Public Education Matters

Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.

Scott DiMauro 0:15
This is Public Education Matters brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Welcome back to Public Education Matters. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the Ohio Education Association and the nearly 120,000 k-12 teachers, education support professionals, higher ed faculty members, librarians and so many other public school educators OEA represents across the state every day. Ohio's public school educators are working to be the best educators they possibly can be. They're pursuing professional development opportunities and continually learning new tools as new technologies emerge, and of course, one of the big technologies educators are learning to use these days, right along with their students, is artificial intelligence, or AI. Now, I know there's a narrative around AI about potential problems it can create, but Julia Tilton tells us it also creates a lot of opportunities for educators to solve problems and to really meet students' needs. She led an Ohio's New Educators, or ONE Beyond the Classroom session, giving OEA members a deeper look into the possibilities and the ethical considerations around AI tech and other digital tools in the classroom. Julia Tilton is a former ONE member ambassador who now works as a tech integration specialist at Neonet in Cuyahoga Falls. She joins us for this episode to give us just a few of the basics you music.

Julia Tilton, thank you so much for sitting down with us and sharing your expertise. I know I'm asking for the impossible, an hour and a half long session that you're doing, distilled down into a 10 to 15 minute long conversation. What are the big things, though, that you wish educators knew when it came to AI and digital tools?

Julia Tilton 2:28
Right, well, first off, thanks for having me. And the biggest thing I wish educators knew is the benefit that AI has in the classroom. If I knew about these resources when I was in the classroom, my time in the classroom would have been completely different. So I now have this passion to get this information out to these educators, especially these new educators coming out of college, to make their first and second years so much easier. Because we all know those first and second, third and fourth years are so challenging, and these AI tools make things just a lot easier. Kind of going along with that, when we run these trainings with teachers, we - when I say we I have a partner. His name's Dan. He's the other tech integration specialist I work with who's just incredible - But when we run trainings, we like to say that AI can be a student's personal tutor, and it can be a teacher's assistant. So in the sense of that, it can be a teacher's assistant, it can create lesson plans for you. It can create DOK questions for you. It can create parent emails for you. And that is just skimming the top, and later on, I can go into some websites that would be great resources too. And then the student's personal tutor wise, it would be wonderful if every student could have a one on one tutor, but realistically and monetarily, that is just not possible. But there's these websites out there where, number one, it follows COPPA rules, meaning that it's not going to take the students data, but they also can basically have a one on one conversation with a chat bot, where it is a tutor with them. It keeps them on track, even if it tries to, the student tries to get it off track by saying, you know, what's your favorite Fortnite character? You know, that chat bot, that tutor gets them back on track, saying, you know, let's get back to the topic on hand, right? So AI, when you break it down into two categories, students' personal tutor, teachers'assistant. Those are the two biggest things we kind of try to say that AI can do an education as of right now.

Katie Olmsted 5:12
Importantly, you're not saying replace the teacher. Assistant is, is the key word there. And I have to say I'm a late adopter to almost all technologies. I am what I am, and I've been afraid of of using AI tools, frankly, because I'm like, well, it's it can't be accurate anyway. I understand it's supposed to be a jumping off point. Is that how it should be used in the classroom as well?

Julia Tilton 5:33
Exactly, so I'm happy you brought that up. We always talk about this thing called the 80/20 rule. So we say that AI can do 80% of the work for you, okay? So they do the first 80% that last 20% is what the teacher has to do. They do the bias checking. They put those last 20% of the personalization on it. AI doesn't do the full 100%. That's not what it's meant to do. The teacher still has to do some work, but like you said, it's the jumping off point. It's the starting point for you. You still the teacher has to do some work. But it does work for you; but it does 80%, the teacher does 20%.

Katie Olmsted 6:20
What are some of the big tools that educators really should know about that they should be using to make their lives easier?

Julia Tilton 6:28
The website that I would suggest teachers head to if they've never used AI before as a website called MagicSchoolAI and I'm actually part of their pioneer program. So they have everything on this website, from helping you create, actually, AI resistant assignments. So I know that's something right now that a lot of ELA teachers - and to be honest, I get it, ELA teachers are all worried about, you know, kids are going to throw this prompt into chatGPT, they're going to copy and paste it and, you know, they're going to turn in that essay - And I get it right. And to be honest, we don't have, you know, an answer to that, a foolproof answer, besides, we got to shift our mindset to, we can't write essays anymore. We need to change some stuff, right? We need to look at this as think of it when the calculators came into math class. Right? now, instead of it being calculators, now we have now we have AI. How are we going to change our learning and our teaching to now include AI. But back to MagicSchool, like I said, DOK questions, text levelers. I mean, there's over 50 different tools on here that you can mess around with. One of my favorite ones that I wish I had was they have a standards unpacking tool. When I was teaching, there was actually a job at the school I worked at. The person would meet with you and you would take a standard, and he would sit with you and break down that standard to you know, the simplest form. Well, MagicSchool has that tool now. It does it for you. So MagicSchoolAI is the definite starting point that I would suggest if you've never done anything with AI. Magic School AI is definitely the go to another resource if you are a Google school, if you do Chrome, there's an extension called Brisk that, it shows up in Chrome for you, and essentially, it can take whatever webpage you're on. It can create a quiz just by looking at your webpage. It can create a quiz from YouTube videos. It can create PowerPoints from you just having a webpage pulled up. An incredible resource again. So I would say, at least from my point of view, MagicSchool and Brisk are my two favorites, just for the amount of resources that it has already inside of them.

