.jpg)
Compass PD Podcast with Dr. Carrie Hepburn
Compass PD Podcast with Dr. Carrie Hepburn
Compass PD Podcast Episode 51: Harnessing AI for Efficiency: What Educators Should Know
In this episode, the Compass PD team explores how educators can use AI to streamline administrative tasks, boost productivity, and enhance workflow. We’ll discuss practical applications, key pitfalls to avoid, and why keeping human expertise at the center of educational decisions is crucial. Tune in to learn how to leverage AI efficiently and effectively without losing sight of what matters most!
Referenced:
Gen AI MasterClass
Common Sense Media - AI Articles
Welcome to the Compass PD podcast, where we explore research-based practices and new innovations to empower educators and improve student learning. I'm your host, dr Kari Hepburn, and today I am joined by Dr Stephanie Brenner and Dr Natalie Fowlert, and we're going to discuss a topic that's become more and more relevant artificial intelligence, or AI. Hi Natalie, hi Stephanie, hello. I'm so glad to have you guys here. It's going to be fun. I think it's going to be a really fun topic today.
Speaker 1:Now, to be clear, we are not AI experts here at Compass PD. In fact, we believe it takes 10,000 hours to master a topic, and that's the time that we spend in education in the content areas that we serve in. But we wanted to learn more about AI, and so we've taken time to learn from AI experts like Ethan Malik, allie K Miller, manuel Sensilli and Don Allen III through a master class called Achieve More with Gen AI. And then we've been reading other resources, and I'll make sure that we link all of that in the show notes so you have access to it and you can check it out. Today, we want to talk about how educators can use AI to streamline administrative tasks and enhance their productivity. I think that's like something we all need right in life, don't we Just like every day?
Speaker 1:We're also going to touch on some key pitfalls that you want to avoid when it comes to using AI. So if you're curious about how AI can be a practical tool in your school or in your classroom, this episode is for you. So we're going to get started with this part of our podcast today and talk about how can we use AI as a collaborator or a co-pilot. How can we have that as our mindset? Ai can be a collaborator for us or a co-pilot for us. Don't we just kind of be thinking about that? What are some of your thoughts?
Speaker 2:When I think about AI as a collaborator, I think that as educators in general, we get afraid of it. Or even just in any workforce, is it going to replace me? And so, if we think about it as a collaborator or a co-pilot, that it still needs that human touch, it still needs that human mind, that content expert, to dig through whatever task we're asking it to do. I think that that is super important, and we want to make sure that we're not using it to replace us, that if I'm just throwing something into ChatGPT or any of these programs and it's producing something for me, then what's my purpose in education in the world or whatever? And so we really need to make sure that we are working alongside it and not letting it replace us.
Speaker 1:Thoughtful Thank you place us Thoughtful.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Some of the things that I recently have been trying to give and helping with emails responses because I can. I'm slow when it comes to writing and getting my thoughts out and I will put off answering emails or answering emails because I don't want to take the time to compose the response, because it's going to take me a while, and so putting that thought into an AI and having it respond is really helping me save time with some of the things that I'm trying to be more productive with and I know that's kind of an example, but just what are the things that are taking up most of my time in my day and is there a way that AI like chat GPT can help me with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that you mentioned that, stephanie, because if for anybody who doesn't know, I'm a high school educator by trade and so I sometimes can be a little abrasive and I'm very like, cut to the point. So I might at times to have to formulate an email that might come off pretty rough and I'll send it to Carrie and say hey, will you wordsmith this, will you put a little bit of a softer touch on it? But sometimes she's not available, and so that might be another way that, instead of asking someone else to do that work, can I throw that same email into ChatGPT and say I'm sometimes a rip the bandaid off kind of person and I need to be a little bit more kid glove and asking for its help, instead of asking someone else to read it and seeing if that might also help.
Speaker 1:I love all of those ideas. I'm thinking something that you're asking Natalie to give you feedback. You're asking it to help you improve or change or alter, or give you ideas on how to alter that that kind of thinking. When I was thinking about Stephanie, I was thinking like you're using it as a brainstorming buddy, like a way that it can help you not look at a blank something. Don't you ever just like I, get super overwhelmed when I'm looking at a blank page and I'm trying to create something, like you know whether it's an email or it's. My brain is so full right now of all of the things. Can you help me by asking me questions about what I'm trying to do or what problem I'm trying to solve? So I use it a lot as like a problem solving buddy. Think about who I am. I want to make sure it comes across maybe in this kind of tone or this kind of manner. So can you give me feedback or help me problem solve? On maybe some words that could be altered.
