November 2025 bonus episode: Teaching with AI

This is our new season of bonus episodes of the Reading Teachers Lounge podcast.  In this season of exclusive extra episodes, Shannon and Mary welcome reading teachers from the field to join their discussions and share their unique teaching experiences.

In this November 2025 bonus episode, Shannon and Mary chat with Shane Hogan, an elementary teacher from Ireland currently teaching in Abu Dhabi. Shane discusses his journey from Ireland to the UAE, his teaching experiences, and his integration of AI in instruction. Highlighting his co-founded platform, 'Help Me Teach', Shane explains how it serves as a virtual assistant to streamline tasks such as lesson planning and resource creation. The discussion covers the benefits of AI for personalized learning, increased student engagement, and addressing educational challenges. Shane emphasizes the critical role of the teacher as the director of AI, ensuring that human expertise and the relationship with students remain central. The conversation also touches on ethical considerations and the potential misuse of AI, advocating a balanced approach in which AI supports rather than replaces the teacher's role. This episode provides valuable insights and practical examples of integrating AI into the classroom to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES RELEVANT TO THE EPISODE:

1. Help Me Teach AI Tool for Teachers
2. Connect with Shane via e-mail:    Shane@helpmeteach.ai
3. Connect with Shane via LinkedIn
4. ILA:   Thoughtful AI Use in Literacy Instruction: Possibilities and Problems
5. Edutopia:   How Students Can Use AI in Project-Based Learning
6. Edutopia:   How Generative AI Tools Assist with Lesson Planning

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Transcript

November 2025 bonus episode Teaching with AI with Shane Hogan

Shannon Betts: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Reading Teacher Lounge. This is our, you know, welcome the Real Teachers into the conversation section of our episodes. And we're excited to welcome a teacher from across the pond today. So, hey Shane. Welcome to the Reading Teacher Lounge. Hello. 

Shane Hogan: Hello, hello. It's great to be speaking with you, Mary and Shannon.

Shannon Betts: So tell us about yourself. 

Shane Hogan: So, as you can probably guess from my accent, I am originally from Ireland. I grew up in Ireland and for my studies I studied in Limerick in Ireland, and I completed my first year of teaching in Cork in Ireland. And then I moved over to Abu Dhabi around four years ago. So I've been teaching in Abu Dhabi since then.

I started off in an international school with a variety of students over here in Abu Dhabi, and a [00:01:00] year ago I moved to an Emirati school, so mainly students from the UAE. So it's kind of more of a, almost like a family orientated school rather than an international school. And. I am a elementary school teacher, and since I've moved over to Abu Dhabi, I've been teaching grade five for all of my four years.

So I'm a classroom teacher and I also teach STEM and robotics a little bit on the side in the school as well. 

Shannon Betts: Oh, side note, my brother, lived in Abu Dhabi for many, many years and met his wife there. She's actually from Lebanon, but she and she's still living there. He's now moved back to the States, so they're having to do long distance for a little while.

But she works for the Department of Ed for UAU, so, 

Shane Hogan: and, and is he a teacher also? 

Shannon Betts: No, he works in the oil and gas industry in engineering. 

Shane Hogan: Okay. Which I'm sure a lot of people do. You know, you'd be very surprised, a lot of teachers move out here and they end up. Getting in a [00:02:00] relationship with another teacher.

Really, it just seems what happens out here for some reason in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, 

Shannon Betts: all the excellent. I was gonna, Americans and English speakers trying to, you know, hang out together, I guess. 

Mary Saghafi: Love that. I was just gonna say that you reached out to us per our Instagram request, and you are very interested in talking about AI that teachers can utilize in the classroom.

So we would love for you to share just kind of what's going on with you in that, in that aspect of your teaching. 

Shane Hogan: Yeah, so just under a year ago now, I guess I became a co-founder in help me teach. Help me teach is basically a virtual teaching assistant that helps teachers complete a lot of their tasks, create worksheets, create stories, anything to do with preparing lessons and administration tasks.

It allows you to do all of that within the space of 30 seconds to maybe two [00:03:00] minutes, depending on the task. So how this company originally started was. There was an Egyptian guy he's a digital marketer, but he started going out with an Irish girl that I used to work with here in Abu Dhabi, and she used to come home complaining about lots of different things to do with school, complaining about making lesson plans, all of the admin tasks, and he eventually said, I don't know why you're getting so worked up with this.

AI could do this for you in no time. So he actually started to develop this platform based on her giving out about what she was tired and sick of doing for school. So it started off just as a mini project for him, but then it has spiraled and really taken off, and now it's become this big platform that we use here in the Middle East.

So I guess how that interacts then with. The reading and literary side of [00:04:00] things is we have many tools that coincide with reading and literacy, and only today I, before I joined this call, so it's around seven o'clock here in Abu Dhabi in the evening, but all today I was at a conference up in Dubai for the British schools Middle East, and it was all around ai.

And the kind of main focus, really what I took from it today was that AI is there to create personalized learning for every student, and I think that can fit in nicely with with reading also. 

