#403 – Three Steps for Developing Your Personal AI Professional Learning Plan

#403 — Three Steps for Developing Your Personal AI Professional Learning Plan

AVID Open Access
11 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.

Paul Beckermann 0:01 Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckermann.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 0:05 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic of today’s episode is three steps for developing your personal AI professional learning plan. Let’s face it, the school year can move at a frenetic pace. It’s often all we can do to get our correcting done, answer emails, and be ready for the next day of school. This leaves little, if any, time for our own PD, even though we know it’s important to remain current. For me, personally, the summer was both a time for rest and renewal as well as a time for me to engage in self-improvement professionally. After a little break from school, I was usually ready to dig into something new. For those of you who like to learn in the summer, and especially for those of you who feel the need to catch up a bit with everything AI, this episode’s for you.

I’m going to share a simple, three-step personal PD program that you can take and use this summer. If you’re so inclined, you won’t even need to go searching for the materials. I’ve got everything gathered for you. So let’s dig in.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 1:15 Here is your list of tips. Here is your list. Here is your here is your list of tips.

Paul Beckermann 1:21 Paul Beckermann 1:21

Paul Beckermann 1:21 Step one: Use a generative AI chat bot. Many of you have probably already done this, but if you haven’t, it can be really helpful to simply use a generative AI chat bot for a while. They really take no training to get started. Simply choose one to use and start interacting with it. This interaction can do a lot to demystify these AI tools and give you a practical overview of what it does and how it works.

I’d recommend choosing one of the most popular chat bot options. If you have one available to you at school, that’s probably the best choice. Otherwise, here are a few to pick from: ChatGPT. This is the first one to hit the mainstream, and it remains the most popular option. Gemini. If you’re a Google district, this might be the chat bot most available to you. Co-pilot. If you’re a Microsoft district, this might be your best choice. Claude. This one is known for its focus on safety and ethics. And Perplexity. This is a great choice if you’re mainly interested in research and information gathering. You really can’t go wrong with any of these.

As for how to use them, here are a few ideas to get you started. Ask it to help you plan something, a lesson, a travel itinerary, or a menu. Ask it to help you create something, an email response, a letter of recommendation, a rubric. Or ask it to explain something, a historical event, how something works, or maybe the steps in a process. Try to include relevant detail in your requests so that the chat bot knows what you want. If you don’t get what you’re looking for or the response is lacking, ask follow-up questions until you get what you’re looking for. You can learn a lot from this back-and-forth exchange.

Step number two: Take a free AI course. Now that you’ve gotten yourself familiar with what a generative AI chat bot is, what it can do, and what the experience feels like, you’re ready to dig a little deeper. To do this, I’d suggest choosing one of the many free AI courses available online. You don’t need to do them all. Just pick one and invest in that. Once you’re finished with that, you can decide if you want to engage in another or not, or maybe you decide that you have enough context and you’re ready to move on. Either way is fine. Do what suits you best.

At AVID Open Access, we have an article called “Free AI Courses and Resources” that you can explore to find an option that’s just right for you. To get you started, however, here are four from that list that I’d suggest picking as a starting point.

One of them is called “AI 101 for Teachers”. This course is from code.org, ETS, ISTE, and Khan Academy. It offers a list of videos, companion guides, and an informational slideshow that you can choose from. Again, you don’t need to review all of the resources here. Pick and choose what makes most sense for you. Here’s an overview of what you’ll find for videos and companion guides. You’ll find a fireside chat with Sal Khan and Hadi Partovi. Another about demystifying AI for educators and others that include “Transforming Learning with AI,” “Ensuring a Responsible Approach to AI,” “Bringing AI to the Classroom,” and “How AI Works”. Most of these videos are about 30 minutes in length. As for the slideshow, that’s “How to Use Large Language Model Chatbots”. It’s got sections for starter prompts, beginner tools, intermediate tools, and advanced tools. Again, you can hop around and pick what you want to look at.

