As a Principal, I often use AI to proofread or draft letters that I am sending out to staff or families. It’s something that I’ve done sporadically in the past and would often think of doing after I had drafted the letter. This fall I drafted the letter to our families about the Anxious Generation book and after completing it, realized I could have saved myself quite a bit of time. Luckily though, I was able to ChatGPT a letter and make a better version between the two copies. 

As a History teacher I have been using zerogpt.com to combat the use of AI in my classroom. It is far too easy for my students to cheat using AI so I am constantly having to copy and paste their work into the website to see what percentage comes back as AI. For every assignment with a class of 25 students, 2-3 students are caught with a 90% AI generated assignment. We’ve attempted to combat it by having students handwrite their assignments, but that then makes it more difficult to check and they are simply rewriting the info from the screen. Additionally, I’ve used AI to learn about historical events, organize information, create slides, develop assessments, and enrich my lessons. 

As a volleyball coach I’ve been able to plan practices and analyze our statistics using AI. It’s provided me additional ideas for practice plans when I hit the mid-season slump and have run out of ideas. Its analysis of our data has been helpful to determine where to place athletes on the court and identify areas of success or challenge. 

Outside of cheating and plagiarism, I see a massive number of benefits of AI in the educator sector. The instantaneous ability to provide feedback to both multiple choice, but also written prompts is impressive. The opportunity to become so much more efficient is something every teacher and administrator needs to strive to become highly functioning in. AI can develop schedules, create assessments, correct those assessments, provide feedback, and engage students. The future of AI is exciting, even if there are a few unknowns, because teachers can’t be replaced, but they can be inspired and provide ample opportunities to improve and become more efficient. AI is the first thing introduced during my 12 years as a teacher that has the potential to increase learning outcomes. 

Additionally, the area which excites me the most are the virtual tutor programs that exist. I see students and my own children utilizing these as they get older for additional support and extra practice. The instant feedback will go a long way with our new generation of youth who thrive on instant gratification. 

Lastly, I see the future of AI as a tool which is embedded in our everyday lives. I hope to see AI improve email efficiency and see us transition away from email to a more chat based system. Like all technologies, I believe the changes over the next decade will be a rapid acceleration before  we have moved on to the next technology or made most of the advances we can make. We’ve seen this with the iPhone where each new version does not have any significant innovative upgrades over the previous version. During the first few versions the upgrades were mind bending for users and were impressive considering a couple years prior we were using T9 or ABC texting and taking photos on a flip phone that were so grainy you couldn’t make out who was in the photo. 

I hope to see AI improve education and reverse our current trend of making things easier for students. I find I’m constantly needing to reduce the amount or quality of work I expect from previous students. With AI being used effectively, I see schools prioritizing hands-on learning in robotics, play hall, and makerspace courses. AI makes obtaining and accessing information easier than ever. Now, it’s about developing creativity and problem solving skills using our hands and AI. Let’s drive education forward with the use of AI.

I’ve included below an IT Tool handouts from Prairie South School Division. It provided a great overview of the most impactful and relevant AI programs for education.

AI Tool Handouts (3)

Thanks for a great semester! My Summary of Learning is a culmination of new learnings, mixed with reflections on past, current, and future practices. The learning was made possible by excellent presentations from my classmates!

(https://youtu.be/7Yg94Wcv9vI)

STEM and Makerspace is an integral part of the future of education. When I think about the power of AI and its ability to write and produce information in a split second that would otherwise take a human several minutes or hours to complete, these hands-on tasks seem far more important than they previously did in education. Last year we purchased around 25 Robotics kits for our Grade 9/10s at Rouleau School. Students took their first Robotics course with an eager teacher and while not all 25 students enjoyed it, all 25 did learn a completely new skill set, develop an appreciation for coding and the process of sequencing directions to make something happen. All students appreciated trying something new and were forced to learn patience and perseverance as they problem solved technical issues and new learnings. Many students are planning to take the next level of the course through our online options at the Sask Distance Learning Centre (Sask DLC) and will use these skills moving forward as they explore computer science programs. Even if many of the 9/10 students choose to never use these coding skills again, they will at least have an understanding of those processes and relate to their future children who will be growing up in a world where learning coding is likely to be the norm. 

