#338 – AI in the K-12 Classroom, with Eric Curts

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• What forms of AI have you personally used?
• How can technology make teachers’ lives easier and help them save time?
• What are some ways that you can use AI as a teacher?
• How can AI be leveraged with students?
• Why is it important that we teach students about AI and let them experience it in our classrooms?
• What are some tools that you learned about and would like to try?
• What is your “one thing” with AI?

• Control Alt Achieve (Eric Curts)
• AI Prompt Libraries for Educators (Control Alt Achieve)
• AI Resources (Control Alt Achieve)

#338 AI in the K-12 Classroom, with Eric Curts

Time: 42 min.

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Eric Curts 0:00
Our students are going to be interacting with AI the rest of their lives. They need critical thinking skills. They need to know how to identify what is accurate, what is not, how to challenge things, how to be skeptical. What better place to learn than our classroom?

Winston Benjamin 0:19
The topic for today’s podcast is “AI in the K-12 Classroom,” with Eric Curts. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:40
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:52
I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:53
And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 0:57
And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music 1:01
Education is our passport to the future.

Opening Quote from ChatGPT

Winston Benjamin 1:06
Our quote from today is from ChatGPT. We asked it to write a quote about AI in K-12 education that we could use for our opening of today’s show. Here’s what it gave us: “AI in the K through 12 classroom isn’t just a tool; it’s a partner in curiosity, helping both teachers and students explore new ways of thinking and learning.” What do you think about this quote from ChatGPT?

Rena Clark 1:40
Well, it’s right about being a partner. It’s a really good partner when I can’t sleep at like one in the morning and no one else wants to talk to me. But I like the idea that it can be a partner, and sometimes it’s a partner in helping you think through your own thoughts and helping us explore things in a different way coming from us.

So even thinking about how we’re prompting—our prompt engineering—and if I’m trying to get a lesson or get down to ideas, it’s like, what do I really want students to know and be able to do? And thinking through that process and using it more, I guess, in that case, kind of like a partner to help me really think through those things. And then, how might I support some of my students who receive multilanguage services? And how do I make this very specific in a 15-minute time period? Really thinking through those things, and it helps me do that in a much faster way.

And then, of course, we always have that human element, because anything I put in front of students, that’s on me. So I have got to think about that. I don’t just take it for what it is. So it’s that human element too, where I use my expertise and think about it. But it’s a great thought partner, especially when no one wants to talk to me at 1 a.m.

Paul Beckermann 2:55
We always want to—you can always reach out! Yeah, that word “partner” really sticks out to me too. Teaching can be an isolating kind of career. Ideally, we would have a colleague right there to banter back and forth with all the time. But I feel like ChatGPT or generative AI can be that thought partner for us, but it’s a partner. It’s not going to do everything for us. It’s not like some people think, “Oh, it’s going to just take over.” No, it’s a partner.

We can bounce ideas back and forth. It can make us better by pushing us to the next idea. It also can be a thought partner for students, with some guardrails on there, because the teacher can’t be with 30-some students all at the same time. It’s a way to replicate ourselves and maybe give that student that independent coaching that we can’t always be there to give. So I think there’s a lot of potential, and I’m kind of excited for the conversation with Eric today to dive in a little further with this.

Winston Benjamin 3:52
I like the fact that you both called it—highlighted—the partner idea. And sometimes we need a learned expert to help us move a little bit beyond where we think and how we can think about utilizing AI in the K through 12 classroom. And right now, we have somebody who could support us in pushing through as a thought partner.

Guest Introduction: Eric Curts

Winston Benjamin (continued)
We’re excited to welcome our guest, Eric Curts, to our show today. Eric has over 30 years of experience—that’s a long time—of working as an edtech specialist in Ohio. He provides training to schools and organizations around the world. He is also a Google Certified Trainer and Innovator, and for many years, Eric has been sharing all of his technology resources on Control Alt Achieve, his award-winning blog, which you can find at www.controlaltachieve.com. Eric, welcome! Do you mind sharing just a little bit about yourself outside of the bio? Tell us your story.

