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Tuesday Talks!
Join me for weekly discussions about ALL things education...from preschool through high school! As a mom, Speech Language Pathologist, and educator, I share my personal experiences related to each week's topic in relatable and informative ways.
My message about education is powerful: Reflecting on what is and making waves to cause change!
Tuesday Talks!
AI in the Classroom: Innovation or Disruption?
Send us your thoughts about this week's episode!
The digital revolution has arrived in our classrooms, and it's transforming education in ways we're only beginning to understand. From fourth graders using ChatGPT for writing assignments to China implementing mandatory AI training for kindergarteners, artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic concept – it's reshaping how our children learn right now.
Communication expert Melissa D. White joins Tuesday Talks to demystify AI in education, offering a refreshingly balanced perspective on what many educators view as either a threat or an untapped resource. White introduces us to the concept of Communication Quotient (CQ), explaining how students today need to become bilingual – fluent in both human-to-human and human-to-AI communication. "AI is a language. Coding is a language," she explains, "and the quality of your prompt determines the quality of the AI's response."
Rather than viewing AI as a shortcut that undermines critical thinking, White encourages parents and educators to teach ethical AI communication as a framework for efficiency. She outlines four key benefits of AI in education: improved cognitive development, enhanced communication skills, differentiated instruction capabilities, and more equitable learning experiences regardless of background or resources.
Whether you're a parent concerned about AI "cheating" or an educator looking to harness these powerful tools, this episode provides valuable insights into navigating the digital frontier of education. Subscribe to Tuesday Talks for more thought-provoking conversations about the challenges and opportunities shaping our future.
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Tuesday Talks is hosted by Dr. Tiffany. She has been a Speech/Language Pathologist for 20 years. She's also a speaker and educational consultant. Dr. Tiffany hosts webinars and in-person workshops for teachers and parents.
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Hey, hey hey, what's going on, dr Tiff? How are you? I'm doing good. How are you? I'm just fabulous on this Tuesday.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us tonight for another episode of Tuesday Talks. We have another fantastic topic for you. This week we're going to be talking about AI in the classrooms. So I know that if you're a teacher or a parent, this topic has come up. If you have kids in, I would say, grades three and up, what do you think, val?
Speaker 2:Oh, even even further than that, down like we're about to hit kindergarten. China's doing some stuff over there. You know they always ahead of us right yeah, yeah, I saw something. They were making it mandatory, or yeah, mandatory for kids starting in my kindergarten or first grade. They have to have some AI training, instructional training.
Speaker 1:Wow, wow, wow, wow. So I know, in my household, my son, it has become a topic of conversation because I know how my kid writes. And then he shows me this three paragraph thing that he's written and as he's reading it to me, I know that he doesn't know what some of those words mean, like paragraph using the word reciprocated. Hmm, I don't think that's part of your day-to-day vocabulary. So then my question is is this all your own idea or did you use chat, gpt? And then it starts to come out that this isn't all his own original idea. We have to have that conversation.
Speaker 1:Hey, make sure it's your voice in what you're writing or typing, and you can use AI to give you some ideas, but not do the work for you. So it's already come up, and he's in fourth grade, and I know I have other friends who have kids that are older and it has come up in the same types of way in their writing. How about for you when you were in the classrooms? How did it come out for you? Maybe, since your topic was math.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, people have been cheating in math for quite a long time, and so once, once you incorporate AI into that, because as a teacher, I could always get away with saying, oh, your answer is right, tell me how you got it, and then you know they can't. But now AI tells them, child, it gives them the explanation of how to get there, and so it's it's. It's a little more tricky. Um, in that aspect of just trying to weed through, you know, all I can, really all I was doing at the point when I left the classroom was like, okay, you know, you got a test coming up on this. I don't, it doesn't matter how, how you got these answers, but by the time the test gets here, you need to know what you're doing. So maybe you need to study what AI told you was the explanation and then put that into your head. If that makes more sense to you, that's great. I'm not offended, just know it for the test.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So I know there are some benefits to using AI, but then we kind of, in our discussion about tonight's episode, really talked about how AI could be innovative or disruptive in the classroom, because, as a teacher, you're already taking out a lot of time to grade papers, reading through, and now you got to read through it. Maybe give the kid a second chance to do it and now read the resubmission. That's a lot of extra work. You're playing detective. There are AI detectors out there that you can see if what is being submitted is AI related. But I know that there has to be some positives associated with AI too, because it can be a helpful tool, and in our discussion about that, we thought of the best person to come on.
Speaker 1:So we have a special guest tonight. Melissa D White is an AI and communication expert and we're going to bring her to the stage. Hey Melissa, hey ladies, how are you Doing? Great Welcome, welcome, welcome. So, for anyone who does not already know how fabulous Melissa is, go ahead and share a little bit about your background and experience.
Speaker 3:So my background is 25 years in corporate America and specifically specializing in sales, operations and communications, and really that's the art of how to be, through communication, speaking. And then I shifted to really working with youth because of my passion, outside of my corporate work, with starting a nonprofit called Writing Our Wrongs, and that's when I was really introduced to the world of education and building that gap and through all the different work I do whether it's nonprofit work and working with youth, consulting corporate, doesn't matter. The thread with all of it is communication, and for me, the passion point is that the best communicator always wins, and so I just made a career out of being a great communicator and helping other people, including youth great communicators. And here's where AI comes into the conversation. I realized AI had to be a part of the conversation when I started working with youth in our program and I went in gung-ho and passionate but I'm going to help kids with creative writing.