Mary Saghafi: This is so great to hear about because I think that you're, you're right. Embracing technology and utilizing it for individualization can really make a difference when we recognize that learners grow asynchronously throughout their reading journey and some need a little bit more practice in one area or [00:05:00] not, and teachers are well aware of that, but the limitations of a classroom with say 26.

30 students in it makes it so that sometimes the teacher's moving faster than some students need, sometimes slower than some students need. Which is a topic that we've been talking about throughout the eight years of our podcast. So yeah, I find this really fascinating. Any real world examples you can give us, I'd be so curious about.

And 

Shane Hogan: before I start, do you mind if I ask, have you ever used AI as as a source for reading before? I dive deep into it all. 

Shannon Betts: Mary has more than I did. I just used it. I, I, one of my tutoring students is math, and I was like at a loss for like what to do. I'm like, I've tried every other strategy with the student, what else should I do?

And I actually did get some fresh ideas, but I had to like add my own. Layer of experience to it. So I do wanna like circle back with that in the conversation of, you know, we can't just trust it blindly. So, but Mary, you wanna share how you used it with [00:06:00] the credibles and the other stuff we talked about?

Mary Saghafi: Yeah, so I tend to work with students who have dyslexia or, and some other comorbidities that kind of follow along with that. And so the one particular student that I was working with was around first grade, very interested in soccer. And so, getting him to be interested in some of the decodable, like handheld books that I had was somewhat challenging.

And he, he would, he was very agreeable to everything, but I knew I needed a hook for him. And so I think that the, the benefit is that I've been using AI and I feel like the server that I'm using AI on is starting to really understand me, my language and my angle. So the more that I use it, it recognizes my tone and things like that. And so that has been really positive as well. I have. Notice that the more specific you are about what you want, which strategy you need to use, which topic would be better? What kind of visuals [00:07:00] would be included with that? It's better, but I feel like the learning curve for most teachers is how do you really get the language to get AI to do what you want it to do, and how do you sort of.

Change your frame of thinking for it to provide a visual or to provide the language that you need. So, so yeah, I, I found it to be absolutely successful. One was that soccer story and then the other one I was doing a lot of work with executive functioning skills. So we were doing what is time blindness and what activities could I choose to do to work with a child who has time blindness and how can I make him her more aware of that?

So. That's a little experience that I have. 

Shane Hogan: Yeah, I think you're completely right with that. And the more that you are using your platform like you're speaking about there, the more that you use it, the more it becomes familiar with what you need. And I think the challenge for teachers at the start is that you need, for most platforms, you need to put that time and effort and actually [00:08:00] fail a couple of times before you get what you need.

With help me teach, what we actually do is when you log on to our platform, and let's say you select this story generator tool, you have a series of questions, maybe four to five questions that you need to answer, and then when you answer these questions, it will generate the text based on them. So straight away it's targeting, the questions will be targeting what is the reading level of your student?

Does your student have any reading challenges? What are the specific interests that your student has? So then, just like you mentioned there about the football, it will target those interests within the story. So for, for, I have a similar example and not so much for football. So I, I had a Korean boy in my class who was grade five.

Highly intelligent, but he had just moved from Korea and had never spoke English before. So [00:09:00] he was learning the alphabet. Once he had all his phonics, he was moving on to C, B, C words. But the stories that I had for him were the, the books that we had from our big cat collection, and they were all about farm animals birthday parties, which.

The context did not relate. 

Shannon Betts: It was very babyish for his age. 

Shane Hogan: Right, exactly. So he was getting really frustrated and he was reading these baby books when everyone else in the class was reading more interesting, maybe almost like murder mystery or different styles of books that were age appropriate. So he was almost developing a bit of anxiety from this.

So what I was able to do then using our story generator tool. I was able to create books. He loves dinosaurs, so obsessed with dinosaurs. So I was able to create different styles of books, informational narrative books, all about dinosaurs, but in an [00:10:00] almost, I would say a grade one context. So targeting that exile range, and then he started to become a more confident reader.

He enjoyed reading those books, even though the language was at a more basic level, he didn't feel like he was out of place in the classroom anymore. And I think that's a big challenge for teachers if they do have an emerging reader in their class. Where can they find a resource that matches their age and also matches their leg reading ability?

So. And I think that's an issue across the board. I haven't come across books that actually cater for this, whereas with using AI such as Help Me Teach, if you create a story on it, you can control exactly the level of the reading and also the context of it, which fits perfectly in a situation like this.

Shannon Betts: What I'm getting from both of what y'all said, [00:11:00] I guess it's sort of the back thing that's going through my head is like scary articles that are about the matrix, you know, and like AI taking over the world and things like that. Okay. So that's like where I'm coming from in my fears, but like what y'all are saying is the human, the experienced teacher, in your case, Shane, the who has a relationship with your student, knows he loves dinosaurs, is the boss.

The director of this AI where you are feeding it very specific directions that are catering to your student. So it's not making decisions for you if you weren't there. That's, you know, AI might have come up with another just cat barn story, you know, and the student wouldn't have liked it. And so that human factor has to be there to really make it valuable and also to give it the specific commands to generate exactly what we want.

