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THE SEARCH BAR

AI and education: Empowering teachers, engaging students

| 37 minutes | Media Contact: University Communications

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Summary

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. So, how can students and teachers embrace it effectively and ethically? 

Guest: Jen Weible, professor of teacher and special education at Central Michigan University

Summary 

Host Adam Sparkes welcomes Jen Weible to the show to discuss the impact, benefits and potential drawbacks of utilizing artificial intelligence in schools. The two touch on some of the most exciting ways both students and teachers are currently using AI in education. And with advancements in technology happening so rapidly, how can schools ensure AI tools are used safely and ethically?

 Chapters 

Transcript

Introduction

Jen: Nobody goes into education because you want to do paperwork. The overwhelming amount of that is one of the reasons why teachers are leaving the profession. I see AI when I'm working with my pre-student teachers and with my people that are in service. I really see that as being a way to help kind of give you back your joy. My hope for the future is that AI becomes more readily available to all people. That allows everyone a more equal and equitable platform to learn on and to grow.

Adam: Artificial intelligence is here to stay, so how can students and teachers embrace it effectively and ethically? Welcome to The Search Bar. I'm your host Adam Sparkes, and on today's episode we're discussing the use of AI technology in classrooms with Jen Weible, professor of teacher and special education at Central Michigan University. Thanks for coming in.

Jen: You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.

Adam: I would like to get an advanced degree and have AI write all my papers for me. Is that possible? Yes or no?

Jen: There is no AI software that will catch cheating completely. They can have-yeah, but why would you do that? You're paying a lot of money to learn stuff and cheating on it actually cheats you out of the experiences and then we'll go from there. With that being said, I firmly believe that AI being a part of an advanced degree is super important.

How do you define the role of AI in the modern classroom?

Adam: Where do you kind of view us as sitting in terms of AI technology that's available in the education space? I know that when ChatGPT first came out just a couple of years ago, I feel like there's a real collective gasp, but it feels like that has settled a little bit. The reality of it has settled in, things have kind of advanced, there's competitors. How do you see it? What do you feel like the current level of stasis is with it?

Jen: Well, to age myself, when I was in high school, we were told we were never going to be able to use a calculator on a lot of our advanced calculations because we wouldn't have one with us at all time and now we have our phone that'll do everything for us at all time. I feel like AI is kind of fitting into that niche where it's going to be a part of our lives, whether you want it to be or not, it's going to be ubiquitous, it's going to be seamless at times and has great power for good and great power for evil.

Adam: I think I remain a little bit cynical about it and I don't use that word lightly because I don't view cynicism as a positive thing necessarily. Skepticism good, cynicism bad. We don't have to get into the semantics of that, but I do feel like I lean towards ending up cynical like, oh gosh, this thing feels like it's doing all the things that I don't want this type of technology to do. It's sort of helping us not do the stuff like you had said, that is most beneficial to us. Do you share that sentiment at all or no?

Jen: You can go that way. Back when I was teaching high school, I had kids that would pass a test and get a good grade on a test because they would write all the answers on a stick of gum so that they could chew it up as soon as they put the answers on the paper and that evidence would be gone. People are going to cheat. In life and school and business no matter what you do, but putting guardrails on hopefully will happen to prevent us from going down the really dark pathways. Right now there's software AI capability of generating deep fake video that is extremely convincing and they have editoring capabilities, all of those kind of things that they can make people look like they're doing things that they're not doing and that's a real powerful danger, but the possibilities though are also really vast.

What are some of the most exciting ways students and teachers are currently using AI in education?

Adam: What are some of the positive directions we're seeing kind of happen or some of the positive outcomes that we're starting to see with it?

