AI & Literacy: Balancing Innovation with Human Connection

Join Jessica and Georgia as they have a discussion with Allen Schagene and Dr. Matthew Panozzo around AI Literacy and balancing human connection.

Resources

• Dr. Panozzo
• LinkedIn
• JTILT Article
• Allen Schagene
• LinkedIn

Transcript

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Allen Schagene and Dr. Matthew Panozzo
Georgia Terlaje: [00:00:00] Okay, it's Time for the Edge, A podcast brought to you by its D and A SCD community leaders. Whether you're a teacher, an administrator, or someone who simply loves education, fasten your seat belts because this podcast is tailor made for you.
Georgia Terlaje: Join us as we dive into the world of education, sharing, inspiring tales of innovation, passion, and change directly from those on the front lines In episodes to come, we'll highlight the incredible dedication and creativity that drive transformation in the field of learning. Buckle up. Brace yourself for an adventure.
Georgia Terlaje: Coming up today, we are talking about AI and literacy or literacy ai, and I'm one of your community leader hosts, Georgia Ulai. I'm a former TK five instructional coach and educator of 36 years, and I'm here with my always favorite partner in crime, Jessica Pack. 
Jessica Pack: Thank you, Georgia. Being here with you on the Edge is one of my favorite places to be.
Jessica Pack: I am Jessica Pack, a middle school teacher and an isti author. [00:01:00] We know that student use of AI is becoming more prevalent in the educational landscape, and today our conversation will center around accessible, ethical, and interpersonal implications for literacy. As artificial intelligence grows larger and larger.
Jessica Pack: We are joined by our fellow ISTE community leader, Alan Shag. Welcome to the Edge. 
Allen Schagene: Hi. It's great to be here. 
Jessica Pack: Thank you so much for joining us. And you brought a wonderful guest with you. Could you introduce them as well, please? 
Allen Schagene: Yeah, so I brought with me Dr. Matthew Pazzo. He is he works in literacy. His background is on making sure that students have accessible books in their classrooms, and so that is the space that he occupies.
Jessica Pack: And what is your educational context as well, Alan? 
Allen Schagene: My educational context, I work in a private school in, I serve infant through fifth grade currently. And that's, yeah. 
Jessica Pack: Well, welcome to the Edge. We appreciate both of [00:02:00] your time and energy and we look forward to this conversation for sure. 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Wonderful.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Thank you for having us. 
Georgia Terlaje: So we always like to a start first with origin stories and, and Alan, since you are the CL leader, if you could tell us a little bit of how you came to its D and the CL program and maybe how you looped Matthew into all things. Its d. 
Allen Schagene: Yeah, so I started, I think, following Isti I think probably sometime last year.
Allen Schagene: I started joining some webinars meeting people in the chat. I even decided to sign up for isti certification. I really wanted to sort of align some of the things we were doing at our school to the certification process. I recently became ISTE certified. So that was a process. It was a difficult process, but I think it was a good process overall.
Allen Schagene: And then I signed up to be a community leader. I'm currently working on the global conference that we're hosting Global Impact Conference, so just doing some of the behind the scenes work in that. [00:03:00] In, in that space. And then I go to the coaches meetup and just learn from other people. It's kind of like beg bar on steel.
Allen Schagene: In the world of education. You always can learn something from someone or you can sort of give something to someone as well. And then Matthew is actually my partner, right? So that's how we know each other. He's, he's probably the person that pushes me the most, I think when talking to him.
Allen Schagene: Whenever I have an idea or something, he's gonna challenge that and, and ask me really difficult questions. And I think that that's the space that's sort of, he occupies in the sort of behind the scenes things of all of it. 
Jessica Pack: That's perfect. I feel like we all need that voice in our pedagogical practice to kind of like sometimes temper all the the fun new things we wanna try and be like, Hey, have you run it through this filter yet?
Jessica Pack: Well, for those who are maybe just beginning to engage with artificial intelligence, could you kind of give us a quick rundown on what AI literacy is for [00:04:00] educators? 
Allen Schagene: Yeah, so AI literacy for educators is understanding what you can do with in your classroom, but even what you can do as a individual. So whether you're using something like Chat, GBT or Gemini, which you're plugging into that and knowing how to prompt, right, because I think we, I.