Eric Curts 4:55
Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here. I’m so excited to be with you guys here tonight. So yeah, I guess I will start with the education end of things real quick.

So yeah, this is year 33 for me. I was a middle school math teacher. Started off teaching middle school math for seven years, and absolutely loved it. But I also loved technology, and so we had a job opening in the district I was at for what we would now call a tech coach, or something like that. This was a long, long time ago, and I made the switch. So I went from teaching kids to teaching teachers, and I was in that district for 21 years total.

And then the last 12 years, I’ve been at a regional service center in Ohio. We have ESCs—educational service centers—so I still support the same district I was at, but now I help support about 35 school districts up here in Northeast Ohio with professional development and training and helping teachers use technology in the classroom. So that’s my day job.

And then on the side, probably for the last, I don’t know, 25 or so years, I’ve been doing my own consulting where I just travel around the country, work with schools, conferences, organizations, doing workshops or keynotes or training or whatever the case might be. And of course, yeah, sharing everything through my website. That’s sort of the one-stop shop to get to all of those things.

Outside of that, I’m a proud grandpa. Got two grandkids, and they live, thankfully, pretty close to me, about 30 minutes away, so I get to see them all the time. And yeah, that’s the gist.

Why Integrate Technology in Teaching?

Rena Clark 6:46
All right, you’re like the cool grandpa! I got—my kids have one of those too. The cool grandpa, Papa. My Papa P—he was writing code on the cards, and now he’s always the one that’s fixing things and getting them to do cool stuff, which I would love to talk about. You made that switch seven years in. I’m just curious: Why are you such a proponent of integrating technology into teaching and learning? Where do you see the power is in that?

Eric Curts 7:16
Wow, that’s a big question. I mean, yeah, I know. Well, you know, I’m going to tap into your quote that you had earlier about AI there specifically, and now we’re talking technology more in general. But yeah, the idea of technology being a partner, being an assistant, being something that can help us do more than we could do on our own, about helping us be the best teacher we can be, helping our students be the best learners that they can be. And my gosh, that can take on so many different aspects.

You know, if I were to think through how technology can be helpful in the classroom, why should we be encouraging that—I mean, it could be, on one end, as simple as saving time. I mean, it really could be. It could just be, “Hey, here’s something that makes things quicker.” Well, that’s great, because then that means we have more time to do what we do best: to connect with our students and work with them one-on-one or in small groups, or maybe do some self-care, actually, to take care of ourselves.

But on the other hand, technology—it’s not just about saving time. It’s about going further. It’s allowing our students to have a personalized learning experience. Hopefully, we’ll talk more about that later here tonight and get into some of those details. But the ability where, hey, there’s one of us and maybe 125 of them that I’m seeing throughout the day—how do I meet the needs of every student?

Well, technology can come alongside as an assistant to help meet those students where they’re at, to provide personalized learning experiences. Or if a student needs some additional support, there are so many tools with text-to-speech, speech-to-text, readability—all these wonderful tools that can come along and support all learners, not just students who might be on an IEP, because everybody can benefit from good tools that help support learners. And on and on and on.

You know, encouraging our students to be creative, to be able to express themselves in ways they couldn’t otherwise do easily, whether it’s using Google Slides to create stop-motion animation, or creating a choose-your-own-adventure story in Google Docs, or whatever the case might be. And communication—sharing what they create with a broader, authentic audience. I mean, it’s just—and that’s just scratching the surface.

There are so many amazing ways that technology can basically, again, it’s not replacing us. It’s not taking our place. Specifically with AI, I always like to say: AI is not here to do your job. It’s here to help you do your job better. It’s all about extending us. It’s being that assistant for us and for our students.

Why Teachers Should Care About AI Chatbots

Paul Beckermann 10:09
Well, speaking of AI, AI is the hot topic these days. You know, started off when ChatGPT kind of hit the mainstream. It’s been around, but that really brought it to the forefront. So why should teachers care about AI chatbots like ChatGPT, and how might they use that kind of technology in the classroom? Another big question, again.