Jen: I think that as a whole, and I'm speaking really not for the field because I'm not one of the forefront researchers or anything like that on AI, I don't do a whole lot of that kind of work. I use it more in the classroom and for learning purposes, but the way that it can calculate odds of things, the way that it can calculate advanced computing and machine learning and things like that that we've been using really time-consuming development of things in order to get to certain places. It cuts that process quite a bit. Positively though in personal use and in the classroom being able to use it for a tutor, a thinking partner, someone to push your bounds on creativity, like that best friend that doesn't have 15 hours to sit with you while you're working on something and tell you did you think about this? Playing devil's advocate. Those kind of things I think really, really work with learning processes in ways that we are not able to do as a teacher, a parent, a tutor, a friend. We just can't be there all of the time. That's where I think a lot of the strengths of it, right now especially, are laying.

Adam: Talk a little bit more about that. There's that back-and-forth conversation, and I think there's specific kind of tutor software that does this right now where you can kind go, am I right and rather than it just be like, here's the answer, it kind of challenges you to know whether you're right or not, correct?

Jen: Yeah, if you go into chat-ChatGPT or Claude or one of the other products and you even say “you are acting as a tutor, do not tell me the answer but tell me if I'm right or wrong and lead me to the answer.” It'll do that for you. It'll walk you through mathematical problems, chemistry equations, other kinds of things that you're working on and it'll push you in the right direction without giving you the answer and it'll tell you. It'll explain where you went wrong. Like you say, here's the problem for math, here's a problem, is this the answer correct? Most of the time it's right, it's getting better. You do have to know a little bit to make sure that you're not being completely led down the wrong way, which is a danger, but it'll give you the answer if you ask it for it, but it'll also say, no, this isn't correct, and you could say, can you walk me through the process and it'll tell you do this and you'll do it and it'll explain why and the explaining why part is something that I think a lot of the older software, if you remember Rabbit Reader, when your kids had that or some of the math stuff we had when we were in school with the old Apple IIes and things like that, it would just give you the answer and you're right or wrong and you don't know why, so it does a lot of the explanation things, but it can give you multiple, multiple sets of problems, multiple ways to look at things, multiple sentences to correct. It'll fix your grammar, most of the time correctly. If you ask it to, if you say, this is an idea I have, can you give me five other ideas that are different or divergent? It'll do that for you too, so it'll help kind of spark some creativity sometimes because you'll be like, Ooh, that's something I didn't think about. Tell me more about that, and then you can kind of school a little bit, then you can go and do the deep dive, come back and do that, finish the process that you started working on with it, but just the ability to kind push your thinking in ways very powerful, both possibly for good or for bad too because the underlying algorithms are something we have no control over.

How can AI help with time management in the classroom?

Adam: Sometimes, I mean just there's the baseline benefit of being able to talk about something specific and maybe boring or undesirable for your parent, for your friend, for the teacher. I have to imagine, at least the interaction we were just discussing, it's time. It's a time management tool for them because, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know other than I went to school, I have kids in school, but it does seem like that is probably one of the bigger challenges in day-to-day education is I have 27 kids in this classroom or 30 or 35 or 38 sometimes I just can't have that conversation to keep them going with all of them.

Jen: Just think about how you feel waiting in line to get your driver's license. You are like, Ooh, this is a big waste of time and it's maybe 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, but if you're a student in a class and there's 25 questions and you are having to wait for the teacher to go around and check everybody's work and give them support or whatever, then you're waiting quite a long time and for some students that attention span, they're off doing something else, they're doing things they're not supposed to be doing, they're disengaged and they're done. They're ready to check out. That's something that can give them the support right away. With younger students, the younger they are, the more guardrails you need. There are products that are created that are really beneficial for younger students that have parameters set in place that protect them, that make sure they're not going to get things they're not supposed to have that have some. Khan Academy has a big product right now that they're offering and it is for pay, but-

Adam: It's more age gated than ChatGTP or Gemini or something.

Jen: It’s more age-gated, more standards-based. It has, like I said, the guardrails on it where the students aren't going to go into other areas that they shouldn't be asking for those kinds of things, but for older people, the students I work with here at the university, I think it has so much potential for you're doing your homework at three o'clock in the morning. Obviously you're not going to have somebody to check it for you unless somebody else in your class is not doing homework then, and there's always been Chegg and things like that where students can go and get answers for set up problems or see at least pathways for it, but this is something that could be free, kind of eliminates the paywall there and it allows them to customize it for whatever it is that they're looking for.

