K12LEADERS

Author: Matthew Winters

  • Resource Share – SlidesGPT

    Resource Share – SlidesGPT

    I, like many of us in educational technology, have been somewhat taken away by AI over the last few months. ChatGPT, Dall e, and Midjourney have been weekly, if not daily, topics of discussion, along with AI policy, frameworks, assignments, and assessments in education. For example, just in this past week I have run an edcamp session on AI in schools, developed coursework for an AI course, and shared a presentation with a local educator team on creativity and AI.

    However, throughout all of the changes, I have been keeping an eye on two specific threads. First, is the aforementioned creativity aspect of AI and how it will change the creative output of learners and educators. Yesterday I discussed how a decade or so ago, education feared the proliferation of cell phones and its limiting of creativity in individuals, but we have seen the opposite. Short-form videos are just one example of how cell phones are a tool for creativity right now. The other strand I have been following is the easy-to-learn, adaptable tools for any classroom. Tools like Conker, Mote’s AI quiz generation tool, or Firefly, Adobe’s in-beta AI Swiss knife, are two that immediately come to mind as useful tools for many educators to move through their designing, planning, and creation phases in their classrooms.

    SlidesGPT is another tool that I think fits this group. If you are unfamiliar, SlidesGPT uses an AI Chatbot format to build a slide deck for you on a topic of your choosing. In the deck above, you will find my first exploration of SlidesGPT. I had it build a presentation on a topic I presented early this year and it did a fairly good job of addi威而鋼
    ng pictures (from Unsplash) and providing good content. The really interesting thing is that slide two was generated by SlidesGPT and it is basically a caveat for users that it might generate inaccurate or offensive content. Other education-focused AI tools have particular blocks that will not accept specific, inappropriate content (looking at you, Conker) as prompts. As a starting point for slide decks, much like using chatbots to help build assignment descriptions, SlidesGPT is a good starting point if you are not sure where to start or need help with an outline, but the human element for editing, rephrasing, finding accurate information, and personalized content, is where the rubber hits the road. Check out SlidesGPT at this link.

  • Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom with Dr. Scott McLeod

    Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom with Dr. Scott McLeod

    If you go to ISTE23 in Philadelphia this year, make sure that you make some time for Playgrounds. ISTE Playgrounds are short table presentations made by experts all centered around the same topic.  These interactive sessions help everyone make personal connections to content and give you time to ask your questions to experts who can help you build your understanding.

    Case in point, at ISTE22 in New Orleans, I visited the Coaching Playground with a few of my Utah educator friends. They were coaches in a local district and I took them to this space to explore what coaches in other areas of the US are doing to help their teachers. While they were exploring different tables and listening to the presenters, I found myself at Dr. Scott McLeod’s table where he was discussing the 4 Shifts Protocol. If you are unfamiliar with the 4 Shifts, it is a companion piece to SAMR developed by Dr. McLeod and his colleagues. Where SAMR is a theoretical framework, 4 Shifts gives teachers direct questions to answer about their technology use in their learning environment to connect their pedagogy to their technology use. It provides a structure rather than just a framework. I had not heard too much about the 4 Shifts and immediately dug into Dr. McLeod and his work by asking a half dozen questions. It was great to talk to the direct expert about the content.

    Flash forward ten months, Dani and I had the pleasure and honor to bring Dr. McLeod, who is on sabbatical, to Homeroom to talk about deeper learning, the 4 Shifts, and what is working in schools. The episode was a rollercoaster as Dr. McLeod had a great answer for every point and brought in great research to back up his points. One point that kept cropping into my mind was Dr. McLeod’s work doing site visits to innovative schools across the country. For instance, you will hear him talk about an interdisciplinary school in Colorado that is working on clothes-washing solutions for astronauts. This project includes heavy use of STEM, but also English to document the work they are doing and provide ample backing for their process, CTE for the mechanical processes, and even social studies to understand the impact of prior missions. These schools are doing work that is very small in idea, but deeply expansive in how much they cover per project. Check out the full episode at this link.

