Technology

I recommend technology I’ve found to be helpful to planning, lesson delivery, and assessment.

A few tips for technology use:

1. Be open to trying new technology. This has been key in my educational career spanning more than 30 years. I started teaching as computers were making their debut in K-12 spaces (i.e. computer labs). Now the challenges of AI dominate my tech learning. Be willing to learn and try new things.
2. Think about the purpose for the technology. We are constantly inundated with promotion of the latest, greatest, magic bullet to achieve student success and teacher productivity. However, the only technology that works well to improve learning helps us plan, deliver, &/or assess in meaningful and productive ways. It’s not bells and whistles that matter but results.
3. Traditional pen & paper methods have value too. I’ve returned to having a course journal for notes, journaling, and beginning stages of the writing process.

What About AI?

AI, whether good or bad, is here. Personally, I make use of Chat GPT to analyze documents, especially to provide statistical breakdown to support or refute the analysis from my own reading. I also find it good to reduce text to shorter blurbs for social media purposes.

In terms of teaching, I have an explicit AI statement in my syllabus as expected by my college. My college provided faculty access to an AI generator for this statement and examples to guide us. In general, AI is allowed for editing purposes in the final stage of the writing process, and students provide a note that they used an app such as Grammarly. I also explicitly identify when I use AI applications to create materials. Typically, this includes:

• Guided notes for videos
• Quizzes for videos

I still edit the produced items, but it saves significant planning time.

What do I Use?

I use Brisk Teaching. It’s a Chrome add-on that I can access for a webpage. The tools I use are a free version and don’t need a student account set-up. It has a feedback generator I can use for drafts and connect my own rubric. I’ve used it to give additional feedback to drafts before students finalize their essays.

The only application I currently use that has students use the platform is the debate feature (see video below). I can create the debate based on a web article related to the course theme. I create the question for debate and the objectives for students. They can access the activity through a link. [Important Note: Students only provide first name or first name & last initial in the activity, which means there is no saved personally, identifiable information.]

The student responds to the question and Brisk responds, noting something positive about the response and prompting for more information. I’ve learned to time this for 10 minutes because Brisk will continue the conversation indefinitely. This is a great way for students to practice forming opinions, supporting logically, and forming counterarguments. It’s low stakes and only seen by the student and me, so students can have an opportunity to think through arguments with feedback before participating in a class discussion or drafting a counterargument in their essays.

Technology in My Classroom:

General Tip: Save files in a cloud server like Dropbox or your personal Google Drive. I lost so many valuable files I created during the last few years of my career because I didn’t back them up correctly before I retired. I also created many instructional materials on my personal computer at home.

My Favorite Applications:

• Padlet
• Nearpod
• Insert Learning
• Quizizz