Eric Curts 10:33
I know, yeah, these real small little questions here tonight! Yeah, well, I mean, I would certainly build off of what we already said. What I like to tell people is with AI, with generative AI, if you so choose, every teacher can have a 24-hour personal assistant, and every student can have a 24-hour personal tutor.

And I do say “assistant,” and I know we use the word “partner” earlier. I kind of prefer “assistant,” because “partner” almost implies equality, and in the end, the teacher has to have the final say. The AI can assist you, it can help you, but you have to vet what it shares, and you have to make sure it aligns to what you are covering in class. You’ve got to put your personality into it, and you’ve got to make sure whatever you’re generating is something that is going to be appropriate for your students, and on and on and on and on.

But the fact that, yes, we now can have that 24-hour personal assistant is fantastic. So again, how can we leverage that? My gosh, it could be some of those things that are just daily tasks that—”Oh, listen, I need to generate some DOK level questions. Help me do that. I need to generate a rubric. I need some lesson plan ideas. Maybe I haven’t taught this particular subject for years, or maybe I’ve been teaching it for 25 and I want some new ideas.” So it can be that kind of stuff, for sure.

But it can go beyond just that. We can use AI to—how should I say it—to be able to make practical, good educational practices that otherwise we might not be able to do. So let’s just take an example. Let’s say we talked about personalized learning earlier. Maybe we’ll dive deeper into that. But let’s just say, you know, okay, there’s one of me, 125 of them. And we know—we know from studies and from research—that if you can provide personalized learning, where every student gets unique feedback and unique information and things that assess where they’re at and move them along, that that’s very powerful. But what do we say? We’re like, “Well, love the idea, but it’s just not practical. How can I do that?”

Well, that’s the idea. With AI, we can now use tools—whether it’s something like SchoolAI, I could throw that out as an example—where you can build or choose a custom chatbot to give to your students. So every student can now have a conversation with a chatbot that responds to them uniquely. And of course, it’s school-safe, and it records everything for you, so you as a teacher can see everything the student types, everything the AI responds.

So not only are now the students getting met where they’re at, but you’re getting insights that you might have missed otherwise. And again, it’s not taking your place. You’re there working with the students. But what about the weekends? What about the evenings? What about when you can’t be there? That AI can help fill that gap, and you can see the summary of everything that was discussed. So now you know your students better. So it’s not that AI is pulling people further apart. No, it’s actually helping you make connections. Now you’re learning about that quiet student who maybe wasn’t going to speak up in class other ways.

So I guess that’s really what the crux of it for me is: saying there are so many things we know—these are good educational practices—but we’re like, “Ah, you know, we just can’t do it.” And we can talk about others, things like giving oral responses on an assessment. That’s an awesome thing to do, but we’re like, “I don’t have time to listen to 125 recordings.” Again, AI can do that. There are tools that are designed for that.

So it’s about taking something we know is good and saying, “You know what? We can finally do it. We have the technology. It’s finally here to allow us to put into practice things we’ve known for so long are good, but we just had no realistic way to scale it up.”

Tips for Effective Prompting

Winston Benjamin 15:05
I like the assistant part, because right now, all I can think of myself is Batman, because I have AI as my Alfred. Love it, right? You know what I’m saying? It allows you to go out and do the work while Alfred is in the back doing all of this Bruce Wayne thing, allows him to still function and do the best superhero he can, a.k.a. teaching.

So now that we’ve shifted and gotten a chance to recognize AI’s value within the classroom context, right—you gave examples of how it’s related to UDL, universal design, trying to support students who are at multi-tiered and multi-needs—my question is: What are some of the tips that you can help teachers to think through how to get the most out of the AI chatbot, for example? What are some good prompt-writing tips that you can give?