Shane Hogan: 100%. Lots of people now debate whether. The job of a teacher is gonna be null and void [00:12:00] by 20 30, 20 40. I honestly think that is nonsense. I do not think that is gonna be the case. I think there is always going to be a need for a teacher. Now the teacher's role is going to change, and I think it already has started to change.

I actually refer to teachers now as facilitators of knowledge that they facilitate the the learning rather than give the knowledge to the students because what the students have available to them now with before even ai, with YouTube, with TikTok, and now with AI as well, they can have all of this knowledge within three to four seconds.

Much quicker than a teacher can actually give the knowledge. And also, there's lots of areas that us as teachers, we don't have all the answers, even though sometimes the kids think we have all the answers, we don't. So I now see teachers as not the ones who give the knowledge, we provide strategies for them to get the knowledge and then how they [00:13:00] apply this knowledge in different situations.

And coming back to what you said about. That the teacher needs to be there for this. So the platform that we created helped me teach. This is a teacher first platform. If you use chat, BT for example, many teachers will just go onto chat BT and say, create a story about dinosaurs. But there is so much more needed behind the scenes to create the right story.

You need the students. Maybe reading age, maybe legs, levels, maybe even giving information about what words are they working on? Are they working on cv, CVVC words? There's so much more to it that you need to give. So the questions that we ask on our platform guide the teachers to input their answers. So it's the teacher that's in control.

Whereas with chat GBT, they will say, do you want me to include this? And you'll say yes or no. [00:14:00] So the chat GBT is in control. Whereas with help me teach, the teacher has the control of what is created. 

Shannon Betts: You're starting to allude this but I wanna ask very specifically, like backtrack a couple years ago as a classroom teacher, how were you using AI before Help Me Teach was around, and then what were the limitations of those AI tools that made you, you know, want to help refine this technology and make it specific for teachers?

Like, do you understand my question? Yeah. And then like, what specifically does help my teach have? 

Shane Hogan: So I suppose the first time that I really started to use. AI for reading was when Chatt BT was first released and I, back then Chatt BT was not as good as it is right now. It is, has improved so much since then.

This is maybe talking 18 months ago, so. 

Shannon Betts: That seems like, like light years ago, but like 18 months ago is not that long. But in terms of AI technology, it's, it's advancing so quickly. [00:15:00] Sorry, I just had to break in and say 

Shane Hogan: that. I would say before that AI was like chat, GBT and different AI platforms were there before 18 months ago.

But from my personal use, it was around 18 months ago when I started using it for my classroom. And I went through a long period of failing with chat GBT at trying to get the right. Solution and it was quite frustrating at the time, and because I had a keen interest on it, I kept on going and I kept with it.

Shannon Betts: What were you using it for? Like, like decodable text or specifically or something else? 

Shane Hogan: So similar situation to this, creating stories to more to engage the, the students. So not necessarily to support the emerging readers, just creating stories for an entire class that we could use as a comprehension and answer questions on it, and use that then to support our English subject.

And even just creating a story, I found lots of issues with it, even [00:16:00] just in the syntax of sentences. It didn't make sense. So that was quite frustrating and I didn't want other teachers to have to go through all of that trial and error. I wanted them to be able to create a story straight away after one.

Prompt that they fill in. I wanted them to be able to create a story that they wanted and that's why we created that system. Then with Help Me Teach, of having the couple of questions that you need to answer and then hopefully it generates that story and you don't need to keep on changing it and modifying it over and over again.

Mary Saghafi: I'm a little curious how the process for creating the question prompts and things like that kind of came about. I am making an assumption, so I'm gonna throw it out there, but I have no idea if this is accurate. But as a special education teacher, writing goals is very, laborous in the fact that like, it needs to be measurable.

It needs to have all of the elements that you're trying to [00:17:00] ascertain from the goal. And that language needs to be consistent and communicated widely. And so I'm, I'm assuming that like. Thinking of what the goal is, then you kind of have to backtrack and, and have the language of how to make a measurable goal.

I don't know if that's similar, but I am curious how the process is for thinking like a teacher and, and coming back to the questioning because. For me, I think that's a higher level of skills for teachers to be utilizing. 'cause they usually are the ones asking questions of their students and in this case we can facilitate the knowledge to them.

And so it's a different way of I would say approaching, your, your career and the outlook and the way that it's kind of evolving. It's kind of a roundabout question anyway. Feel free to answer however it makes sense to you. 

Shane Hogan: Yeah. So can you, I just a little bit lost with that. So do you mind giving me like, the exact question of what, what you're asking?

Mary Saghafi: The question is how do you come about figuring out how to ask the question? So how [00:18:00] can teachers utilize AI better using language and prompting questions? Specifically with Help Me Teach and, and maybe also just in general. 

Shane Hogan: So I guess first of all, with help me teach that the guidance that we have given, so.

