’t already. Be sure to bookmark the sessions that you want to attend. You can see those on my itinerary. It makes it easy to organize your schedule. We’ll also have the expo hall open that you can visit during our breaks. If you visit, you’ll be entered into where when a pair of AirPods. And lastly, make sure your profile is set to feeling social if you’d like to chat with other attendees. See you at the next session. Thanks everybody. Have a good day.

Emily Zuccaro:

Bye.