Eric Curts 16:01
Absolutely. So when it comes to prompting, first thing I would want to say is: there’s no magic prompt. There’s no way you have to do it a certain way. I think there’s a little bit of nervousness about that. I certainly have seen that where I’ve shown ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, or whatever the case might be, and teachers get excited, but then they’re like, “Yeah, but I’m not sure what to type in.”

There’s a couple of things I would say in response to that. One is, if you do feel uncomfortable, there are tools—there are prompting tools out there. There are things like Magic School AI, Fobizz, Conmigo. There’s lots of ones out there. And yeah, they basically will say, “You can say, oh, I want to make a rubric,” and they’ll ask you, “Okay, well, tell me what’s the grade level, what’s the topic, what’s the thing?” And then those tools will basically craft the prompt for you. They will go to ChatGPT for you, they’ll submit the prompt, bring back the response, and so forth. And I think that’s great if that’s where you’re at, and that helps you feel comfortable and start getting use out of these tools. Then fantastic, please do that.

Now, eventually, I think there’s a lot of value in going straight to ChatGPT, because you’ve got more control over it, but that’s a great starting point. Now, having said that, if you do go to ChatGPT—again, there’s a lot of great acronyms out there where people have put together these steps, you know, “Here’s what you want to include in a prompt,” and if you want to follow those, that’s fantastic. I think that’s great.

But really, what it comes down to is a couple of things. Keep in mind: it’s a conversation. Okay? You can talk to the AI just like you’re talking to a person, and if you don’t get the response you were looking for, you can just ask follow-ups. That’s totally fine to be like, “Well, that was good, but having said that…” Other things you can do: I have sometimes tried out what I would call a collaborative prompting technique. Actually, I have a blog post about it where, basically, let’s say I want to write a rubric. You know, maybe that’s what I want to have generated. Go into ChatGPT, and instead of saying, “Make a rubric for me,” I ask the question: “What information would you need from me to be able to create the best possible rubric for my language arts activity on writing a limerick?” or something like that, whatever the case is.

And then ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Copilot will give me like 10 or so questions and say, “Well, if you tell me these things, I can do the best possible rubric for you.” Now, do you have to answer all 10? No. But it gives you an idea. You could go through and say, “Okay, well, I’m going to answer seven of these. Okay, well, here’s my responses,” and then you’re working with the AI in this collaborative prompting technique, answering the questions. And boom, it is now generating an awesome product for you, which, again, you can still follow up and say, “That was great, but how about this?”

So I guess I would encourage people to think along those lines—to just think of it as talking to a friend. You’re not going to break anything, and there’s no perfect way to prompt. But those are some things that might help.

Rena Clark 19:25
Appreciate that. It’s like reverse engineering for prompt engineering.

Eric Curts 19:29
Absolutely, absolutely.

Introducing AI to Students

Rena Clark 19:31
I just love—I haven’t thought about it that way. I appreciate that. We’ve talked a bit about how teachers can use it. They can use it to help create rubrics, do all kinds of things. But how might we introduce AI to students? And it might depend also on grades and other things.

Eric Curts 19:50
Yeah, so when it comes to using AI with students, I mean, the first thing I’ll always say, no matter what, is definitely work with your school district. Make sure you’re staying within the appropriate guidelines of what your school district is saying for what tools the students can use or what experiences they can have when it relates to AI.

Having said that, though, we can use AI with our students without our students touching the AI. They do not have to themselves personally use the AI to benefit from it. And I don’t mean just, you know, me using the AI to generate some cool ideas for class. What I mean is doing something like an AI interview.

So this is one I’ve done tons of times. I absolutely love it. It’s such an easy activity to do. But basically, you tell your students, “Hey guys, we’re going to have a special guest in class today, and it’s ChatGPT” or “it’s Gemini” or “Claude” or “Copilot,” but it’s going to be playing the part of something that we’ve been learning about. So if we’ve been studying a historical figure, “We’re going to have a guest—somebody who was on the Oregon Trail in 1850. They have come to speak to us today because we’ve been learning about that.”