The value of these programs is to provide an opportunity for children to complete hands-on tasks. Our students were building robots and programming them to complete a series of functions. Whether having them light up in a certain sequence or battle each other for robot supremacy, their problem solving muscles were flexed and they thought in different ways than they need to in other subject areas. The teacher was able to complete a couple cross curricular projects like having the robots draw pictures for art or understand light in science.

Coding and Makerspace courses do not need to be taught exclusively by techies, however, if the person is not a techie, they should be patient and prepared to constantly be working through technical errors in a positive light. We saw students become frustrated time and time again thankfully our techie teacher was both knowledgeable and patient helping students remain positive. The skills can be learned by anyone, but like most subjects, a combination of competence and passion leads to a lot of success. I see it a lot in sports. Many teachers or staff members feel obligated to coach a team to do their part. Those who are not in it, often lose the interest of the students because they can see there is no excitement or passion for those sports. Those coaches who are eager and excited to be there, often captivate the students’ interest more and many teams perform better than on the teachers with the disinterested, skilled coach. Excitement and passion is integral to keeping the interest of our “phone-based childhood” students.

Assistive technology can benefit all students. Most of the adaptations or accommodations we provide students not only benefits those it is in place for, but also the class as a whole. This is true for assistive technology as well. My experiences with assistive technology is fairly limited, but my experiences with adapting instruction and providing accommodations is more well versed. I’ve frequently used bluetooth transmitter/FM type systems to communicate with students who wear hearing aids. Combined with the hearing aids were providing accommodations like printed notes, pre-filled in notes, and verbal and written instructions on exams. My use of Google Classroom has been beneficial for all students as it makes it easier for students with ADHD (and pretty much all pre-teens/teenagers) to stay organized. When it comes time to complete a larger project or prepare for a test, students can spend more time studying and less time searching for their work. For students with chronic absenteeism, which currently mostly stems from mental health issues, it is much easier for students to stay engaged and keep up independently with Google Classroom. 

Further, our school continues to access Google Read and Write which allows students to manipulate text in a variety of ways based on learning style. Speech to text, text to speech, and picture dictionaries are the most common forms of tools used on that program. As a school with a device per student from K-12, it has allowed us to utilize iPads and Chromebooks at regularly scheduled times. Since every student has a device it has allowed teachers to get into a routine of using a program like Google Read and Write. The benefit has been that students are comfortable using it and it hasn’t been a simple novelty used once. The text to speech is beneficial when you want students to work on something in pairs and to save some time can listen to the text and follow along. Provides more time to work with the knowledge than spending the entire time just trying to read the passage. The same is true for speech to text. In social or science it can be incredibly frustrating for a student to get their thoughts down on a sheet or paper or document when writing or typing. With the ability to do speech to text, students can show what they are learning much faster. I believe our understanding of this technology with improve as we become more comfortable with AI.

I was happy Nysa showed off Google Forms as that is one software that is free and integrated with the rest of the platform that many schools are using. As a Google Based school utilizing Google Classroom and other Google products, the use of Forms is one which works nicely, doesn’t require expensive subscriptions, allows the screen to be locked and collects students information safely. In a world where cyber attacks are all too common, the use of some of the third party apps and programs is a concern for myself and the IT department. 

The online platforms that were shown during the presentation and discussed in the articles did provide a lot of great advantages to using the software. The ability to track results over the long term, protect your exams from being copied, mix up the order in which students see questions to prevent cheating, and grade many questions automatically are all beneficial. For most of these technologies the paid version offers a lot more options which could really expand and provide more options like keyword tracking and more advanced correcting in mathematics. 

One area I’ve struggled with lately is students using AI programs like Chat GPT to complete assignments. Unfortunately, the AI detectors do not seem reliable enough for a teacher to accurately make a decision if a student’s writing was cheating or not. This is where professional opinion still trumps some of the technology that exists. A program like Go Guardian allows teachers to monitor students’ chromebooks and be able to see students working on their assignment. Google Docs also allows a teacher to see the history of a student’s progress to see if large amounts were copy and pasted. Of course, a student could have two tabs open and type out the Chat GPT work as well. Each program that is introduced creates some challenges and provides some opportunities. Each should be used for its opportunities for monitors for the challenges. Setting clear expectations with students, monitoring their progress, and having conversations with them about their findings and finished work help to eliminate the challenges. 