When we were creating this, we had a big team of educators with us. We had inspectors, we had principals, we had subject teachers, english coordinators. So we had an umbrella of teachers working with us to provide those scaffolds of questionings. So when, let's say, for example, if you, Mary, if you went to use Help me Teach to create a story, you need to answer the questions that we have created as a team.

We feel these are the questions that are needed to create an effective story for personalized learning or for a whole class environment. If you are talking about using something like chat, GBT, which is an open [00:19:00] AI where the teacher needs to put their own ideas into it, the considerations for this would be, first of all, you need to in inform the AI of which curriculum are you using.

That's very important. You need to know that. You need to give it what age group you're targeting with the story. You need to know what reading focus you're working on. Are you working on retrieval skills? Summarizing evaluation, what skills are you're working on, if you're incorporating comprehension questions.

Also, other factors are what are the topics that you want to include? Do you have any interest? Other things that you can incorporate is if you have your vocabulary list for that week that you're teaching the kids, you can actually tell the ai, these are my vocabulary words for this week. Can you incorporate all of these words into your, into this story so that then it's an integrated system and an integrated flow.[00:20:00] 

Likewise for English features. If you are working on simul ass and metaphors, you can prompt the story to include, to include those features. Any features that you want, you have full control over it. So I'll give you an example of. What I did this week in my classroom, so I needed a story. So in science we were learning about aquaponics and hydroponics in for sustainability.

We were learning about simul and metaphors and what was the last thing we needed to incorporate? Oh, yes, it was procedural writing that we were focusing on as well. So I needed to find a procedural story that was about aquaponics hydroponics. Included all of that vocabulary. And if I didn't have ai, I would be searching on the internet for this to have all of those links, and more than likely I wouldn't find it, or it would take me a long time.

Whereas I can just now [00:21:00] go and use ai. I can say, these are all the things that I require in my story. Can you create it? And within one minute or even 30 seconds, sometimes you have your full story created for you. 

Shannon Betts: So you're using it as like a cross-curricular supplement? A little bit. That's really cool.

Yeah. So what you're saying is like, we have to be very clear as the teachers, as the inputters for the ai, for the learning objectives, but then also the student levels and then the data identified learning needs. So that we can get the right product that we need. For the student, you, it sounds like you're very happy with what you got from that dinosaur story and the hydroponics story.

I'd love to maybe show them to our listeners if you wouldn't mind sharing them. 

Shane Hogan: Yes, 100%. And I also have, what I can share with you also is we have videos of how to use all these tools. Okay. So what I can do is share all those videos with you and you can, whether you want to share one or all of them. You can share them with your viewers and they can actually, they'll see a step by step guide of how you can use these AI tools for [00:22:00] reading.

Shannon Betts: How else, what else can it do? What else can it do besides story generator? 

Shane Hogan: Are you speaking in terms of reading or 

Shannon Betts: anything really? 

Shane Hogan: So I suppose we'll stick with the reading first and then I can come to the others after that. One thing that I really like, and one thing that I was something that really got my blood boiling was when we were looking at vocabulary that.

I like the kids to have a vocabulary definition, synonyms kind of almost like a mini dictionary in the back of their copy book, but before I used to have to type all of these out or copy and paste from, from Google. Whereas now we have a tool called Definitions, synonyms and, sorry, vocabulary definitions and synonyms.

And all you need to do is if you have a story and you have a PDF of that, all you need to do is upload the [00:23:00] PDF. To our tool, and then automatically our tool will take the most difficult words. So if I say select six vocabulary words, it will take the six most difficult vocabulary words and automatically create a definition for it and synonyms for it and compile it into a little, almost table that I can stick into the back of the book.

So it creates a little bit of a dictionary, personalized dictionary for them. And. Also so. Then it's kind of up to you as a teacher how you play with this, because that's okay. You give them the information, but that's not a, an effective teaching strategy. So what we like to do is cut all of these up. So we'll have that table, but I'll cut it all up into the words definition, synonyms, put into an envelope, shake it all.

And then I give it back to them and maybe give them a, a four piece of paper or a three, whichever size, and they need to ha to then [00:24:00] organize them into their words, definitions, synonyms. And I always get them to draw a little picture then to represent next to it. So AI does speed up all of these activities, but then it's up to you to be creative of how you use it.

Mary Saghafi: This is great because I think that the opportunity to then take technology, create a multisensory experience for the students to be able to actually interact with the text in a meaningful way is exactly what we're looking for for our students. But not to mention that it cuts back on the teacher time.

How, how much time. We spend searching and, and researching and looking for the right links and things like that. Sometimes lesson plans can take, and, and I know the teachers know this, but I don't think that parents and, and people outside of the teaching universe really recognize that sometimes it can take up to five hours of planning time you know, for a course for, for.[00:25:00] 

Even a week at a time. And so it gets, it gets to be quite daunting and I feel like that's why teachers are feeling so much pressure because just like our kids are feeling this humongous amount of information, teachers are now the siphon to try to. Deliver this information and the distractibility is really there.