Or, you know, maybe it’s a book we’ve been reading. “Hey, you know, Gatsby has joined us. What questions do you want to ask Jay Gatsby?” Or it doesn’t have to be a person. Maybe we’re learning about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. “Hey, we’re going to interview a butterfly that has just recently come out of its chrysalis.” Or think about how the hurricanes currently are causing so much trouble. Maybe it’s something like that—maybe interview a tornado or a hurricane. We really can interview anything, and I’ve done all of those sort of examples.

And so basically, what you do is you give your chatbot—ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever—a prompt. And it’s on my blog, you can find it very easily in all my AI resources. You can use any of the prompts that I have there. I do have a custom prompt that you are absolutely welcome to copy and modify that I think is a pretty successful one for explaining to the AI, “Here’s the role you’re going to play. This is the age of my students. Be sure you respond appropriately for my students. Strive for accuracy and avoid biases,” etc., etc., etc. So it’s kind of a nice prompt to set it up.

And then basically, the students come up with the questions. Now you can tell them a day ahead of time, “Hey, start coming up with questions,” and then use whatever vetting method you want to do to decide which questions are going to get asked. But basically, you have the AI start answering these questions in the style of whatever persona it is taking. And a lot of these tools can even have voices. Both ChatGPT and Gemini have 10 different voices you can pick from, and it can speak the answers aloud as well.

And so the students love this, because, well, first of all, it’s just exciting because, “Hey, I’m talking to a butterfly,” or whatever the case might be. But it’s also motivating, because I’m asking the questions that I’m interested in. I’m asking the things that I want to learn about Jay Gatsby or a butterfly or the Oregon Trail or a hurricane or whatever the case might be. And it prompts creativity.

Now, you could do the same thing and do a little bit of a deeper activity and do an AI debate. That’s another one I’ve done a lot where I’ve got a prompt for that one you can absolutely copy and use. Where, yeah, you pick a topic from your content. You say, “Hey, we’re going to have a class debate,” and you tell the AI, “This is your position,” and then the students have the other position. And you tell it who’s going first, and you have a live class debate. And I tell you, AI is a really good debater—really good. And so it’s going to push the students.

The AI will give its argument, and as a class, “Okay, guys, break into groups and discuss this. Let’s come back together now. How are we going to respond? How can we possibly counter this argument?” And if you really want to make it challenging for the students, let the AI take the position the students most agree with, and have the students be arguing the counter.

So these are examples where the students—they’re not even touching the AI, but you are still involving it in. Now, again, as I said, please be sure that this is something that’s appropriate in your school. And not only that, but make sure that you encourage the students—be really clear with them up front. Say, “Listen, guys, it’s an AI. It can make mistakes. It may say something that’s wrong. It may come from a perspective that is biased. That can happen.” That’s not a reason to not do this. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I guess we’d say it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity, and it’s an important one, because here’s the thing: Our students are going to be interacting with AI the rest of their lives. They need critical thinking skills. They need to know how to identify what is accurate, what is not, how to challenge things, how to be skeptical. What better place to learn than our classroom?

And so if something does go a little sideways in it, that’s a learning opportunity. You say, “Okay, hey, so why do you think the AI said that? Let’s push back against it. Let’s ask some follow-ups,” and encourage the students to be critical thinkers the entire time.

Paul Beckermann 25:11
I love that, and take advantage of the situation to be a teachable moment, right?

Eric Curts 25:20
Absolutely. And of course, later on, you can go much deeper, and you can start using other tools like I mentioned, like SchoolAI, or Brisk has a new student feature, and so many of them do where the students now are individually having conversations with the AI, and that’s where the personalized learning comes in more and all that stuff. But you don’t have to jump right to that. You can start with a whole class activity. That’s a wonderful way to model this for your students as well.

Favorite AI Tools Beyond Basic Chatbots

Paul Beckermann 25:46
For sure. So beyond the basic chatbots, you know, like Gemini and ChatGPT, what are a couple of your favorite AI tools, since they’re all over the place now?