Anxious Generation Parent Letter

The Anxious Generation Letter

As a staff, SCC, and community Rouleau has been reading the Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Along with the Social Dilemma, the book captures the drastic change that has occurred since 2010 when pre-teen and teenagers made a switch from flip phones to iPhone 4s and other smart phones with front facing cameras. Combined with a shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, every marker of self harm, anxiety, mental health diagnoses, and suicide rates have increased faster than at any other point in history. It should be labelled as one of the largest experiments ever conducted on our youth and frankly is the largest failure and let down of our youth in history. The evidence is real and all points towards the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0 and widespread use of social media. I believe, along with a lack of sleep and constant need to be connected and feeling judged, the combination of all those factors has made it difficult for our youth to cope. The book also argues that parents have reduced the amount of responsibility we place on our youth and their ability to cope in the real world is a new struggle. Fewer teens are getting their driver’s licence, fewer teens are able to have an in person conversation, and fewer teens are having part time jobs. Teenagers are staying at home for longer and have a dismal view of their future. 

Haidt suggests four strategies for reversing these effects on the next generation. These include:

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16 years old
3. Phone free schools
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

The author suggests that although Millennials were the first teenagers to have cell phones, the effects of them using flip phones did not have a negative impact on their mental health. He suggests that if parents would like to stay connected with their preteens they should purchase them flip phones instead of smartphones. 

Haidt indicates this needs to be a community push and to work collaboratively as the pressure parents will feel to purchase their teenager a smartphone is real. If the entire peer group has a smartphone and one child doesn’t, that can be socially isolating and also have a negative impact on the child. I would recommend this book to everyone and look forward to hosting community nights and parent nights with the hopes of some collective action.

Distance learning platforms require a number of traits in order to help students stay organized, achieve success in their courses, and ultimately learn. My familiarity with distance learning technology include the UR Course platform, Sask Distance Learning Centre (Sask DLC) Moodles, and Google Classroom. Each of these has aspects which I find positive and negative. The characteristics which I find students thrive from the most is a layout in which the information is readily available, easily to find, and tracks their progress. For example, on the Sask DLC platform, students can easily see what they have completed, what grade they earned on each task, and what their upcoming tasks are. The information is organized chronologically and broken down into sub unit sections. This is important as most high school students are visual learners. 

Katia’s strategy of keeping URCourses clean and having all information located in external Google Docs links is beneficial as Google Docs can be easily saved/copied from year to year and keep the URCourses platform easy to navigate. 

For all students, the area I see lacking with all distance learning platforms is a convenient (perhaps scheduled) way of meeting with the teacher or professor. The term “anxious generation” as described by Jonathan Haidt refers to the growing inability for our teenagers, especially since 2010, to cope and function in the real world. With a generation of students who struggled to communicate in the real world, I constantly see high school students struggle to succeed in their online classes due to an unwillingness to contact the teacher for assistance. For an online teacher, the out of sight out of mind attitude hampers our students’ ability to learn and have success. Students follow a trend of struggling on one unit or lesson so they move onto the next one and ultimately fall behind. If online platforms had built in software to connect the student to the teacher in an instant, students may be more apt to contact the teacher. Sask DLC also needs to be more proactive in reaching out to students on at least a weekly basis to help students’ achieve success. This is partly a fault of the online platform and partly the fault of humans taking the courses. 

As a user of Google Classroom, I appreciate how easily it integrates with the rest of the Google software, including Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides. I’m able to correct and add comments to students’ work. I’m able to assign certain tasks to certain students and collect information from students using Google Forms. The use of Google Classroom has transformed the way I organize my classes and deliver my content. It’s created a bit of a double edged sword in the sense that students can stay caught up when they are absent, but also feel less of a need to attend in person classes. Creating a balance of maintaining a desire for in person learning while providing some content online seems to be a new challenge.