Speaker 3:So I have to say this because what you just said really made me think of something. You and I and Natalie's a lot better at this, but you and I I will try to come up with a name or a title for something for hours A heading, a heading, anything A heading or a title and in the recently we've really kind of gotten better about putting that idea of what we're trying to come up with into chat, GPT and have it, give us some titles and then wordsmith it from there. But it's helped us like name some things really quickly and that really has improved our productivity, and so that just reminded me that was like something that we have really started to use it for.
Speaker 1:I struggle with summarizing, like I have all of the things in there and it's not a summary, it's there's too many words, we're very wordy and I feel like the three of us all struggle with work. We have a lot of words, as people will tell me when they were like you guys have lots of words, we, we do, sorry, we, we kind of do so it does. I do find like summarizing ideas or summarizing notes or giving me highlights of an you know meeting or something. I can have it transcribe the notes from a meeting if it's online, and then it can just summarize and develop action, like the action lists and the tasks and stuff. My husband's actually better at using it than I am, but I keep thinking, man, if I would have had that when I was still in the school district, walking out of a meeting, wouldn't it be nice? Because the time that it takes to put all that down on paper is really, really important. So we have some ideas.
Speaker 2:Oh, I want to throw this out there really fast.
Speaker 2:Am I wrong in thinking that sometimes, when we have Zoom meetings, your husband will record the meeting and do a transcript of it and then ask ChatGPT to condense that into a summary?
Speaker 2:I'm just thinking about like a classroom, like most classrooms have technology, like so if I had a kid who was absent today and I took my and I recorded my lesson while I was just up teaching and they did a transcript of it and I could send a quick summary to the kid, like hey, I think about lesson planning, um, and if you did that, like if you just hit record on that, you could have some of those lesson plans already, kind of summarized of what you did for the day, um, and send that off to a kid or you definitely have to reread it to make sure it's accurate, because we don't want it to replace us. But that might be another quick tool, because I know that I've spent hours, you know, getting work together for a kid or summarizing what happened, that they could watch the video or they could look at a quick summary of it watch the video or they could look at a quick summary of it.
Speaker 1:That's a great idea. I'm thinking about how sometimes, when I use voice to text, you do. It is probably a really good idea. The best practice would be to go back and read it, because you never know how we enunciate words and what what could come out sometimes good, sometimes not so good, Like I don't know how to get that good sometimes not so good, Like I don't know how to say that, but yeah, don't just, yeah, don't do that.
Speaker 1:But I do think that that is us moving into thinking about now. We were talking about how can we use AI as a collaborator or a co-pilot. Now let's kind of think about what would be some practical applications that, as educators, we could use AI as our co-pilot, as our collaborator. Let's get really specific with some examples that you think you might use it for.
Speaker 2:So do you want me to give you some things that I have actually used it for?
Speaker 1:I don't think that hurts at all.
Speaker 2:I think people love that. So even just recently or today, I was like thinking about at the beginning of the year I always do um back to like get to know you activities with high school kids, and I was like I was very specific, I'm like I'm an English teacher, I want reading, writing and speaking kind of mixed in, and what are some you know you're like you've been doing this for so long, you're always doing the same ones or you might be sharing them across vertically and they already did that in another class or whatever. So I asked for some ideas. Well, it was interesting because all of the ideas had reading attached to it. So it was like bring a book that you've already read. And I was like, oh, teach high school English.
Speaker 2:My kids aren't like a lot of them, are they? They're reluctant readers, let's face it. So that could be very intimidating for a large portion of my population. And so then I went back in and said what you know, what if they're reluctant readers? What if they don't have books? How can they still incorporate this? And so it gave me another list of like five things that I could choose from, and I was reading through them. I was oh, but it still sparked ideas of like.
Speaker 2:It was a great brainstorming. It was a starting point because it was like, oh, I could do this, and so, like, one of them was like, ask the kids to create a timeline of five significant events in their life and then pick one to tell a story. So they've written briefly a statement, they've talked to a neighbor, but then, like it didn't tell me this, but I was like, oh, I could then ask them to choose one of those to write a narrative to tell me a little bit more about themselves, and then we could use that as a starting point or part of their readers writers notebooks that we can use later. So that was one example of a way that I just recently used it Something that I thought of that.