Eric Curts 25:57
Absolutely. So, you know, I’m only going to obviously mention a few. There are so many amazing ones. I do have an entire resource document—my AI Toolbox resource document. I’ve got a ton of AI resources, but that’s just one of them there, and that has dozens and dozens and dozens of my favorite AI tools in it. Recently did a webinar on that that’s available on my site as well.

But yeah, if I’m just going to pick a couple, certainly you’ve heard me mention a couple that I will mention again here real quick. So SchoolAI I mentioned that earlier. That’s one that is really for creating custom chatbots for students. You can pick from thousands of pre-made ones or create your own. Students have school-safe conversations with it, and you get to monitor all of that. Fantastic. Can’t say enough good things about Brisk Teaching. It’s a little different than a lot of other AI tools in that it is a Chrome extension. So after you install it, it follows you everywhere you go, and so you don’t have to remember to go back to it. It’s just floating in the bottom corner.

And it does—I think it’s got like 20 tools in the free version, which is amazing. So I can be on a YouTube video, I can be on an article, I can be on a document, and just click on Brisk and say, “Hey, create a quiz about this. Create a slideshow about this. Make a rubric from this data. Create a lesson plan.” If it’s student work, “Provide personalized feedback on the student’s writing.” If it is an article that the students need to read, but maybe it’s not appropriate level for them, “Re-level this to a certain grade level.”

It also lets us do what they call “boosts,” which are student custom chatbots as well. So it does that too. Another one that I would give a shout-out to is Snorkel. I mentioned earlier about how being able to give oral responses to questions is a valuable thing, especially, I think, like as a math teacher. If I thought of a student filling out a worksheet and then they turn it into me—I don’t know, did you do that? Did you copy from somebody else? And if you made mistakes, why’d you make them? I often would be like, “Hey, listen, if you could just have a student record themselves solving a math problem and explaining step-by-step what they did—just have them do two problems, not 20—and you’ll know whether they understand it or not.”

Well, this applies to almost any subject area. Well, the problem is, again, it’s not scalable. Well, that’s what Snorkl does. Basically, you go in and you create the problem. It doesn’t matter—it can be math, science, language arts, social studies, anything. You create the prompt, the problem, the thing for the students to respond to, and you give them a link. They click the link, and it just starts recording. And they record themselves as they answer the question, the problem, whatever it is. It gives them a whiteboard if they want to draw out a diagram while they’re doing it. Doesn’t always apply, but you could use it. And that’s it.

When it’s done, Snorkl takes everything they said and transcribes it into text. It pulls anything off the whiteboard that they wrote, and then it grades them based upon the exemplar you set up for the problem. And then you get to go in and see which students got it right or wrong. And it also gives them a score on how well they explained their answers. And those are just a couple. I mean, it just goes on and on and on from there, but those are some that I see going the next step. They’re going beyond just a simple, “Hey, this is going to save me a little bit of time,” to “Oh no, this is going to also engage students as well.”

Paul Beckermann 29:34
I love that. It’s called Snorkl, because it helps the teacher be able to breathe.

Rena Clark 29:40
While going deeper!

Eric Curts 29:44
I should ask them. I should ask them. And they’re great folks. I will tell you right now all these tools I’m talking about, I’ve had the privilege, you know, at conferences and things like that, to talk to these people. These are typically very small companies. These are not gigantic companies. If you see them at a booth, you’re probably talking to one of the founders. And so I’ve had a chance to talk to so many of these companies, and they’re such good folks that just really care about teachers. They care about students. They’re trying to figure out, “How can we use this new technology in a way to help teachers and students be the best they can?” And we’re all just figuring it out. We’re all just poking a stick at this. Who knows what this is going to look like a year from now, five years from now, but thanks to these folks for leading the way, blazing the trail, and saying, “Hey, this works. This doesn’t. Let’s figure it out.”

Paul Beckermann 30:41
I love it. You’ve already mentioned that there’s so many things out there, so we’re going to jump into our toolkit and see what else we can add.