But I think that the secondary piece that maybe AI can help with is helping teachers focus on the motivation for students. So not just through topics, but through activities that are meaningful and, and can help the students really interact with the text rather than copying definitions, for example.

Shane Hogan: Yeah, I was speaking to someone today about the conference, at the conference, just about education, and I said, the biggest compliment you can get after a day is that one of the students said, I can't believe it's time to go home. The day has flown by because then they've been so engaged, they've been doing loads of different activities, they haven't even noticed the time passed by.

Whereas if you flipped at it [00:26:00] and it's hasn't even been second break yet, and a kid is asking you, is it time to go home, then. You know that you have not created an eventful, joyful day of learning. So there's two ends of it there, and always I. I get a little bit of a, a kick myself when a kid does say that to me that they can't believe it's home time.

And I think just getting them up and moving even that, that they're just organizing those words, definition, synonyms. They're up, they're not sitting in their chair, they're up, they're working as a team trying to organize them. And they are, they're still learning while doing it, but they're active. I always think just get the kids moving.

It doesn't have to be this. Extraordinary lesson. Simply get them up, move them around the classroom, get them moving, get the blood flowing, rather than just sitting there and watching something happen. Because I think as teachers, [00:27:00] so when we do CPD training, I despise when we just sit there for an hour and listen to a lecture.

I despise, I don't, I don't take anything in myself. It doesn't help me. But when they engage us and they actually almost treat us like kids ourselves, then you pick up on stuff that you'll take back to the classroom. 

Mary Saghafi: I was gonna kind of circle back to Shannon's first impression of using AI and kind of feeling like teachers will become obsolete.

I think that it's this, like glass is half full, glass is half empty. Scenario because I think that. At this current moment with AI in these earlier stages, it feels very much like, oh, there's one more thing I have to learn. But at the same time, education has been changing and evolving. Quicker and quicker and as I have every other industry as well.

But I think if we can really turn it around and think of the glass as half full, then what, what we can actually do is really [00:28:00] tap into AI and, and use it to our advantage. And so I I really appreciate the ways that you've been sharing that with us today. I think it's really, it's unique. It's helpful and, and it's up and coming for sure.

Shannon Betts: I'm getting fresh outta Yes. Hearing you speak and how you use it as well. Like, I'm seeing it as like when you're talking about the vocabulary cards, I'm like, oh, that would've been something I would've delegated to my paraprofessional, you know? But then the AI was able to generate it even faster and then, you know, you could still control the parameters around it.

And then I almost see it too, as like, crowdsourcing like a, you know, professional learning community, like your hydroponics example. Like, okay, we've been studying all of these things in our fifth grade classroom, like now can you give us some ideas of like some projects that we could do as like an end of unit thing for the students to apply all the learning.

And I have a feeling it would come up with ideas that I wouldn't have come up with. 

Shane Hogan: So 100% that like. One challenge that I always found, and especially during [00:29:00] college when I was studying to be a teacher, there was a big focus on thematic planning with your cross curricular links. And I used to find it so tough because I, I was yet to be in a classroom that I was trying to figure out, okay, how do I link all of these topics?

Whereas you might have some ideas, but yet you're missing, okay, I don't know what to do for history or I don't know how to link this in with music. If you teach music. Whereas now you can. Exactly why you say that. You can input it into the AI and say, okay, I'm learning this in English, learning this in math science.

How can I link this all in and can you create me a project that we could do over the course of two weeks? And an extra part to that is you can actually get it to create you a real life project so that it has an impact. One thing that we love doing in our school is relating it back to sustainable development goals that we always try to incorporate that in so then we can incorporate that all together [00:30:00] and we actually have, so on our.

Tools we have, I think of the correct name for it. Now we have a weekly and topic planner. So you can create these projects by simply going in and describing this to our tool. And what you need to do then is select the number of lessons that you want to complete it by, and it will give you a step by step of each lesson of how to achieve these interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary projects.

Mary Saghafi: I I also felt very overwhelmed with the, the thematic planning and also kind of honored in my teacher prep program, they made such a big deal about this is how you are a teacher and you're so creative and, and you can create and come up with these, but I. Found it to be so challenging and, and very overwhelming.

And of course every time you want to create these like beautiful units. So this tool [00:31:00] still lets you have the vision, it helps you execute it, but in a timely manner that is. You know, it oftentimes based in you know, good practices. And so that's your job to evaluate how will this practice actually look in my classroom.

So the teacher's role is really essential. It just takes that hard brain work out of it, and it takes the facilitating part to the forefront. So I, I think it's very cool. Go ahead.

Shannon Betts: Flashing back to like student teaching, I had to do that thematic. And so my theme was one of the units was penguins.

And like my mom and I pulled an all-nighter, like creating, 'cause we tied it with the math measurement unit. And so we created all these life size, like seven types of penguins on poster board. And then I'd hung them around, I mean. I wish I'd had like the technology tool back then. I mean, the internet was barely invented when I was in college to come up with ideas for my penguins unit 'cause it would've saved me a lot of time.