The second course is “Creative and Critical Engagement with AI in Education”. The second option is a very brief course from the AI Pedagogy Project by the Metalab at Harvard. They describe this as a collection of resources for educators curious about how AI affects their students and their syllabi. There are four parts. Part one is an AI starter. Part two is an LLM tutorial. Part three is a comparison between two different LLMs, so you can see how they differ. And Part four is a hyperlinked list of resources related to AI; you can explore the ones that interest you.

The third course is called “Generative AI for Educators”. This third option is a self-paced and hands-on course from Google and MIT Raise. The outcomes focus on using generative AI to do three main things: save time on everyday tasks like drafting emails and other correspondence, personalize instruction for different learning styles and abilities, and enhance lessons and activities in creative ways.

The fourth course is called “AI Foundations for Educators”. It’s a free course from Common Sense Education, and it includes three modules: “What is AI and how does it work?”, “Ethical and Responsible Use of AI in School,” and “How will Generative AI Impact Education?”. These are all good choices, but if you want to see other options, you can find more at AVID Open Access by searching for “Free AI Courses and Resources”.

All right. Step three: Explore an AI education tool. If you’ve played with the chat bot and taken a course, you should now have a pretty good foundation for AI and chat bot use. Now I suggest checking out tools that have been created specifically for teachers and students. Quite honestly, it can be pretty overwhelming and probably impossible to try them all, so I’d recommend picking one that sounds intriguing or useful to you and giving that a try. When available, try out both the teacher and the student experiences. This will give you a full, well-rounded look into how the tool works on both ends, the user and the teacher who’s delivering the content. Most of these tools have their own support and training materials, but if you don’t find them helpful, go to YouTube and search for tutorials and then the title of the tool you’re looking for. You’ll almost certainly find teachers who have put out their own user guides there.

Here are some of the most popular classroom options that you may want to choose from: School AI or Magic School. I’m kind of lumping these two together. They’re quite similar, and they both offer both teacher productivity tools as well as student-facing custom chat bots. The teacher tools can help you plan lessons, assessment, craft communication, develop rubrics, and things like that. The student-facing custom chat bots are really powerful and can help foster personalized feedback for students. Honestly, I think this is where the real transformative potential is with AI in our classroom.

The second tool you may want to explore is Snorkel (S.N.O.R.K.L.). Snorkel is an AI tool that can provide custom feedback for students. Students record themselves solving a problem, perhaps a math problem, on a digital whiteboard, and then the AI provides detailed feedback. It’ll correct the work and help the student understand how they can improve. Teachers receive AI-generated insights about the student performances and the feedback they’ve been given. This is important because it keeps the human teacher in the loop.

Another good option to explore is Brisk Teaching. This tool does a little bit of what the previous three did. It functions as an AI-powered Chrome extension which can be used to streamline your teacher workflow by integrating directly into platforms like Google Docs, Slides, PDFs, and YouTube. It offers over 30 tools to assist with content creation, feedback, and differentiation, all within tools that teachers already use.

The last option I’m going to recommend is something called Notebook LM. This one’s slightly different, but it’s really powerful. It allows you to upload content into it and then ask questions about that content. It’s like having a study partner to help break down information you’ve gathered. It also lets you generate a custom podcast version of content you’ve collected. This can be a great way for some students to process the information on a complex document.

Okay, I said there were three steps, but I’m going to give you an extra credit one. So step four is extra credit. Here’s a bonus tip. Completing these first three steps will give you that solid AI foundation upon which to build your AI-powered classroom, as well as a practical tool to get started with. If you’re looking for more than that, I encourage you to check out our extensive collection of AI resources at AVID Open Access. We’ve got both informative articles and podcasts about AI tools as well as integration strategies and conversations with national thought leaders about AI best practices. They’re really insightful. So if you’re looking for some self-guided professional learning this summer, consider this 1-2-3, maybe four approach. It’s certainly not the only approach that will work, but I do think you’ll find that these steps can help you power up how you use AI in your classroom.

To learn more about today’s episode and explore other free resources, visit avidopenaccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out the article collection “AI in the K-12 Classroom”. And of course, be sure to join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening, take care, and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.