Toolkit Section

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 30:50
Check it out, check it out, check it out, check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 30:59
All right, toolkit time. Winston, what do you want to drop in?

Winston Benjamin 31:05
So I’m going to cheat, and I am going to drop in ControlAltAchieve.com. Hey, listen, it’s a tool! So just the simplicity, the fact that it’s organized—it gives you the idea of a prompt that you can use, like a good starting point for teachers who are just overwhelmed with the starting point. I think this is a good place to gather some information so that they have some place to begin.

Paul Beckermann 31:33
I love it. And personally, that’s one of my main go-tos as well. And I know a lot of teacher friends that I have—same thing. Great stuff there. Rena, toolkit?

Rena Clark 31:42
We talked a lot about chatbots and other things. Something we didn’t talk about so much in this episode, but it’s been interesting—talking with, I’ve been supporting some high school teachers that do media and other things and logo design. And so I just love the opportunities for AI and thinking about logos and creating artwork and logo and design prompting.

So yes, it can also help us with those functions when we’re teaching kids about marketing. Or with the particular teacher we’re talking about, they’re designing a food truck, and they’re doing all of those components. But one of the things—students like, “Well, I’m not very good at art, creating a logo,” or “It’s expensive to hire.” Well, now with some AI, we’ve talked through, “How can I get through prompting to create some really amazing artwork for their food truck that they’re designing, and then how are they going to use that?”

And so it’s been pretty cool. And then, even for their own school, some of the different designs. So it can also be used in those visual ways, which we will maybe explore in another episode. But I love the idea of going beyond just the text-based chatbot.

Paul Beckermann 32:55
Yeah, that’s awesome. Bring in those image generators, and great opportunity to teach the students about them and how to use them responsibly. That’s cool. I’m going to drop in a fairly specific one, and it’s NotebookLM from Google. It’s a free tool from Google. It’s basically a virtual notebook with AI functionality built into it. You can upload almost any type of resource into it, and then there’s a chatbot at the bottom that lets you ask AI questions about the content of your notebook. It’s like having a study buddy who’s right there to help you unpack the notes that you’ve taken or the research that you’ve done.

There’s even a new feature, which is really cool. It lets you turn your notebook into a conversation between two really believable voices talking about your content. It’s like with one click of a button, it makes like an instant podcast about all of the content in your notebook. It’s pretty cool. Eric, one more chance to drop another one.

Eric Curts 33:50
It is so cool! That was what I was going to—oh no, I can pick another one. It is cool. It is, actually. And I will add to that, but I will share something separate. It really is pretty amazing. I don’t know that everybody learns best through listening. I think I do very well that way. And so for me, it has resonated so wonderfully. I have been uploading so many things to NotebookLM and clicking the audio feature, the audio summary feature.

And I just did it the other day. I had a chapter of a book that I was reading, and it just was not clicking with me for whatever reason. It’s a book that I needed to read for another purpose. And I’m like—and I owned the book, it was mine, so it was okay for me to do this with it—but I took the chapter and I uploaded it to NotebookLM, and I clicked the little audio thing, and it generated like a 13-minute, you know, pretend podcast between two people. And as they went through the exact same chapter, it made so much sense to me. It just crystallized. I was like, “Ah, I get what that is all about now.”

And I think there’s a lot of students that might benefit from that. That, yeah, you still—if I hadn’t read it, I don’t think I would understand as much as I did. So you still need to do your part. You need to read the content and that stuff. But to be able to have that audio summary of that as a way to crystallize it was fantastic.

So I don’t know—boy, to pick something else. I think I’m going to stay with audio and talk about Udio. You could also use Suno. I think either one is fine. These are great AI tools for generating songs. A while back, I did a blog post—you can find it on the site—where I decided I wanted to see, “Could I make an educational song with one of these AI tools?” And I used Udio for my example, and I pretended I was a science teacher who was trying to teach about the water cycle. So I asked it to make a song about the water cycle.