    Also, check out Dr. McLeod’s great blog Dangerously Irrelevant, and his podcasts Redesigning for Deeper Learning and LeaderTalk.

  • Get Googley – Video Resources on Docs, Slides, and Forms

    Get Googley – Video Resources on Docs, Slides, and Forms

    When I was a kid I really wanted to make videos. Being able to capture and then slice together scenes to make a movie was always so intriguing. I remember watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too many times as a teenager and just loving how scenes were cut to make movement or tension. However, I didn’t have a camera or a computer that would edit footage or a school with those tools. So, out of practicality, I put those aspirations on the shelf until I was a teacher.

    When I entered my classroom for the first time I started watching videos that explained the need for asynchronous content for students to learn on their own at their own pace. I was immediately taken by this idea and wanted to start making videos. I started with my students, letting them make short, narrative silent films in our class. It was an amazing experience that I did every year and could not have been more pleased with the engagement and work that my students produced. I then started making videos while I was out of the classroom at conferences or at district events. Then I started making PD videos for my school. Now I am lucky enough to make a series for UEN called Get Googley, among other video projects.

    We just released a new video in the series and it connects to my overall passion for video. As a coach during the pandemic, I learned very quickly that most teachers did not make videos, which meant they did not have a workflow, but more importantly, they did not have a workflow for adding video content to their classrooms from content providers. Most would add a link to a YouTube video page, but that kind of linking is fraught with distractions from embedded advertisements and links to other videos. Thankfully Google has made some great updates to how YouTube works in Workspace for Edu. In fact, this video was partially influenced by Eric Curts’ post about the updates from BETT (check out the full post over at Control Alt Achieve).

    So, in this edition of Get Googley, we explore different ways to embed video on a variety of Google products: Docs, Slides, and Forms. Each method is a low-impact way of adding video for a variety of purposes. I particularly like the Docs/Drawings method as it opens up some great ways to communicate with parents or the larger community without giving them a hyperlink. Check out the full video on this page and feel free to share it with your educator community.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEjUUHoU178

  • Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom UCET23 Reflection

    Podcast Share – UEN Homeroom UCET23 Reflection

    I attended my first UCET in 2018. I had just come back from SXSWEDU week and I was on fire for more ideas and community. At the suggestion of my good friend, Quin Henderson, I headed to the University of Utah and joined the conference. I was excited to talk to a lot of the speakers as part of our podcast project at the time, Edtrex Rewind, and to just take in the conference. It was the first time that I had attended a state-level education conference and I was tickled by how much fun I had throughout the event. Over the next few years, I presented at UCET and engaged with the larger community through #UTedchat on Wednesday nights.

    In 2020, I applied to be on the board. I didn’t think I would make it. There had to be more qualified educators and community members that were available to help out with the conference, but to my deep surprise, while in a meeting to figure out the best way to approach the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I found out that I was on the board. Now, just a few years later, I was lucky enough to be elected president and to run the conference. This year’s conference was the culmination of a lot of goals for myself and for the board. We wanted to have a larger community represented at the conference. We wanted national figures at the conference to interact with Utah educators. With the inclusion of ULEAD, the Utah Teacher Fellows, the Friends of the Salt Lake City Public Library, the STEM Action Center, Show Up for Teachers, USBE, and UEN we brought a larger swath of Utah organizations to share their work with the conference, but we also were able to bring in national figures and organizations including Eric Curts, Sundance, Dan Ryder, Micah Shippee, Dee Lanier, Darren Hudgins, The Modern Classrooms Project, and more to the conference. In conjunction with that, we were able to move forward with moving to a larger venue for the 2024 conference and to make the president a two-year position, which means I get another shot next year.

    Dani and I were able to sit down with some great field recordings from the conference and discuss the conference and UCET’s impact on both of us, Dani as a past president and me as the current president. We hit a lot of the great moments from the conference, both in 2023 and from prior years. Listen in to be introduced to the best education conference in Utah and prime yourself for 2024! Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

    https://uen-homeroom.simplecast.com/episodes/post-ucet-teacher-review-UctQ3gAc