Will AI services start to charge more for their use? Will that create access?

Adam: That's actually really interesting too, is that at the moment, and yeah, I'm familiar with Khan Academy. My kids use it at different periods of time when they're a bit younger, but that kind of being the exception to what we're discussing, a lot of this stuff is just available for free. Do you feel like the shoe's going to drop on some sort of edition?

Jen: It's already dropping.

Adam: Yeah? Tell me about it. What's happening?

Jen: There's almost everything is freemium, so you have your entry level that is free and then you have the really good stuff that you pay for, and they give you tastes of it. You can run X number of searches on ChatGPT 4.0 for free and then you have to pay if you want more of the good stuff. So there are paywalls with that. Khan Academy's Khanmigo is a paywall experience. A lot of the products that go into schools have a lot of background stuff, like I said, to keep the students safe, to protect their data, those kinds of things, and that eliminates it being a free product. So there's paywalls, so it's very much niches on the beaches where there's stars and there's, I'm afraid that that has a possibility of really pushing into more of the inequity in digital access and internet and even access to learning.

Adam: I was going to ask that. Does that become a problem because which schools are going to have access to this more readily, and I am going to ask you, but I think I already know the answer. Who's going to pay for the kind of Khan Academy package and not pass that on to families? It's probably going to be the higher-income school districts.

Jen: The school districts that have more money or the ones that go after funding and are able to be funded most likely because they are really at the bottom of the income scale. Those ones are probably going to have the ability to pay for it, but schools already pay for learning management systems. They pay for different apps, they pay for ways that products that people use in their classroom, classroom management systems. They already pay for immense amounts of technology and software. It's just where they're actually going to settle with what they spend the money on.

Adam: Definitely there's a potential for some inequity in there. I mean financially obviously. I mean you think that kind of goes, you live in this country, we've all heard this story, or are you private teacher in your family or a neighbor or somewhere who I'm buying my own school supplies. It's a-

Jen: Donors choose-or donors choose and teachers pay teachers and all of those kind of things for people to get supplies for their classroom.

Adam: Yeah, there's a whole separate podcast about that, but that's a place where inequity and the quality of your education can kind of brew up is what's available. Is there anything else that AI might do or could do that would give you concerns in terms of creating an inequity for the user.

Jen: Besides the inequity in the school districts and who can purchase software and who can purchase the better pieces of software, that kind of thing? During the pandemic, we had a lot of programs in place that pushed the number of households that had at least access to internet close to the 90% range. Some studies stay a little higher, some a little lower. Right now, I think we're still, we're dropped back down to about 70% of households have good internet at home and it doesn't matter what you have at school if you can't access it at home and especially in Michigan, think of the UP, there's a lot of areas where there really isn't access to a whole lot of internet unless you pay for satellite download or something like that. There's a lot of students that do not have the same access at home that other people do, and where we're situated here in rural Michigan, rural areas really have a lot of difficulty accessing internet, having social networks for students, those kind of things that, like you said, whole other podcast there, a whole other topic there, but the inequity in the home systems is something that I think will come to play later on because even if you have access to it at school and they give you really good software, really good AI tutors, that kind of thing, if you can't do it at home, then you don't have the homework. You don't have the out-of-school learning opportunities, students lose out.

Adam: I was thinking about this a little bit when we scheduled you to come on and for me it was like, I'm trying to think positive about it. I was like, oh man, that does feel like an issue. I do remember the same thing during the pandemic talking about students going to school online and students that simply just didn't have access to the appropriate internet to be able to participate. It feels like AI is going to accelerate that difference for students or just for people who have access to data in general. So if you don't have access to, let's call it high-speed internet for somebody will tell me what is actually high-speed internet, but if I don't have access to high-speed internet, it's sort of like in the eighties, the telecom act, people who didn't have phones, it suddenly became a thing. Well, for emergency purposes, for just being able to communicate in general, we're going to try to put phones into rural areas. That was a huge public works program. It feels like in the US we're always kind of teeter-tottering between how much of this should be a public's work program between it being just private enterprise that provides data, not necessarily looking to get into that, but it feels like AI is going to accelerate that difference. It is dramatically different now, so we get to a point where it feels like maybe we have to have a solution for people at some point.

What are some things AI can do to help teachers in the classroom?

Jen: Yeah, and I think that, like I said, initially, it's going to become kind of a ubiquitous technology where it's like your phone, having a phone or having a calculator, you won't be able to do a lot of things if you don't have access to it. But on the flip side of that, some of the things that I see coming out of it though are really a resurgence in people appreciating things that are self-made, handmade, authentic products. Going away even a little bit from cheap mass-produced clothing and artwork and things like that where there's a lot of people that are prioritizing the artistic expression that humans have on their own on the outside of AI. So there is a lot of that and that kind of ties into where I see AI kind of fitting in the classroom. Nobody goes into education because you want to do paperwork that is not anywhere on the top 10, 20. 100 list of what people like about it. They go into education because they really want to make connections with students, be a role model, help guide students in really good healthy choices with their life paths, and they want to share their joy of learning and share the joy of a subject that they love. And none of that is paperwork and none of that is administrative stuff. And the amount of that is one of the reasons why teachers are leaving the profession is just the busy work, the lack of support, that kind of thing. And I see AI when I'm working with my pre-student teachers and with my people that are in service, I really see that as being a way to help give you back your joy.

Adam: Yeah, I guess give me a quick example of some of those administrative tasks that AI can do well and ethically for a teacher.

Jen: Let's say that I want to do a lesson on ancient Japan in my social studies classroom. It can help me gather background information and put it in packaged ways that my students can actually read because in my classroom of 30, just to give a round number, I maybe have six or seven students that are reading way above reading level, grade level. I have a bunch of students that are probably at grade level or slightly above or below, and then I probably have maybe a quarter of my students that are reading it maybe instead of a seventh grade level, they read it as a third grade level and no shame. And I'm not saying there's any shame in any of that. I'm just saying that that's just the reality of what the classroom looks like. So if I want all of my students to be able to read this, I can take the piece of information I want my students to know and I can put it into AI and I can say, can you set this reading level at third grade?

Adam: Oh, that's really smart.

Jen: And so there are products that do that. There are products out there that you can get, let's say a news article. It's kind of National Geographic-esque, maybe on sea, sea lampreys or something like that. And the actual program, the kids open up the page and then the Lexile score gets set to whatever it is that they need and they can all read the same article, talk about the same thing, have the same pictures, nobody is a bluebird and a red bird. It eliminates some of the stigma of not being able to read at the same level. It gives you the same content, but it makes it appropriate for the students' reading level. Everything does not do that. So I can take a piece of pretty advanced text, feed it in, and it can set the reading level for it at various levels. So I could have different papers that I give to different students or different pages that I give different students so that they can read it at that level. I either could not do that before and I would've had to support those students in different ways with somebody sitting with them providing a lot of worksheets to help, taking extra time, or I can give them that text and they can read it and they can understand what is going on. And I can do that in about five minutes versus five hours.

Adam: Yeah, I was going to say I didn't really think about that adjusting the reading level. I was thinking initially, well, sometimes you have a lesson and it's like I've been using just creating documents takes time. But you're talking about not only am I creating the document, I'm creating the document and I'm sort of tailoring it because this subject isn't about phonics, it isn't about my reading level, it's about getting this information about Japan or about the sea lampreys, and now I can do it and create more equity in my classroom. I never considered that. That's really cool.

Jen: Right, and that happens with everything. If I have a student in my class that has an IEP and it says that they need their reading materials at a different level, then it's up to me to take my tests and scale it to their level, their ability. I can do that easily with AI. I mean I would check it. You need to check. It is not perfect. There are hallucinations. You need that human-in-the-loop experience still, where the person who is generating the documents in that is still a part of the process, but it can help facilitate all of those kind of things. Or let's say that you and I are working on your multiplication skills and you are an excellent student. You're excelling at two-digit multiplication, so I want to push you ahead and give you just a little bit extra. I can just say type in, can I have some easy three-digit multiplication problems? Provide an explanation of how you got one example. It can print that all out and now I have your advanced materials right now, and I can say I need extra problems for two-digit multiplication that are easy without carrying over, with answers and explanations and I can print them out and I can send them home with Johnny who needed a little bit more of help with his math today. So instead of me sitting down and writing out a whole other set or giving them a set they've already had, I can do that with AI really quickly. And what I feel like AI has the power to do in the classroom then is it takes those kind of things that take hours and hours and hours and it lets me concentrate on personalizing it to the student. It lets me concentrate on making this connection with my students, building relationships, at being able to really do the kind of things that people want to do in the classroom instead of the other. And it doesn't take away then the creativity and the fun of creating really good lessons in design. It does all this stuff you don't want to do.

Adam: And I imagine just the nuance of being able to update the context of certain lessons a lot easier because I know we're talking about decades ago now for me, but I can remember being not that long.

Jen: That's what we think.

Adam: Being in middle school and just being like, this seems old and they give you a ditto, remember the term ditto. My kids don't even know what that means.

Jen: I lived on those when I started teaching.

Adam: Well, right. And part of it is like you're busy and the curriculum is proven. We went to school in a time where things didn't change as quickly. I don't, I probably wasn't thinking about my teachers being not with it as much as kids do now because everything changes every 30 days instead of every three years or something. But I imagine creating current contexts that maybe you're not familiar with, whether it's a pop culture context or something that's happening in social studies in the last year, being able to take a lesson and update it.

Jen: Well, you do need to make sure that there are time constraints on AI is built on large language models, it's built on databases and there is a time constraint on those. So most of the stuff that you can see has a hard deadline of where you cannot get current information from it. Some of them are updating more quickly than others and they are updating them now. But you have to be really careful with that. And I will say there are certain tools that will give you good references and cite different webpages, pull them together for you. And there's other ones that blatantly make up stuff. So if you ask it for an academic paper citation-

Adam: They’re guestimating?

Jen: No! Academic paper with citations, don't do that. It makes this stuff up. It uses real researchers, it gives it a date, it makes up a title, it puts it in there. It looks like it's a real paper in the reference page. It looks like it's a real citation. It does not exist. And it does that-When I've done it with, I've had students do it just for us to see, because I wanted to show them that it can't do this five reference paper on this whatever topic. Three of the five, two of the five bald-faced lies, they don't exist.

Adam: So it kind of goes into a fictional version of a paper, at some point?

Jen: Oh, it hallucinates, it's called hallucination. It hallucinates a lot with things like that. So you do have to know what you're talking about. That's one of the guide rails or guardrails that I talk about. You need to know what you're talking about. You need to have a general idea on what it is or you need to know, give your students ways to look at it and ways to check the accuracy of it. Like we used to say with Wikipedia, people used to say, oh, Wikipedia is going to be the end of all education. But people use a Wikipedia all the time now for a starting reference and it's actually one of the most up-to-date references that you can find because people update it all the time and they're-

Adam: Wikipedia's done a pretty good job of putting those guardrails up.

Jen: They have those guardrails and that's kind of where I hope, my hope is that AI goes to that direction where it becomes this community-sourced resource where people can really find good stuff that is current and it is going to be helpful.

Adam: So there can be community inputs where we go, Hey, I've noticed in your example that this, in your case, it's a person who does education research. This is a real person, this paper doesn't exist and it's sort of just pointing towards them as a source, but they haven't really worked on this. But if you could provide that input, then it could more quickly update that.

Jen: Oh yeah, I was laughing because really one of my students when we did this little exercise, one of the papers they pulled was from a friend of mine, it cited a friend of mine. I'm like, they don't do that kind of research. So, I had to share them that with them we had a good laugh.

How important is it to use the proper prompts?

Adam: So part of the skill is learning also probably really good prompts. I mean knowing how to prompt and ask for something more specific. Because I feel like the more general, the more you want it to just do all the work. And I've done this too where I'm playing with it and it's like there's a lot of elaborate stuff it's telling me, but if I don't know enough about where I'm asking it to get me this information, it's hard for me to know whether I trust it or not.

Jen: Yeah and also the term a lot of people are using is human in the loop. You need to know what you're asking for. You need to know if it's accurate and you need to be able to kind of verify what's there and not just hand off tasks.

How can schools ensure AI tools are used ethically?

Adam: So let's go a little deeper into this where it's like what's the ethical way to be engaging with this? Which I think kind of what we're talking about for the teacher, what about for the student? What's the way we talked about using it as a tutor to bounce things off, but for the student to be organized for the student to get work done. How would you like to see students positively using, and you can pick a grade level as an example or something if you want.

Jen: For the most part, I want them to see the power of it and the pitfalls and to kind of play with some of the products. So there are a lot of ways to prompt engineer. One of my favorite chain of thought helps you drill down. Tree of thought helps you expand and get some diverse ideas. So I like both of those a lot just for starting things. So if I want to know a lot about a subject, I might just ask it to give me some general information on it, background on it, feed it the question, whatever. But from there I'm going to want to drill down on the areas I don't know. So I'm going to ask it more specific questions, ask it to expand on this area, tell me more about this. Just like you would with a person talking to you. And then I also like to ask it, what are three other ideas that aren't listed here and have it give me other ideas, other ways to think about it. That's just a start. The blank page sitting in front of you is sometimes the worst thing. So writer's block procrastination, tying all into those kind of things. I like to tell them, feed it in. You can ask it for an outline, you can ask it for a rough draft of something and then you start to play with it and you add in the information that you need to really make it rich and vibrant.

Jen: I know for me, I'll write things down like pen and paper and then I'll read them to it and I'll be like, here's the ideas I have. Can you organize those into a document for me? And I find that that's where it's really helpful because for me, I'm good at generating the ideas that I want sometimes, but sometimes it feels better to be not at the computer. So I'll write them down and then I'll go back to ChatGPT or something and I'll be like, Hey, we're going to turn this into a document. We're going to organize it and I'll give it some prompt for the hierarchy and they'll just rattle off a ton of stuff and it will generally do a really great job with that. Is that a problem in the education space if students are doing that? I mean

Jen: We have Grammarly.

Adam: Yeah.

Jen: Grammarly is AI. It already helps with grammar. It already helps with organization. I think this is really beneficial for people whose whatever language they're working in is not their first language. It really helps with some of those kind of things and the way that even adjectives are placed based on the language, that kind of thing. What I think is better though, after the first draft though, is if you take your good draft and you feed it in and you're like, where are holes in my argument? It'll find your holes in your argument. Do I have a good topic sentence for every paragraph? Are my transitions between can you check the transitions between paragraphs and give me tips on how to improve them? What are ideas that I might've missed? You feed it in a paper on the positive aspects of using AI in the classroom and ask it for negative aspects that you didn't think about or how can I balance this argument? Play devil's advocate. It'll do that for you. And that's where I said, you don't necessarily have somebody who's in your class who's on the same time crunch writing a similar paper and you're both six hours from when it's due and you haven't slept yet. You don't have time for somebody to read your paper and say like, oh, these are the things you need to do with this.

Adam: Yeah, go make these three changes right now.

Jen: Yeah, but it can really help kind of point you in the right direction for it.