And, you know, Udio and Suno, they both can do this. They can write the song, they can sing the song, and they can play all the instruments for it. And then when it was all said and done, I had this, you know, two-and-a-half-ish minute song that went through precipitation, condensation, evaporation, explained the whole thing, had a really catchy chorus. Apologies to anybody who listens to it—it is going to be stuck in your head if you do. So, you know, listen carefully if you’re going to.

But I just love that a teacher could use this to create educational content for their students, or also maybe celebrate a student. Maybe you do a student of the week. You know, put in some key things about hobbies and interests, and now you’ve got a song. Or if there’s a staff member you’re celebrating, or whatever. I love the fact that, you know, right—it’s not just text prompts generating text responses. We’ve heard images, audio, music. We’re hitting all these different things. And what’s to come next? Obviously, there’s a bunch of video ones coming out. We could talk about coding, so many neat things.

Rena Clark 37:02
So many! So we’re going to have to narrow it down, though, to just one thing.

That One Thing

Transition Music 37:08
It’s time for that one thing. Time for that one thing. It’s that one thing.

Rena Clark 37:21
So we’re going to take us into our last section, That One Thing that maybe we’re still thinking about, or we want to leave our guests thinking about. So what is our one thing? Winston?

Winston Benjamin 37:35
I like the idea that AI scales you up as a person, right? It allows you to do—it’s not about the actual art of teaching, right? AI is not about the art of teaching. What it does is it makes the processes that’s associated with the art of teaching easier, faster: grading, creating rubrics, like all of that. Get that out of my face and let me think about how I talk and reach this student in front of me. And I think that really is valuable to me—is the way it scales me up to engage with students more.

Rena Clark 38:09
I love that.

Paul Beckermann 38:11
The idea that’s resonating with me is something that Eric said. He said, “Our students will be interacting with AI for the rest of their lives.” It’s so true. This is not going away. This is part of our world now, and I think we owe it to our students to introduce it to them, to empower them with AI, to help them learn how to use AI to be better learners, to be better content creators, to just be better at life because of this amazingly powerful thing that we did not have before.

Rena Clark 38:48
I literally had a teacher tell me last week, “You know, I thought this was a phase, but I’m starting to believe that this AI thing is like going to stay around, so maybe I should figure it out.” But I love that. I really love something Eric said. He said, “It’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity.” So how do we, instead of thinking about this being problematic, how do we see it as an opportunity? And kind of what both Winston and Paul said, how do we use it in that way?

Eric Curts 39:17
Love that. For my one thing, I’m actually going to capitalize on the phrase “one thing,” and say it’s so easy, especially after listening to all of us, to feel overwhelmed. And I mean, I’ll do trainings that are, you know, sometimes an hour long, sometimes three-hour-long workshops, whatever. And at the end, I can see people are excited, but I can also see them overwhelmed, and I can see them starting to be like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know where to begin, what to do.”

So I really always try to say at the end of sessions, “Listen, you don’t have to do all of this. Just pick one thing. Try something.” And that’s good for so many reasons. The KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Sweetie, we’ll say. You just do one thing, just try out this tool. Because by doing one thing, it’s manageable. You’re also going to see what effect that one thing had. You’re not complicating with all these other things. And then you can iterate on it. You can grow. And you’ll also be encouraged to try again and say, “Okay, well, what if I do this different next time?”

So that’s my encouragement to people: Yeah, get excited. I’m excited. But please don’t be overwhelmed so that it causes you to not act. Pick a thing, one thing, try it out—one of the tools you heard, one of the ideas you heard—try it out, and then go from there.

Winston Benjamin 40:44
Eric, I appreciate you being here as a supportive expert in helping push our thinking forward, and I agree with you in keeping it simple. Try one thing, one program, one attempt, one classroom, one conversation, and then we see how that goes. So thank you for your time. We really appreciate you.

Eric Curts 41:06
My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Closing

Rena Clark 41:10
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 41:13
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 41:27
We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 41:32
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 41:35
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 41:37
You make a difference.