Shane Hogan: The [00:32:00] lack of sleep during your college years trying to prepare for your, your practices as a teacher was? Oh, looking back on it now, I would not go back to it, for sure. Definitely not. And I have a cousin who is in her final year of teaching right now, and she's in her final teaching practice and she was sending me messages and I was talking to her over the summer saying.

She was asking me, how did you ever create lesson plans or resources without the help of ai? And honestly, I told her hours and hours and getting my sister, my brother to cut things out, to create things for me to laminate. It was everyone. It wasn't just me. It was a whole family affair trying to get ready for those teaching practices.

And I only wish. That these tools were there when we were going through college because it would've saved us a lot of time, stress, and the best thing about AI is that it gives you the time and energy that you can [00:33:00] put back into the students. Because lots of people at the start were talking that AI was a shortcut.

It's not a shortcut. It does the jobs for you, but it's not that you can go and relax and sit on your couch. It's so that you have the time to go and actually. Talk with your students. Put these initiatives that you want to do to be able to support your students, one-to-one small groups, different ways of being more engaged with them.

That's what AI can do. It can give you the time back to actually be able to support the students more. Rather than being drained going into school, having that teacher burnout from creating your lesson plans, resources, trying to find all of these things to support your students, the AI can now do this for you on various different platforms.

You are not burnt out. You have the energy to put back into the [00:34:00] time with your students. 

Shannon Betts: I just wrote that down and drew a little heart by it, like time and energy to put back in your students. 'cause I love that so much. Can you give some examples in your own teaching of how you've been able to do that?

Shane Hogan: Yeah. So put you on the spot. Yeah. Honestly, I think for before I started to use it. I suppose last year I, I was using it a lot, ai, but before that, especially when I moved to the UAE here, I definitely suffered from teacher burnout with all of the, the planning. And then I felt that in the classroom I was drained and whenever I got a chance, I'll hold my hand up.

Sometimes when I got a chance that the kids were working quietly, I just needed to take a breather myself and just sit, sit also. Whereas now I don't have that burnout. Because the lesson planning is done through our help Me teach also, our worksheets or stories or scaffolding [00:35:00] is all done with the help of help me teach that.

I don't have that burnout. I feel energized in the classroom. So now what I can do is. Work in smaller groups. So if the class is working on a task, then I can maybe have a, a small, almost we call 'em conference groups, where we work with a small group of students on more specific goals and targets for them that they need to improve on.

And this comes at both sides. 'cause this can work for your emerging students or your students who are working towards those targets. Also your students who are working above the ability. They also need this time to be pushed more and they can work independently, but they also need that focus where it's their instructional zone, where they are still getting that bit of challenge.

It's not okay that they can just do the work on their own and they're self-sufficient. They also need to be challenged just as much as your students who are working towards the goal are. [00:36:00] Using AI in terms of this, it gives me the energy back to be able to put these strategies into place in the classroom, and I can put more energy into it.

Shannon Betts: So you're more efficient in the way that you can target and differentiate? 

Shane Hogan: Definitely, yes. 

Shannon Betts: Can I pivot a little bit? I'm, I'm curious, like, I mean, we're talking about really good uses of ai, but if you could talk to some teachers and like you're seeing some, like misuse of ai, like what cautionary things should people watch out for?

Shane Hogan: So there was a study done in MIT in America, I'm not sure if you're aware of this on ai, and they basically had two groups of students and they were given the same assignments. One group of students were allowed to use AI in any way that they want. One group of students were, was not allowed to use AI in any form.

And what they did, they took scans on their brains throughout this process. So as you can [00:37:00] probably imagine, the students who were not using ai, they had high brain productivity and you could see it in the in the scan. Whereas the students who were using AI straightaway, they just put in their assignment title, used that there was zero brain productivity.

And what will happen over time is that if you continue this trend of using AI to complete all of your work. Your brain is going to depreciate. It's not going to develop. It's a muscle. It's a brain. Your brain is a muscle. So it needs to be trained, it needs to be worked hard to be able to continue growing.

So if you're not using it and you're using AI for all of your tasks, it is going to have big, big cognitive impact on you. And it's actually called, the term that they give to it is called cognitive death. So it's a short term gain. Right now you're gaining all of these answers, but in the long run, your brain is [00:38:00] not functioning the way it should be, whereas compare that then to the students who were using their brain first.

Then what they allowed these students to do was they said, okay, you've used your own knowledge now. Now we're going to allow you to use AI to use your own ideas, but to polish it off. And that's my personal philosophy on how I use ai. So if I'm given a task, if I'm planning lessons, if I am doing maybe some curriculum development.

I will think about what I believe first, and I, I put my own ideas out there and then I put my ideas out there to chat GBT and I get chat GBT to build on it and almost put it together like a polished article. So it is so important that you don't let AI be in control. Keep your ideas at the center of everything you do, [00:39:00] but use AI to support that and for teachers out there who are, because it is our responsibility now as teachers to teach kids about this.