Allen Schagene: I like, I like to tell people we grew up in an age where Google existed. I remember the librarians telling me when I was in college, you're so lucky you don't have to order a book and wait for it to get here to do the research. It, it sort of creates this sort of procrastinating culture in some sense because we feel like we can just wait till the very end to do things.
Allen Schagene: That's a topic for another day. But AI is a bit different in that sometimes your output is not always the same and you have to be really specific about what you want and how that looks with kids is you have an experience that some people are very for. Like trying things with kids. There are programs out there that you can use in classrooms as young as kindergarten, even younger than that if you're into that sort of thing.
Allen Schagene: And there are some people that are against it because they just, just think that [00:05:00] there's not enough out there to know where that information is being stored, how it's being like what. Where does it go? Who owns it? Those are all big questions in the space. And then also making sure that there's the ethics around the information that comes out of it, the hallucinations and the bias that come from that, that kids actually know that, so they don't get sort of sold on this other story.
Allen Schagene: So like what I like to tell people is we have to teach kids to be really critical consumers of information, because now with AI, you never know what's real and what's not. So you really have to, even with like video or an image, right, you have to really be critical about what it is that you're looking at and at the very start of it.
Allen Schagene: Images were easy. Kids would be like, that has, you know, five more fingers on its hand, but now it's getting so like, so good that it's really gonna take a, a real close eye to sort of look at that information. So I would say that AI literacy and a, I know it's a very long-winded definition, but it's just under understanding how to use the tool to get the output that you want and being and having the [00:06:00] resources to be able to use it effectively to do what you need.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I think the only thing I would add to that definition, Alan, is, and you touched upon this, identifying that we're also gonna be consumers of ai. So AI literacies really looks at a, how are we producing using it and what does that look like? But also I. How does it affect the consumption that we have and getting students to have that metacognitive awareness, you know, just like we teach them to think about what it is that they're reading, are they understanding it?
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: We need to have those same protocols in place when they're using ai, writing the prompts, you know, determining if AI generated what they wanted based on the prompt they had. So it's a multifaceted layer. But it's fun to go down those rabbit holes and have these conversation. 
Georgia Terlaje: I was reading an article [00:07:00] yesterday and it mentioned it's, it said that AI is a, like, like a stochastic parrot, meaning that it predicts words but it doesn't understand them.
Georgia Terlaje: How do you think maybe an example like that could help teachers and students as they're teaching about AI in 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: the classroom?
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: So predictive parrot, 
Allen Schagene: right? So something that's, so AI does predict things. It's based off of. It's learning about you as you're using it. So like I can go into JGBT and it knows exactly kind of how I sound based off of some of the writing samples that it does. It collects that information from me. So it's gonna predict sort of the output that I'm going to like based off of things.
Allen Schagene: And it's also even gonna ask me, thumbs up, thumbs down. So for students, it's gonna pick up on some of the things that. They do all the time, and it's gonna predict sort of the [00:08:00] outcomes that that would lead them to certain spaces. So when I think about the predictive nature of it, sometimes it could just sort of lead to the same thing and it's not necessarily moving us moving the needle forward in some spaces.
Allen Schagene: So you do have to kind of push it a little bit to be like. Because the first output, like I said earlier, is not always the best. It's like a 80 20 approach. It's like your initial approach is the, the 80%, like the initial task is this. That's 80% of it. Now you have to go back in the 20% and actually make it yours.
Allen Schagene: Make it into what really truly matters. So it can predict. And then tell me exactly what I wanna say and what, what do I explain this to people? AI is like wanting, wants to basically please me and give me what I want and it's kinda like telling a kid exactly what they want to hear in order to get what they want.
Allen Schagene: And it knows how to sort of manipulate people in that situation. So you just have to make sure that you critically consume all of the things that it spits out to make sure that is all factual, but then also put your 20% spin on it and that's why [00:09:00] the human is still needed.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I mean, Alan Basic took all the words that I was gonna say. So as a, as a traditional literacy person focusing on reading and writing, every student has a unique voice. And while AI is great in that it predicts a. Prompts we would want or providing that feedback. You know, we really need that unique spin, that unique perspective that our students have to offer.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: So I'm working with an author right now. And his main premise to me is, you know, what is your ethos? How are you building your credibility? And if we're allowing AI to predict everything for us, how are we developing our own identity from this? So there's a lot of those implications, like balancing. Yes, AI can take us into new tangents, but how are we also developing ourselves in the traditional [00:10:00] aspects?