Speaker 3:I have used it for a lot. I used it a lot when I was doing some curriculum writing with a school district and they we were making decodable passages or texts for teach or for students to use in their phonics and word study. And it's easy to find decodable passages for, like the K-3 world. But when you get into those skills that are like the fourth, fifth, sixth grade skill set, it's more challenging to find those texts that are already available, so that you have several options and we ended up or I ended up using ChatGPT to write decodable passages.
Speaker 3:So, and at first I was just putting in like write a fourth grade level passage with words containing the root mot and it would like throw out this really lengthy passage that was way above the reading level of a fourth grade student. So then I started getting better at saying I need a fourth grade level passage that's two paragraphs long and it includes the words motion, motivate. I gave it the exact words I wanted it to use and then I would get a passage that was closer to the reading level and it used words that were more grade appropriate and it was a smaller passage. Then I could go that extra layer to put it into a checker. That gave me a very accurate reading level and readability score to and I could wordsmith it from there like make the sentences shorter and all that kind of thing. But it was a game changer in that sense for that part of curriculum writing that it was really hard to find resources, took a lot of extra work to make it fit for us, but it was a great starting place.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. That kind of goes back to our first question about not replacing us as educators that your expertise in elementary education and reading really allowed you to look at what it produced and say this is too high for these kids, and so we really need to make sure that we're still talking about that first question that we brought up and saying it doesn't replace us, but it's a great tool to use to start, you know, streamlining our work and making it more efficient and effective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I think about all of the tasks that you have to do at a curriculum level or a principal level or a teacher level, and that they're so repetitive. There are a lot of administrative and organizational tasks that happen every single day that just kind of weigh us down, that take away from that important work of being able to focus on instruction. And so one of the things I that keep coming to mind, like when I was in the classroom every week and I was an elementary teacher, so every week I had to send out a newsletter for the parents and it gave it. I had a structure already, but it felt like I had to make it feel fresh for what was happening and I would put in updates. Well, I could see having my um, my newsletter template and and plugging in the new information and then allowing chat GPT to help me make it more interesting, more engaging, more refreshing, maybe prettier, like the things that take a ton of time. And I hated writing that newsletter, but I did it every single week because it would take me literally a half a day every single week to develop that. And then I think about when I was in that curriculum role every month I wrote a newsletter to the different content areas. So I had one for elementary that had all the content areas that I served in, but then I would have one for secondary for the areas that I served in there and in there being able to use that to help me develop the newsletter. But I think about every month.
Speaker 1:Every time I sent that newsletter out, I knew I was going to have an onslaught of emails within 24 to 48 hours, of 150 emails every single day asking the same kinds of questions. So, and then around in my newsletter I had assessment information and dates and what was required and all of that, and I knew around that assessment time I was going to get another onslaught of questions, some from principals, some from instructional coaches and then from teachers, and those questions would be different. Well, I could use chat, gpt, ai to help me be proactive in this approach so that I'm ready, because on those days I knew the level of stress and burden that email brings in my life is unbelievable. Like that causes me a ton of stress, and so being able to be proactive and have some of those things ready would be something that I think I would be really happy to use if I were back in the school district right now.
Speaker 1:Let's kind of think about now. So we gave you a couple of ideas. Hopefully it's sparking some ideas for all of you and we would love to hear your ideas. What are some pitfalls we really need to avoid when it comes to using AI? What were some things, as we've been learning, that stick out to you, that were like okay, I didn't know that or I need to be really cautious about that.
Speaker 3:For me. I think the thing that stood out most to me. I was blown away to learn. The thing that stood out most to me I was blown away to learn is and it goes into the reliability of AI and it gets into that back to like Natalie's been really good about keeping that center. We can't use it to replace us. And so I was blown away to know that a simple prompt of like a bribe to AI or putting something in there that would say, like you're trying to make it worry, like it was like my boss is going to make me cry, would change the response that you get from AI. And so if something as simple as I can provide you chocolate would change the response, then that just shows how unreliable it is as a total, definitive answer and highlights more that you have to use your expertise to go the extra mile and put forth the effort to check it, fact check it, make sure it is giving accurate information. And it is, in a lot of places, just the beginning step. It's not the end.