So I give, I have explained this exact same situation to my grade five students, exactly the same as I've just explained to you, because it's important that they know the effects that. AI can have for them, because if we don't tell them as educators, we don't know if their parents understand AI or this functioning ability of it.

So we have a core responsibility to teach our students about the ethical considerations of using ai.

Mary Saghafi: Yeah, I think that's very concisely explained because I think that you're, we can't just. You know use a spacecraft without really understanding how it works. Because if you've lying to outer space and you don't know how to repair what, what you've done, you know, you're kind of [00:40:00] out of sorts. But when you are, you know, using this tool alongside your students and, and modeling how, okay, we've come up with this big brainstormed idea, let's write it out together, and, and actually modeling that.

Through with your students. We know that's how students learn to write and learn to write more polished. But this is another example of how you can continue editing and polishing the concept. And then additionally, you need to. Also teach teachers and students how to check and reflect on the quality of how AI is getting their information.

And I do think that, you know, if you are just mindlessly clicking checking through, checking the boxes, handing in your work, you can show students how it can be. Ineffective. It can be actually wrong. It can have, you know, it can lack the syntax as you were talking about in the earlier days. Showing them that is so [00:41:00] critical and crucial.

Shane Hogan: I, I learned the hard way that AI can be run over the summer. So summer, 12 months ago, I was trying to get in touch with a university lecturer that, that used to work in the college, and I asked. Chat, GBT further email, and I asked them, were they still working in the college? And they were. So I emailed them, but I got no reply.

So kind of two weeks went by and I sent another e email, a follow up, and I got no reply again. So I sent an email to the secretary of the college, and I almost not giving out, but in quite a firm tone saying, okay, I'm trying to contact this lecturer. Can you please give me the correct email address for them?

And the lecturer had passed away. So I was giving, I was giving all of this, almost anger towards this lecture because chat, GBT had told me that he was still [00:42:00] working there. But. That just showed me how chat GBT can be wrong because that was, he'd passed away months before that and chat GBT was giving me this information, but that really made me not trust chat GBT 100%.

And I know that's a, that's an extreme situation, but. It's reflective of if we're creating stories for, for students that we need to be reflective of what's in it. Does this actually make sense? And how we do it. So when we provide schools with training on how to use, help me teach, we do it 20 60, 20 ratio.

So you put 20% at the start is. All about the teacher input, answering the questions, giving your AI prompts 60%. The AI is gonna do 60% of the work for you, and then the last 20% is reviewing the content and modifying the content if you need to. So that 20 [00:43:00] 60 20 approach is what we really enforce that teachers do.

Shannon Betts: That's a fantastic ratio. And that could be applied to any type of ai? 

Shane Hogan: Oh yes, 100%. It's not just for reading stories, anything that you do with ai. You put in input, it does the majority of the work for you, and then review it with everything.

Mary Saghafi: I think that your example is honestly a very good example too, and I'm a big fan of sharing mistakes openly on our platform, on the podcast, on sharing them with my students because I think that sharing your. You know, quote unquote, failures offer such a great learning opportunity and it also kind of narrows the field that like we, we might have all these bright ideas, but no one is just perfect.

And so I think that that is. It's a graceful way of, of sharing that. It's not perfect, but we have thought through some of these challenges. We're continuing to think through some of these challenges [00:44:00] and the, the 20 60 20, I think I've heard like 2080, but I like the 20 60 20. Again, I think that that actually is more meaningful and at bookends that you have work to do in the beginning.

You have work to do at the end. You must also analyze in the middle, so that's great. 

Shane Hogan: Yeah, 100%. It is so important because like we talked about at the start, the teacher needs to be in control of this. We have survived since the beginning of time as teachers without ai, and we are, everyone is a fantastic teacher.

We all have the skills that we need to be able to teach and give the students the education that they need, and that doesn't change right now. AI doesn't need to become the teacher and replace us and. Be that number one figure in a classroom because we are the number one priority in a class. It is there to support us.

So I think having that is key [00:45:00] and going forward, even though AI is gonna become more and more part of our education system, it is still vitally important that we remain in control of what happens in the classroom. And even what I've seen now in in schools is that schools are trying their entire curriculum out the window and saying AI can make it better.

But it can I that's, I find that crazy that schools are doing that. It's there to enhance it, to make it better. Use what you've been doing, you've been doing an excellent job. Your curriculum is obviously working so far. Yes, it can be enhanced and it can be improved, but use it to find the areas that you are lacking in.

Find the misconceptions, find the students' weaknesses or the gaps in your knowledge or in your curriculum. Don't just eradicate everything you've been doing. Use it to enhance what you already have in place. 

Shannon Betts: When you, we were talking about our. Student teaching experiences, I realized like we're gonna be [00:46:00] like the, the last generation of teachers who remember like pre AI and then like post ai, and I'm actually the generation too that remembers analog versus like, you know, what the world was like before the internet versus.

This, like now it's just crazy how fast our world is changing. Anything else you wanna share? This has been such a fascinating conversation but I wanna be cognizant of your time too. So is there anything else you wanna share with us about how AI has transformed your teaching, what you wish other teachers would know about ai?