Jessica Pack: Matthew, what other ethical considerations do you feel like we should keep in mind as we're using AI with students?
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I mean,
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: like, I. There's so much pride in revising and editing your text to get to specific meanings, and so I don't want students to lose sight of that productive struggle. Like, yes, I can type in a prompt to AI and ask it to write a short story with X, Y, and Z characters in this setting, and it's gonna produce something that's very entertaining.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I use that all the time to create. Like scenarios for my pre-service teachers to sort of sort through and problem solve. Like, oh, how would I approach this as a teacher? What decisions would I make? How would I address this? And it's great that it works all the time, but I don't claim ownership of those [00:11:00] scenarios.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I just see it as like. A textbook that I'm able to tweak and modify to meet my population's needs and circumstances. And so I just want that sort of copyright aspect, but also, you know, AI generate those scenarios out of the blue. It's scenarios that it's pulling from all sort of different sources online.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And so whose credit is. Being overlooked because their scenario is being used? Or is it referencing a scene in a book? So I do wanna share like, the, the academic in me is like, let's cite our sources. You know, I want to see the receipts, I wanna go back to the original text. And so just making sure those people who did put in the time and energy get honored.
Georgia Terlaje: Matthew, you're at the college level, correct? Teaching at the college level, 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: correct? I did. I did four years [00:12:00] of high school, six years of middle school, and now I'm teaching at the University of Memphis. 
Georgia Terlaje: So, so this is a conversation, Jessica and I had like in the ethos without an answer, but how, how do you think like educators, especially in.
Georgia Terlaje: The college space could craft assignments differently with AI in mind, because I know we hear a lot of complaints about, you know, students just looking things up in AI and turning them in. But I mean, my argument kind of is you need to craft a different assignment. Have you had any ideas about like how that could be done, where you could incorporate ai, still have the student voice but the assignment isn't the t typical traditional like essay or paper?
Georgia Terlaje: I.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Oh, so first off, I'm not a traditional essay or paper type teacher. We do a lot of the sort of like fun hands-on creative projects, but one of the things every pre-service teacher has to do is a [00:13:00] lesson plan. So in a couple of our courses where we require the lesson plan, we give the students the options.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: You can either inherit a lesson plan from your mentor teacher. You can create it from scratch, you know, as you wish. Or you could type something into chat GPT and see what it produces. Provide that, but then modify it in a different color of, you know, okay, chat, GPT recommends this, but you know, that doesn't reflect my student population, so I'm gonna tweak it to do X, Y, and z.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: So that's something we've done. I do have colleagues at another institution who they actually walk their students through a sort of reiterative. The process of, you know, using ai and then they track their prompts that they're providing and then clarifying how long it takes to get the answer they need from ai.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: But our colleagues are all having these conversations about like, what does a meaning AI usage and [00:14:00] our classroom look like? How are we preparing our students to, you know, utilize and confront this in the field and every. Department and every program has a different approach to it. And I'm really pleased that we're making the space for these conversations to be had.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And we're not just, you know, shunning it under the rug or saying like, we can't use that. You know? 'cause we think about all those, you know, middle school days where we had those math teachers who were like, no calculators, everything's by hand. And it's like, well no, we have to learn to use the calculator and use it responsibly and, you know, still be able to test.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Are numeracy skills against the calculator because, you know, order of operations will give you, if you do the order of operations out of sequence, you get different answers. And so we have to make sure our students know how the calculator is thinking. 
Jessica Pack: Right now just across the educational landscape, we're all at different levels sort of starting [00:15:00] these conversations with our students, but I, I guess in a dream world, we'll eventually hit sort of critical mass where hopefully you're inheriting students who have already been.
Jessica Pack: Prepped on sort of the ethical uses of AI and, and how to follow that 80 20 split. Alan, do you have some ideas on how teachers now in the K 12 space could be helping students recognize AI's limitations and still leveraging its strengths so that by the time they get to that collegiate level, they're more prepared?
Allen Schagene: Of course. Right. So I think one of the things that I did with some fourth grade students that would be applicable anywhere is just talking about copyright and how the definition of copyright itself, what that means with ai, especially generative ai. I. When you're looking at generating images or even generating music, and so you can talk about the ethical implications of that in sort of for artists who actually make their, make you know, create their own designs or create their own music, what that means.
Allen Schagene: And so I didn't tell the kids what to think, but I [00:16:00] just said, if this is what copyright means, what does it mean if I actually go into a system now and I use my own words to generate an output, right? Who owns that? At the end of the day, does the tool own that or do I own that because I'm the person that wrote the prompt?
Allen Schagene: Right? So in some situations, depending on the tool that you use, the answer is different, right? So if, for example, I know Suno ai, which makes music, and if any of you know that you, you can go in and generate lyrics. If you pay for their subscription, you own anything you create. So if you pay for it, but if it's the free version, you do, you can't sell it, right?
Allen Schagene: Like you don't own that. They, they own that. You can use it for educational purposes. And that's sort of our work around in the educational space is we can always use something because it's, for the learning process for images depends on the image generator that you use. Especially if you upload your own piece of artwork.
Allen Schagene: I always sort of. Tell kids not to do that because you don't know who then owns access to your own art that you've created. So you just keep that in mind when you're doing that. But that space itself and, and sort [00:17:00] of having that conversation around that is a good start. And then I also like to start with character chatbots.
Allen Schagene: So I. Because my, you know, because my husband does literacy, I think the number one thing we both agree on is that literacy is important. And so talking to characters from books is a great way for kids to learn about hallucinations, right? So like if you're studying a book, you can then load up a character chat bot with a certain character that has them understood.
Allen Schagene: And I would even start with our kids. With people that they actually know a lot about. So a lot of them chose Taylor Swift, right? They're like, oh, you know, Taylor Swift's my BFF, you know, she knows a lot about me. It's like she doesn't know you, right? She, you're like one in like so many people that also like her, and so they're not like, oh, well this is not true.
Allen Schagene: Like, I know so much about her and it's giving me false information. I was like, that's called a hallucination, right? It's making things up and so it's. It's exposing kids to that so that they recognize that by the time they actually do something in a space on their own, they have to be able to check that information.
Allen Schagene: And the last thing I'll leave you with is when I taught a book when I was a fifth grade [00:18:00] teacher, seed folks with a book I taught, it's a great book by the way, but I always tell, I send a letter to parents and I said, we're gonna read this book. It has some mature content in it, and I just wanna make sure that you're aware of that.
Allen Schagene: But what I would lead with is, I would say, would you rather have your. Kid have a conversation with a facilitator in this book or have a conversation in the hallway or on social media. And so to me, my push for people is that. Kids are gonna learn about AI whether we want them to or not, especially as young as the kids that I have.
Allen Schagene: And so my job is to make sure that I expose them in a space that's comfortable for them before they actually get to the space where they don't realize that like sometimes things are made up and then they turn something into their teacher and they haven't done any of the critical work that needs to be done about going through and saying, this is what we sort of need to do.
Allen Schagene: So that's my, that's what I would say is a. Sort of starting point for, for this and sort of what people can expect to see in the future. 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And building off of that, like I think of the [00:19:00] whole premise that, you know, the digital natives. Argument of just like, yeah, we grew up with it, but that doesn't know mean, we know how to use it.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Like the iPhone has totally surpassed my ability in terms of understanding technology. Let me go back to the flip phone era, like I would be completely fine, but with our students, like there's so much for them to learn and understand and I think. Teachers were content literacy and we were talking about historic GPT Write up a conversation with George Washington offering us advice going into the latest election.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And it was such a powerful statement that Chad PG did. And I was like, Ooh, okay, let me do other presidents. And it's like each president that I then asked after. It's like the dialogue just got worse or it just got more [00:20:00] shallow. And so you realize the limitations of like, okay, yeah, chat GPT, you know, hit these target pieces.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: But let's dig deeper. What do we know George Washington having done? What else? What sort of advice could he have? Let's go back to primary source documents. What, what could he bring in? And so that's that way of like getting the students to think broader. But also it goes back to my original statement about helping our students develop their voice.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: If they see chat, GPT do this effortlessly, and they're like, okay, I'm done. But they're not activating any of that background knowledge or any of those things that make these figures stand out to them. Like they could have had more depth and beauty to the assignment. So. 