During the Monday night presentation, Ayushi, Gage, and Mohammad asked a thought provoking question regarding the use of productivity suites. They asked whether we felt the use of these software programs enhanced creativity or suppressed it. It took me a long time to answer and I continued to think about this question throughout the evening.  While I do believe some aspects of the productivity suites do foster creativity, I also think they have worked against creativity in many ways. Productivity suites are better suited to preparing young adults for certain aspects of the work, there are gaps in many areas not filled by the productivity suites.

First of all, we’ve reached a point where the productivity suites are simply embedded in each of the academic subjects and their use is no longer explicitly taught. No longer do students spend time learning how to word process, create formulas in excel spreadsheets, and learn additional features in word processing or presentation software. I have witnessed this over the past decade with the removal of computer labs and introduction of chromebooks and carts. While more work than ever is completed on a laptop, there is less intention than ever on its basic uses. Students struggle to type more than 15-20 words per minute. Students struggle to use any features in Microsoft excel, Apple numbers, or Google sheets. Students struggle to design anything creative in word processing and presentation software. I often wonder if this is more attuned to apathy and our own focus on the outcomes rather than the overall presentation of their products or if this is a product of a lack of explicit instruction to their use. Perhaps, a combination of both. 

The productivity suites have increased creativity in a number of ways. The ability to collaborate with the cloud based documents have allowed students to work together and share their ideas. These programs have increased their capabilities and the speed at which they can process information to make working on them more seamless. These programs provide quite a few opportunities for students to be creative, if they choose. 

Productivity suites have decreased creativity in a number of ways. Gone are the days of doodling in the margins of a notebook or honing your cursive skills. Even for myself, my penmanship has decreased and word processing software has become a neat means to an end. Canva and other programs have decreased my creative skills in the sense that most of the creations are made via pre-set templates that I simply plug the information into. 

Productivity suites have prepared students for the workforce by allowing them to create simple documents, prepare presentations, and digitally collaborate with their peers. The vast majority of careers today require basic computer skills. Those careers which require a more advantage skill set will either 

Productivity suites have created gaps due to our lack of explicit teaching and the increase of other third party software apps that are better suited for many tasks. Products like Prezi and Canva have become as commonplace in my school setting as our Google or Microsoft programs. These thor party programs foster creativity much more than the standard productivity suites we use.

I’m constantly torn with what I feel are the most effective strategies for teaching students and the methods in which students should be showcasing what they have learned. As a History teacher, I want students to be able to memorize facts, understand how the events of history are connected, and how those events and decisions impact our world today. I want students to memorize facts as that seems to be a skill that is disappearing with the ability to search for basic info with a moment’s notice. Some may argue that if something can be “Googled” in seconds that it isn’t worth remembering, but our brains have a fairly significant storage size. Being able to recall information exercises your brain and also comes in handy for any future trivia nights or Jeopardy appearances. 

While reading through The Nature of Knowledge and Implications for Teaching, I felt my teaching style follows cognitivism fairly closely. Cognitivism, for the most part, follows the philosophy of internalizing new information and making assumptions and decisions based on the combination of prior knowledge and the new information. Memorizing names, events, dates and what happened in the past allows students to take that prior knowledge and apply it when given information about current events. 

When I coach volleyball, applying Bloom’s taxonomy and cognitivism comes more naturally. Players are put in situations constantly where they need to analyze the game situation, other’s emotion and abilities, and make a decision. These decisions require athletes to understand their own ability to execute a skill and when to take a risk or play it safe. The game of volleyball is a great example since there is no clock to kill and teams must work together as a unit to earn every point by identifying their strengths, their opponents weaknesses, and use all available information to make a decision. Less skilled teams who understand how the other team is set up and how to be deceptive consistently beat more skilled teams. 

Over my teaching career, spanning a quick 12 years, my course content has changed little, but delivery and purpose has changed significantly. The more I coach, the more I try to emulate that in the classroom. The shift from binders and photocopiers to Chromebooks and Google Classroom has been a welcome change in the sense of organization and class presentation. I’ve now shifted to trying to provide the information and having students analyze why the decisions were made in the past, how the people were impacted, how they responded, and whether the decisions made could be justified. With the polarization of politics today, it’s important that students can critique the information they are seeing and make a decision that’s in the best interests of society.