Shane Hogan: I think one thing that we have been using a lot in my school this year is our MAP testing tools. So for the standardized assessments we have. The math testing. So over here in U ae, we do it three times a year. We love math. 

Shannon Betts: That's like our favorite test. We talk about it all the time on the podcast. 

Shane Hogan: So one challenge that we find with the students is that when they sit down to complete the math testing, in particular, the reading, math testing, for them to read for [00:47:00] 75 minutes, that amount of questions and stories, the students find it very tough because.

Maybe they read for some excellent readers might read for 20 minutes a day. Some may only read for 10 minutes a week. So for the students to sit down and read for 75 minutes and answer questions continuously on this. They are struggling a lot from, and they're exhausted. 

Shannon Betts: You're right. 'cause like, especially like those passages for the fifth grade onward are like long and scrollable.

Like they have to like scroll on the screen to even get to the bottom of the story. And they're doing that for multiple stories during that testing period. 

Shane Hogan: Yeah, so some of them will just be the, the paragraph of maybe 150 words for grade five. They might be 150 words, one question. Whereas then some of them are what you're talking about where they have to scroll and they're, they get four questions then based on that story.

So trying to balance all of that and [00:48:00] focus for that length of time is a real struggle for kids now and as we know it. Technology with TikTok, YouTube, what they're all watching, their attention span is shortening every year and even, I would even say every month, I'm not an expert in it, but like even ourselves, we know ourselves as adults.

Our attention span is even shortening. So for the kids, it's obviously doing the same. So what we've been working on with our students is. Help me teach. You can create practice map assessments, so you can create up to to 40 questions. And it's all targeted towards the lexile ranges of MAP testing. So the norms from 2024.

So if you select the grade four level, you're gonna get the grade four norms, grade three, and so on. So what we've been doing on a weekly basis is we've been taking one period a week of 45 minutes and getting the students to complete curty of these map style questions [00:49:00] to train their brain, their focus levels, their attention spans, to be able to sit and read for longer periods of time.

Because for me, I am, I'm a big advocate of. Engaging the learners in active activities, but then there's a part of me that's saying, okay, that is fantastic, and that should be the majority of education, but are we setting our students up to fail their standardized assessments then by not having them engage in these practice assessments.

'cause for me, so in Ireland we do the Leaving Cert as our kind of big exams in secondary school. And for me, when I was studying for that, I was just doing practice assessments, practice assessments, pre papers to it all. That's how I studied and practiced for it. But we don't have anything to replicate the map style reading comprehensions.

So that's where we have now. We have the map practice tools where we can generate those questions and you can [00:50:00] actually generate, so you have the control. Again, as a teacher, you could control whether you want to create the questions as. Those 150 words, shorter paragraphs, and just have one question. Or if you want to have maybe a story with six, 700 words and have four questions on it, you have control of how you use that also.

So we're really trying to develop the kids as holistic learners, all activities, but also give them that practice time to become more, how would the word be for it to be more? Assessment ready that when they go to sit, these assessments, it's not their first time in months sitting down for 75 minutes trying to focus and read this much.

They have been continuously practicing this and working on their cognitive development to support them in standardized assessments. 

Mary Saghafi: Yeah, you. Yeah. Their stamina, their endurance, your endurance training essentially. [00:51:00] Yeah. That's brilliant. I'm really impressed with our conversation today. It's given me a lot of food for thought.

We'll make sure that we link to where our listeners can find you and, and links in the podcast, especially for tutorial videos and things like that. I think this has been so interesting. So is there a way that our listeners could reach you? Do you wanna share that information? And also we'll also link to it too.

Shane Hogan: Yeah, of course. So well first of all, our website, our platform, if you look up, help me teach ai, you will come across it. There's a Wise Owl as our logo, which we love. So you'll come across that and you can sign up for free. So you can sign up for free to our platform and try it. Try it out five times without paying, and it doesn't ask you for any bank details, just five times for free.

And then you can upgrade. If you would like to. So that's helped me teach, do AI also on Instagram, same name and again, help me teach.ai where we [00:52:00] share videos of how to use our tools. We're going to be doing that on a weekly basis where we have helped me teach hacks that not just reading tools. That we will be showcasing all of our tools.

We have over 80 AI tools on it for maths, science, lesson planning, creating presentations, all all of it we have. So we'll be creating the videos for Help me teach Hack on our Instagram page and it You want to follow my personal account on LinkedIn? It is just Shane Hogan, my name. 

Mary Saghafi: Great. Thank you so much, Shane.

This has been so rewarding for us to listen to and, and also to hear about it in the real life classroom. It's so great. Very cool. 

Shane Hogan: I've really enjoyed speaking to you both. It's, it's been fantastic. So thank you for inviting me on. I, I'm really delighted that I got the chance to, to speak with you. Us too.

Shannon Betts: Thanks. Your students are really fortunate to have you. I can tell that you're a very thoughtful, reflective teacher. Mm-hmm. 

Shane Hogan: Okay. That's.