Allen Schagene: Yeah, I'm gonna add it to that, right?
Allen Schagene: 'cause obviously the, this answer's not done. So he's right in all that. Because I wouldn't start with ai. I would always start with something else. So like, read a book first, and then have a conversation with a character, right? So that way you [00:21:00] have that. What he's talking about, that background knowledge.
Allen Schagene: You don't just start from the get go or even have a conversation in social studies, like you actually learn about the American Revolution and then you're chatting with a person from that timeline to sort of then see is the information factual, is it accurate? And that's sort of where we're coming into this, right?
Allen Schagene: So I don't just start with AI off the get, AI is like something we do as kind of like the enhancement piece to what we're learning about and then being able to critically consume as he's. As he's talking about I just wanna be clear about that, right? Because I do like to jump off the deep end as an ed tech person, but I also know that my job is to make sure that kids actually have a background before we jump into anything AI related.
Georgia Terlaje: So Matthew, I wanted to piggyback a little bit off. You were talking about digital natives, and I love the way you included all of us because I actually started teaching before the internet long time ago. But something I had read recently explain to ai, sort of to [00:22:00] those of us that have been around forever is that, you know, back in the day, you know, we had.
Georgia Terlaje: Devices, like even just say your microwave, you did not communicate with your microwave. You did not have to think about how you asked your microwave to make your food. I mean, yeah, temperature a little bit, but it was such a narrow thing you had to think about. And now we jump all this way ahead and we really do have to think about the way we communicate.
Georgia Terlaje: With AI and these devices. So, I mean, in my mind it's such a huge jump, but I, I love that image of standing in front of the microwave, asking it how it feels about, you know, heating up my popcorn because I'm just, we, I'm just weird that way. Another quick question is, what role does human connection play in literacy and learning?
Georgia Terlaje: How can educators design learning experience that leverage AI without diminishing student to student and teacher to student interactions? How can we still get that good inner communication going and [00:23:00] leveraging ai?
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I mean, I'll gladly like education is so, is such a social. Experience. We learn so much from each other. And I had this debate with one of my first colleagues. To me, reading as a social experience we're always, you know, recommending the books we love. You know, having criticisms like Good Reads is created as a space for us to comment about our books.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And he was like, no reading is a private endeavor. Like had this very sort of like stoic. Reading has a personal experience with me and I can't necessarily convey that to others. So we had the sort of polar opposite trend, and I think AI could sort of be in that same space as traditional reading in that, you know, I've used AI to help me generate my thoughts, like I have this mess up in my [00:24:00] brain.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I communicate with it and I get a clearer sense. But I think we can still. Provide spaces in the classroom for that, but also pair it with, you know, a think pair share of like, Hey, this was my process in using AI for this. Did I do something wrong? Could I improve it? Because there's so much we can learn from each other about more efficient practices, whether it's our, you know, hey, how do you organize your home files?
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Or you know, how do you tackle these complex issues? We have to give students the space to think through that, and this is their. This is their big technology piece to figure out how to use it efficiently and effectively and ethically. So think prayer sheriff, that's my, that's my go-to let 'em talk about it.
Allen Schagene: I guess what I'll say to this question is anytime that you're introducing a tech tool to your kids for the first time. There's always gonna be a kid that figures out how to do something [00:25:00] and then they learn to make something like really cool happen, and then all the kids are like, Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Allen Schagene: What? How did you do that? And they sort of learn from each other. So he's right in that this is a social experience because I don't know everything there is to know about every tool when I go into a room, some kids are able to do things that I wish I was able to do sometimes or had thought of on my own, but.
Allen Schagene: That's the beauty of learning, like you're learning along with kids. And that's what makes it a social experience because kids are, once a kid is able to do something and then transfer that knowledge to someone else of, of what they did, that's, that's the beauty of learning and sort of growing and evolving.