Katie Olmsted 9:19
Are there red flags or specific challenges that anybody who's using any digital tools or AI really needs to be keeping an eye out for? You mentioned before there was that site with the tutor doesn't collect student data. That's got to be one of the important thresholds here. Are there anything else like that we need to consider?

Julia Tilton 9:42
Just like you said, with those privacy laws, make sure that they are following those COPPA rules, especially if you do teach kids that are under 13, make sure it's not collecting those the student information. Um, next would be check for those biases. You know, the way AI works is that it scans the internet for information, and we know that the internet doesn't always have correct information on it. So that's where that extra 20% comes in, right? The 80% AI does, teacher does the extra 20%. So in that 20% check for that bias. And then I would also say, just from the teacher's point of view, teachers - and when I was in the classroom, too, I heard a lot about AI writing checkers and how if you thought a student was using AI to write an assignment to go to one of these AI writing checker websites, put in the assignment and it would tell you if it was written by AI. Um, it's come to be known that they are actually not that reliable. There's been articles that have come out, came out that actually the one that was most reliable was 80%. So 80% seems high, but if we flip it around, that means that it's wrong one in five times, so -

Katie Olmsted 11:20
And if you get a false positive and accuse a child or a student, that is really not okay.

Julia Tilton 11:27
Exactly, and that's exactly where I was going, is you can spend this entire school year creating this relationship with your that child in your class, and then you accuse them of cheating, and it turns out not to be cheating, and you broke that relationship, right? So I wouldn't rely either on those writing checkers 100%. You can use it to help you build, you know, a case if you think there is cheating, but don't use that as the end all be all, if you think there is cheating.

Katie Olmsted 11:59
But I think that actually brings us back to something you mentioned earlier, that maybe essay writing isn't the way we do things anymore. We have to change with the times and recognize that, you know, if it's a question of, are you cheating or are you not cheating, we also have to think about, is this the most effective tool, the most effective way for us to test our students knowledge, given what our world is and what it's going to be in the future?

Julia Tilton 12:24
Yes, so there is actually a really interesting article that was written by Dave, I think it's Cormier, if I'm pronouncing it right - trying to give credit to him - where he wrote essentially, why are we writing essays? Right? We're teaching kids in middle school to learn to write essays in high school, we're teaching kids in high school to learn to write essays in college. We're teaching kids in college to write essays in master's degrees. We're teaching kids in their master's degrees to write essays in PhDs. And how many people get PhDs? And then from there, how many people are actually writing essays in their real lives, in their in their careers? So he goes on to say, you know, we're putting all of this effort into writing, learning how to write essays when in real life, in your careers, how many people are actually writing 10 page essays. So in what you were saying, you're right. Do we need to teach them how to write 10 page essays? Maybe, maybe not. But there are so many other things that you can do to assess them. So for example, MagicSchool, we were doing a presentation, and we were using the AI resistant assignments. And we were doing the example of Lord of the Flies, and we put in my assignment was going to be writing an essay about Lord of the Flies; help me make an AI resistant assignment. Well, it came up with having them writing a survival guide for the book, you know. So they're not writing an essay about it, but when they're writing a survival guide, they're still showing that they learned about the book, right? So we're just shifting how we're assessing our students. So AI is just making us think a little bit more. But that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing at all. I think it's gonna make our classrooms more fun, to be honest. A lot of these digital tools and AI, it's going to make things more fun. It's going to make things more interesting. It's going to make things more real life. Kind of back to essays, I'm not going to write a 10 page essay in my career right now. As an Ed Tech specialist, I'm not sitting down writing a 10 page essay, but, you know, I am going to write, you know, short paragraphs here and there, right? So that is something I need to know, and that could be an assignment. That can happen in a high school class.

Katie Olmsted 15:17
When you were in the classroom, how would tools like what you've discussed have made a difference for you?

Julia Tilton 15:24
Oh, I would have loved it. I would have loved it. I'm actually working on, um, presentation right now that talks about bringing, safely bringing social media into the classroom and bringing in kind of a Netflix point of view, where, instead of writing a book report, they do a Netflix review. And they have to bring in with the this assignment that I created, for the chapters, the students would use an AI image generator to create what the chapter would look like, and then they also would create a video of them speaking, and then they would also write a paragraph. So you're getting all of these elements that hit these standards that these English teachers need, but it's making it interactive, still, right? It's making it fun. So I would have been so fun for me in class. It would have been engaging and and I think a lot of times this would bring kids, it would make kids want to come to school more, right? I think it would been a lot more engaging. And a lot of schools now are implementing PBIS. And you know, within tier two of PBIS, we're trying to hit those students - A lot of them were struggling to get to school, right? And if we can have these engaging lessons and interactive lessons that want, that make them want to come to school, right? That is what we want, right? We want these kids to be here, and when they are here, they're happy and they're learning, and that's what school is about, and that's when we can create the relationships with the kids, and that's what teaching is, and that's where the passion comes from, and that's why people become teachers.

Katie Olmsted 17:36
And teachers learn every single day, too. So having these opportunities to learn from people like you, learn about the new tools, that's huge. Thank you so much, Julia.

Julia Tilton 17:48
You're welcome.

Katie Olmsted 17:54
Our thanks to Julia and to the ONE Member Ambassador group for helping to connect us with Julia for this episode. Conversations about AI were definitely one of the most popular topics that OEA members requested in the podcast survey we did over the summer. I'd love to hear more from you now about what else you'd like to hear about on this podcast. Send me an email at educationmatters@ohea.org. And make sure you tune in next week as we continue our conversations about all of the big topics shaping the education landscape In our state, because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai