Cool Tool Alert -- Templates

 I stumbled upon another cool tool to share with you, so no AI this week! Instead, how would you like some fun, creative templates to have kids go beyond regular learning?

If you're not familiar with Matt Miller, you're missing out! He offers so many creative ideas and loads of practical information, you'll be on brain overload after you spend a little time on his website!

He recently shared out some templates -- everything from social media templates to game templates to lesson plan templates, the legwork has been done and these templates are just waiting for you and your students to complete them and turn them into something awesome!

I took a look at some of the templates and immediately had some ideas for how they could be used. Part of my brainstorm follows:

• Airbnb: Write a description of Brian Robeson's camp from the novel Hatchet.
• Airbnb: Write a description of an animal's habitat from the point of view of the animal that lives there.
• Spotify playlist: Create a list of songs that represent the theme of a book,
• Spotify playlist: Create a list of songs that contain certain poetic or literary elements (example: songs that use similes and metaphors; songs that use alliteration).
• Amazon product page: Come up with an invention and create a page for it on Amazon.
• Virtual field trip postcard template: Have students create postcards after studying a particular geographical area.
• Design your locker template: Create a locker for a character from a story.

There are oodles of templates -- I haven't even scratched the surface! Carve out some time to scroll through and let yourself be inspired! Which ones do you think you would like to use? Need help? Let me know and we can get together and do some epic planning with these templates!

Cool Tool Alert -- Screencast App on Chromebooks

 Would you be interested in a way to create a video of a lesson you teach for kids to view when they're absent or to be able to review if they need? What about an easy way to create a flipped lesson? Or a way for kids to do a quick and easy demonstration of their understanding for you on a topic? What if this video also automatically generated a transcript that you can edit? Well, your wish has come true!

Here's the icon
for the Screencast
app on the
Chromebook.

Meet the Screencast app on the Chromebook! Literally, with the click of your mouse, you can create a screencast (with your beautiful face on or off camera) and a transcript that you can edit (remove text, correct text, annotate text -- please note, in the video demo below, I misspoke and said you can translate the transcript into another language. Sorry if that's something you wanted and I just dashed your hopes. If you DO need this, let me know and I will find a way for you to do this -- like a copy/paste into a Google Doc and then create a translation). 

When you open the Screencast app, you'll see this:

Here's what the icons mean in the toolbar:

1: Record full screen
2: Record partial screen
3: Record window

Click on the settings icon to turn off the camera if you don't want yourself in the little circle in the video.

Here's a Screencast video with the transcript where I talk about this app (this is also where I misspeak about translating the transcript, just as a reminder). Screencast recordings live in the Screencast app as well as your Google Drive! If you share a screencast from the app, your only choice will be to share it within CSD 17. However, if you share it from Drive, you can set it so anyone with the link can view it. The link from the Screencast app has the transcript. The link from Google Drive does not.

I would LOVE to help you learn this application and find ways for you AND your students to use it! Let me know if you want some help and I'll come on over and walk you through it -- plus you'll get a gun sticker for using one of the Cool Tools I feature!

Exploring AI -- Prompting

 One of the keys to making AI work for you is being able to tell the AI very clearly what you need from it. After all, no matter how smart AI is, it's only going to be as smart as you tell it to be! Telling an AI tool what to do is called prompting, and that has spawned a new term -- promptcrafting. The book The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education has probably the best framework I've seen for creating a prompt. It's called PREP:

• P -- PROMPT: introduce the question to the AI tool with a prompt, what you want it to do.
• R -- ROLE: give it a role.
• E -- EXPLICIT: be as detailed as you can in what you want it to do.
• P -- PARAMETERS: set up the parameters of the answer.

Here's a rough example. Let's say I want to create some study questions for the novel Fahrenheit 451. I could go to a tool like ChatGPT and ask it to write some discussion questions for the novel, but I may not get great results. A better way to ask would be something like this: "Create a list of discussion questions for the novel Fahrenheit 451. You are a teacher who wants to be sure her students understand the novel and can think critically about it. There should be at least 20 questions at all different levels of Bloom's taxonomy. The questions should be answerable by 8th grade students. Provide suggested answers for the questions as well." By giving all this information, you are more likely to get useful results. The great thing is that if you feel like you didn't get what you wanted, you can regenerate a response or refine it!

If you're interested in getting really good at promptcrafting, here's a self-directed lesson from Code.org, Khan Academy, ISTE, and ETS that will walk you through promptcrafting for novices all the way up to experts! What I have discovered is that the more I practice writing good prompts, the better I am getting at it and it is saving me so much time!

Do you have a promptcrafting story to share? If so, I'd love for you to drop it in the comments! Did you write a good prompt, lousy prompt, revise a prompt? How did you like your results? The more we can share, the more we can learn from each other and become really skilled at leveraging AI tools!

Cool Tool Alert -- Curipod

 I have been hearing some buzz about an online application called Curipod, so I decided to check it out today. I heard it was kind of like Nearpod AND that is uses AI, so I was naturally intrigued. And after trying it out for just a small amount of time, I think it looks REALLY COOL!

In a nutshell, Curipod lets you put in a topic or subject area and a grade level and it will generate an interactive lesson for you (looks very similar to Nearpod lessons). It's editable, so if there are things in the lesson you want to change, you can do that! After all, that's one of the most important things to remember about using anything generated by AI -- you need to check it out thoroughly to make sure it's accurate and doing what you need it to do! It's just a tool -- YOU'RE the expert!

You can also put in a topic, have kids write a response, and let Curipod give AI generated feedback. My experiment with this aspect of Curipod is that the feedback can be great or nor so great, depending on what you're really looking for in a student writing sample. But again, this is a known limitation of AI generated content, so while you could try this out with your students, you may need to add your own feedback to supplement the AI created feedback!

As a quick side note, kids do NOT have to use their own name to join a Curipod lesson, but they can -- it IS SOPPA compliant, and we DO have an agreement in place! Oh, and it's FREE!!!!! Yes, it has a paid version, but from what I can tell, the free version will do plenty -- no need to pay!

Check out the video below of me doing a demo of Curipod for you. It's rough because I was literally doing it on the fly, but I also wanted to show you just how easy it is to use!

Intrigued? I'd LOVE to come help you use Curipod and even sit in on your class when you use it!

This is a great way to dip your teacher toe into the AI world and see how it can work for YOU!