Allen Schagene: And so, yeah, that's, I'll leave with that. Well, 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: and how cool is it to give our students the. Opportunity to see that they know more than their teacher. Like we talk. The buzzword is we're all lifelong learners, but if we're not giving our students the chance to see their teachers as lifelong learners, then they're not gonna embody that.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And so I loved that as a teacher. [00:26:00] There was not a single year that my students saw me not also be a student as well, because I was constantly sharing with them my work of going back for my mass. My work of going back for my doctorate, what it looks like to work on my dissertation. Like I shared those milestones with them and I shared that discovery with them as well.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: So doing one of the, this isn't really AI related, but it was using makey Makey boards and scratch in order to create interactive posters for an Edgar Grin post. Short story. I had one student who was coding in his free time, like he was ready. He was gung-ho. He literally like ran laps around me in that assignment and I just, I was like, do it awesome.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Like here's some extensions, like go have fun. Like prove me wrong. Teach me something and see how I can excel in making this assignment better next year. And he loved it. He loved having that ownership as a middle schooler. Like, yeah, I know more than my teacher who has a doctorate. Like what a good bragging right [00:27:00] for them.
Jessica Pack: That's so awesome. I love that you were like, good with the sort of chaos of just letting go and, and letting them fly and do what they do best. 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Oh, my category or my chosen descriptor is the classroom should be a hot mess. Like that's what learning is like. We have to make mistakes, we have to try new things, have conversations.
Jessica Pack: Absolutely. One of the things that I find just for myself as a classroom teacher is as I'm having students utilize ai, I need to provide. A lot of like metacognitive opportunities for what they're getting from AI and how they're making changes, and especially like programs where they receive feedback from ai, like how are you processing that feedback?
Jessica Pack: What changes do you make or not as a result. All those things. And I tend to rely on the every framework from AI for education to really help them process that. Do you have [00:28:00] frameworks or resources you would recommend teachers? Tap into as they're starting to build AI 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: literacy into their instruction.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I don't necessarily have 
Allen Schagene: a particular framework that I follow, but I do follow 80 per 80 to 20 rule. And then judgment, like your judgment matters. So like schools, all schools have different policies regarding ai, as about as well as districts. So it's always good to follow those whatever those policies are for your school or district, but.
Allen Schagene: Critical judgment is a key factor in everything that we do regarding AI and what you can give or take. For the students that I use the tools with, I use a very controlled environment where I can lock it afterwards because I'm working with students in elementary school and I don't want them to have it access to that outside of school without a facilitator.
Allen Schagene: And so that's just sort of makes me feel more comfortable. With that environment. And I also have access to all their outputs as well. So I can see their, like the collection of [00:29:00] data across time. It's not their particular like name or anything like that, but or any personal information about them.
Allen Schagene: But I can see anything that they've asked for which is also good on that part. So. I don't necessarily have a particular framework, but I do sort of teach kids that they don't have to take everything from what they generate. And what, what I run into the most with younger kids is that they, I. They get upset when the first time that they generate something isn't producing what they want it to produce because our kids live in an instantaneous environment where everything is accessible to them and they don't understand that sort of, I'm gonna use the word grit, which I don't necessarily love, but sort of like that perseverance that's needed to get to that level of like sophistication in adding that next level of like, this isn't what I want, but how do I take it to the level that I need to take it to push it, the output.
Allen Schagene: To where it's gonna produce something that's gonna be actually viable for me to have a better understanding of this assignment or prove right. A better outcome [00:30:00] here. And so that's what I would say about that.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I also don't have a specific framework. I. In mind, but I will emphasize the importance that, you know, the teaching practices of think alouds and modeling are transferable to AI just as they are to any other subject area. And the more we are modeling and thinking aloud and sharing our thought process with the students and you know, giving them opportunities to share what they would think about in certain scenarios, the more they're empowered with that criticality.
Georgia Terlaje: This has been a, such a great conversation and I'm just curious, do either of you have some advice you would give to educators that maybe are just starting to dip their toe into ai as a upstart, a place to start or a mindset to have so they can be a part of this journey that their kids are gonna be a part of the rest of their lives, [00:31:00] so it's so important.
Georgia Terlaje: What's some advice you would give to educators that are new 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: to all of this?
Allen Schagene: I'll jump into that. So my advice is always start small. I think social media sort of exposes us to all the wonderful things that people are doing and it sort of makes us maybe feel at times that we're not doing enough. And so I would sort of remind people that you are enough all the time. And so you just have to start small.
Allen Schagene: So you just have to feel where you're comfortable and it's. Looking at your strengths. So like when I first started my journey, I focused on character chatbots because that was an in for my campus. That was a strength that we have is literacy. And that was a connection that I felt personal and deeply connected to.