Adam: I can hear us talking about this though, and I can hear people going, I don't even like that. They don't even, some people are going to, I'm not counting myself among them, but I think some people are going to look at that and go, that's some form of laziness.

Jen: Do you ever talk to your colleagues about an article you're writing about a piece that you want to put out? Do you ask for their feedback? Do you take it to the writing center on campus and have a human look at it? People do that all the time. We require students at different times within our educational process here to take it to the writing center and have them look at it to help them with their writing. We require students in high school to take our feedback and apply it to it. This is taking a person out of the loop a little bit, but it is also giving you that immediate instead of waiting two weeks for somebody to get back to you on it.

For parents concerned about the use of AI in schools, what would you say to address their worries while highlighting its benefits?

Adam: What's some advice that you would give to parents who have maybe younger kids or kids that they're still giving help with or advice about school? What are some positive, safe ways for them to guide their students to self actuate that AI school experience?

Jen: I would, number one, have them comply with what the school policy is because you do not want your student to be punished for using a tool that they're not allowed to use. Thinking back to calculators like we used to have whole tests, SATs where you are not allowed to use a calculator, that kind of thing. So make sure that they're complying with the rules even if you don't personally agree with it. There's a lot of products that are created for specific age groups, so if parents are hesitant about it, they could look into that. There are free versions for parents on a lot of them that even the schools have to pay for that they could look into if they feel like their student needs some extra help. And I do think that this helps address the equity we talked about a little while ago, parents who don't have the money to pay for tutors. This could be a way for them to help support their students using some of the products that are out there. Sit with them, walk them through how to do it, how to ethically use it, how to put a good prompt in, talk to your kids about what is good use and not just like you would with any other internet product you want to talk to, you don't look for this, this and this. You don't do this online. You don't bully online. Just talking to your kids about using it for, you know using it for the good power of good versus other ways that they could handle that. And just double-checking on them. Ask them to talk about their assignments, talk about the work that they're doing. I think that works as well.

What’s next for AI in the classroom?

Adam: So what's next? What do you feel like we're on the precipice of, at least in the education space? What are you looking forward to seeing get better or what do you feel like is on the horizon?

Jen: There's going to be a lot of products produced. Tech wants to sell stuff. So I think that there's going to be a wash of products that are coming through. Some of them good, some of them bad, all of them collecting data, that kind of thing. What I really hope that this helps us do is, I really hope that it helps teachers be able to, like in the classroom. I really hope that this helps teachers be able to create really creative, engaging lessons that students really want to dive into and learn about and create products that demonstrate their understanding that they're really proud of and help reengage the teachers in the profession and like I said, initially, kind of bring back their joy of being in the classroom and working with the students and take away some of the pieces that are just so time consuming and are not fun.

Adam: Yeah, grading those 35 arithmetic papers.

Jen: Well, I don't know that I would trust it to grade it, but creating the 17 documents that you need to demonstrate you've hit these standards or helping you create interdisciplinary, because you don't ever go out and just learn one thing. You don't ever go out and learning to ride a bike is not only kinesthetic, it is also going to tie in your visual acuity and it's going to tie in your balance in a million other things. Teaching is kind of the same way. You don't ever just learn one way. You don't ever just teach one way. Being able to create these interdisciplinary things across subjects and make lessons more authentic for students, I think is the way that I'm hoping that AI can help drive the profession.

Adam: Yeah, that'd be really awesome. And hopefully we don't all get monetize to death and have all of our data stolen even more. That's the hope for the future, right?

Jen: You want to go there to end it?

Adam: No, I'm not.

Jen: My hope for the future is that AI becomes more readily available to all people. That allows everyone a more equal and equitable platform to learn on and to grow as humans now and as they age and get older and want to learn different things.

Adam: I can get behind that and it's a much better way to end it.

Jen: Thank you.

Adam: Thanks for coming in, Jen, it was great.

Jen: It was great to sit down and talk to you. Thanks.

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The views and opinions expressed in these episodes are strictly those of the host and guest speaker.