Speaker 2:And I think that when I think about chat GPT and if you're just starting this, or even if you have been using it for a while, keeping in mind my puppy's having a dream right now they're like sorry, that's what that weird noise is. However, is playing around with it yourself and I um took one of my sons I have fresh are sophomores in high school. I took one of their essays and put it in chat gpt and was very specific. Like you're a 10th grade peer, what feedback would you give this kid? Then I said okay, now you're the teacher in the state of missouri focusing on these standards, what advice would you give?
Speaker 2:And just playing with to see what the different answers are and using your content knowledge to then say, like, is this good? Would I have given this type of feedback? Because that's another way that you could, especially if you're a high school English teacher, that you could streamline hey, have your kids run this through and get some feedback, then fix what that is and then bring it back to you. But I think playing around with it and offering different prompts and seeing, like, what direction is this going is important because you don't ever want to put something out there. Ai is biased and it will you know if you're in a very conservative state and then it gives you some more liberal like viewpoints or ideas and you just go and use that that could be harmful for you, your kids, your job, any of those things.
Speaker 1:And so being aware that it it does still have a bias and it it's not always accurate, I think I keep reminding people you know, like teachers, if I work with them, and and I keep reminding myself that AI pulls from all sources unreliable, even outdated, even so, if you're thinking, you know you're doing science of reading and you're pulling from old, outdated research and information and you don't know that that's, that's frightening. Um. So, really, something that I learned was that ai is a system. It's like a system that produces patterns that can't be predicted and, um, you're not always going to get the same output every time, even if you put the same input in, so things that there is like a randomness and a confusion that's kind of built in. So things that are really important, like expectations, like what you're teaching, like curriculum. You need to be very aware that you're not always going to get the same answer and that it won't pull only from reliable, credible sources.
Speaker 1:And Natalie does do a really nice job, like when she works with students and when she works with teachers. That's something especially working in that secondary world that she highlights again and again how to use it as a tool and go back and continue to check, making sure that we're getting reliable, accurate information, accurate information. I will tell you, as a former curriculum leader. I would not use this in any way, shape or form to develop a curriculum, to develop, you know, assess assessments, or, to, you know, unpack my standards or do any of that work.
Speaker 1:Yet Something that I really found super powerful was that the Amera's law. I learned about that in this master class, that a lot of times we overestimate the change in the short term and so we rely on it heavily, thinking that it gives us, it can replace, which Natalie has highlighted again and again. It cannot replace our expertise, our knowledge, all of that, but we'll rely on that heavily early. But we underestimate those changes of the long term that it can make and have in our lives, that in the in term time we need to be really thoughtful and intentional in how we use it.
Speaker 2:I kind of tie into that with that. I think we talked a little bit about this before we jumped on here of AI can really boost critical thinking. But you have to be very deliberate and explicit in that like, hey, let's look at some brainstorming ideas or let's look at these things, but now let's look at it from a critical lens of is it accurate, is it good? And so you can have some really great conversations and you can really focus on some critical thinking, but again, you have to interact with it on some critical thinking. But again you have to interact with it and you have to collaborate.
Speaker 1:You can't just take it at face value, right? Thank you. So I guess, kind of wrapping up our time today, key takeaway AI can be a really helpful tool incredibly helpful even in streamlining the tasks but we also need to be mindful of its limitations, we have to remember. It pulls from a variety of sources. Some are reliable and some aren't. It pulls from a variety of sources, even, as Dr Fowler pointed out, from different biases. Those are things that we need to keep in mind.
Speaker 1:Ethan Malik warned us that we need to be very deliberate about the conditions. We're willing to let a randomized system make decisions that are important to us. That goes back to the beginning. Think about humanity, think about who we're serving. So, when it comes to our instruction, we need to know our content. That's what our job is. We don't want to rely on something that could potentially pull from an unreliable source, especially when we don't have time to go back and back check everything. We hope today's been helpful in giving you some ideas on how you can integrate AI effectively without over-relying on it, and if you have any questions or want to share with us how you're using AI in your work, please reach out to us here at Compass PD. We're always here to support you, thank you. Thanks, natalie. Thank you, stephanie.
Speaker 2:Thank you have a great day.