Allen Schagene: And then from there I sort of ventured out into other things once I felt comfortable in that space. And you know what you do doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be social media ready, it just has to be like. We dipped our toes in today, and these were some of the outcomes that happened as a result.
Allen Schagene: Now my students have [00:32:00] some exposure because my concern, my biggest worry is that we might not expose our kids to this, and then my exposure to my kids gives them some advantage that other kids are not gonna have because now they had access to something that other kids weren't given the same access to because for whatever reason, right, people might not have had access to those resources.
Allen Schagene: So I always wanna say just. Start small. You don't have to do anything. Super big. And of course if anybody ever wants any ideas of how to get started, I'm happy to share those. I created a website for the sort of things that I did. I share that website with other people, just some like lessons and how to get started.
Allen Schagene: In the tool that I use,
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: I am more of like the wet blanket. I think I have multiple occasions. Been like, no, I'm not using ai. I don't want, I don't, I'm not getting on this trend and I'm starting to come around. I'm seeing the ways AI makes life easier. I'm [00:33:00] seeing how it can be a thought partner in creative writing and professional collaborations and project management.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: And so my first piece of advice is on those days where it feels so hard to get started on something. See what AI recommends you doing. See how AI recommends chunking your, you know, big project down into manageable pieces and see how you feel about that. I think the next piece of advice I would recommend is find a trusted individual who can help you find that project that's the right fit for you.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: So while my husband loves to tell me about the different things he does with ai. I wasn't necessarily paying attention to him because, you know, those weren't ways I wanted to utilize ai, but I recently got a manuscript accepted to a journal and the editor and I had great, you know, comments back and forth strengthening the article.[00:34:00] 
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: She recommended, she was like, I wanna push you to use AI to generate an image for this figure. I think it would really up the ante. And I was like, no, I can't. I can't do it. And I ended up using AI to generate an image to turn that image into a fake Facebook post. And then I added it into the manuscript and I was like, oh my gosh, I love this.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Like I would not have been able to recreate that. But I love the dimension. It adds, it adds to the larger story of that article manuscript. And it was great. But then I had ethical questions about like, well, how do I cite this? Do I provide the process? Here's the prompt I used, here's the, you know, I, I forget the different websites I had to utilize and combine in order to make that post.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: But you know, she was willing to engage that conversation with me about what it would look like for her journal for that piece. And it was [00:35:00] wonderful. So yeah, like having those conversations with a trusted person, she knew just how much she could have pushed me in that. And if she had pushed me anymore, I probably would've been like, no, I'm done.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: Can't In my capacity.
Jessica Pack: That's such a great example of app smashing for the, the greater outcome in the end. Well, Alan and Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really wonderful conversation with a lot of different dimensions. We appreciate your time and your message, but before we let you go, where can listeners connect with you?
Jessica Pack: If they have follow up questions or they just feel like maybe they wanna continue the conversation?
Allen Schagene: I guess I'll start us off so you can find me on LinkedIn. Just my name Alan Chagne. That's spelled A-L-L-E-N. People get that wrong all the time. And then Chagne is S-C-H-A-G-E-N-E. And then I'm also that on Twitter. Or Twitter X, right? What Twix, whatever we're calling it these [00:36:00] days. And then I'm on Instagram, but Instagram is just Mr.
Allen Schagene: Shag me. And that's more like my fitness, what I do on the, you know, my, my bodybuilding sessions, not really, but.
Dr. Matthew Panozzo: So I'm not on social media with the exception of LinkedIn, and that's just Matthew Pazzo. But I do have a website with some of my reading resources and that's DP reads.com. Hopefully, oh, it also does have my article on utilizing those Makey makey boards. So if someone wanted to see what that assignment looked like, they could access it there.
Jessica Pack: Perfect. Thank you again. Well, that wraps up this episode of the Edge Podcast and we hope you had a great time. My name is Jessica and you can find me at Pac Woman 2 0 8 on X Threads and Instagram, 
Georgia Terlaje: and I'm Georgia Slahi. And you can find me at Georgia Ulai on Blue Sky and X.[00:37:00] 
Georgia Terlaje: And both of us at storytelling saves the world.com. 
Jessica Pack: On behalf of everyone at ISTE the Edge Podcast, remember to keep exploring your passion, fostering your creativity, and continue taking risks, all things that can bring you to the edge.