Speaker 3:But there were just some big elements and basic skills of ELA that I didn't realize were lacking and our program had to become an answer to support teachers in the classroom, especially if I wanted a successful program, and so, being the forever learner, I quickly immersed myself in what is adaptive learning, what differentiated learning, and did some consulting with an education tech company and I realized then like wow, ai was all around me and I just didn't realize how it can support teachers, and I mean learners period. Whether you're talking about youth or corporate learners, it's all the same, it's just at the level of where they are.
Speaker 1:I love that so much. What are some of the benefits and exciting ways that AI is currently enhancing education in your opinion?
Speaker 3:In my opinion, I'll give you four ways, and I always like to give the disclaimer I'm not your traditional educator. I'm an educator at a level because I saw the need to fill the gap for communication and I'm just really passionate about people being efficient communicators, understanding the benefit of it, but also across generations and in all settings too, and I think some of the ways that we need to accept or embrace what AI is doing for our society. There's four things when I thought about it. Number one is improvement in cognitive development, oftentimes the art, and here's the argument. Let me say this I'm a purist, like I'm a writer. I love pen to paper as much as I love technology and I was. I struggled being an early adopter. I'm like what are some of the disadvantages? But I think, when you look at it deeper, when taught properly with AI as an enhancement to being better communicators or better yet, learning the language of technology and how to communicate with AI, that enhances your education. So it's an education of how to communicate with technology, all right. The second one, really. Number two, enhancing communication skills, and there's threefold communication here. There's communication with yourself. They help you through your own thinking process. Number two communication with others, just human connectivity, right. Then there's a third one, and this is kind of the the thought leadership on is learning how to communicate with technology as if it was a human element, because there's humans behind it. So now we have to learn the language of AI and essentially be bilingual. I have to be able to communicate with people but also have a language with technology, the third one being differentiative and adaptive instruction.
Speaker 3:Again, I just I had a hands-on, immersive situation with that where I had to very quickly if I wanted my program to be effective and to be an answer as a nonprofit, I was like well, what problems are teachers having by the time the child gets to me in an afterschool program setting?
Speaker 3:Hey, there may be some cognitive or learning delays with the child. I mean, I would get kids that were in the fourth grade but on a second grade reading level, but then I would get other kids that were in the fourth grade but on a sixth grade reading level. I was like, what am I supposed to do with that? And because I at the time had not had a formal background as an educator, like you all, technology was my answer. So I had to look for technology to fill that gap for me to help them. And the last one, which is probably my favorite out of the four enhancements I'll tell you, is equitable learning experiences. And I say this because through technology, with adults and children alike, I have seen the having technology. Literacy creates equitable opportunities when taught and applied correctly.
Speaker 1:I love those. Those are very powerful. We'll include those four points in our show notes too. But just backing up, I think you learning to use technology to help you reach the different types of learners that you had in your after school program. That is solid foundational teacher stuff right there.
Speaker 2:Differentiation is the word. Ok, that is exactly what that is. How? Because it's it's. It's the teacher problem, for I don't know how long. It's been a buzzword for decades. How am I supposed to take this group of kids and they are all these different levels of background knowledge, what they know and what they don't know, and still teach them the same stuff by the timeline that you gave me, or not even that, but just to get this outcome for all of them? How am I supposed to do that? I love how you figured out how to use technology to do that.
Speaker 3:If I can share with that. It honestly was a matter of having an opportunity. It just so happened at the early inception phase of writing our wrongs, I was a full-time entrepreneur, had newly left corporate and I was looking for some part-time work to save my income. And I just I love kind of these wings when there's an intersection and I believe nothing's wasted, like whether it's part-time experience, work experience, it doesn't matter, it all kind of intersects at some point in life. Well, I, I don't know how I found I don't know if it was linkedin or indeed I started working a part-time consulting job with a technology, um, education technology company and I absolutely loved it and this is not an endorsement or a plug for them, but the company was called freckle. It's now renaissance freckle and again it, I think and they told me they said they wanted consultants who were not traditional educators, who had a corporate background, either operations or systems and technology job at the time, and I love how this is such a full circle moment.
Speaker 3:Our job was to help educators like you all, like your listeners, use the technology platform and we would help onboard with them with the platform and show them how to use it for adaptive and differentiated learning. I had never heard those terms before and I'm certified in adult learning and development, and so to hear that in the sense of youth and academia education for K through 12, it was mind blowing to me, because I have a mom who was an educator and so I was able to get that feedback and I would go into schools and to see a teacher say, well, this really helped me cut down my time in curriculum delivery or hey, when I'm doing groups with my kids, I can accelerate the learning path of a child that may be in one group and kind of not have to segment my classroom as much while I get them all caught up. And so to see that to me that efficiency and that's my corporate operational mind, like you need an efficient classroom and that just helps you be efficient.
Speaker 3:So that was how I was able to talk to teachers about efficiency with with this tool and ai technology yeah, I think that's so awesome.
Speaker 1:We kind of touched on what I'm going to ask next before we brought you on stage tonight. A lot of teachers are concerned that ai is going to replace critical thinking skills, because the kids aren't thinking through the problems, the prompts, the situation, and they're just using AI.
Speaker 1:How does how do we mitigate that concern? And then, how does that tie in to what you talked about in other platforms as communication intelligence, because I know you said you really want to build up that was one of your four pillars the cognitive piece. So how do those two things go hand in hand?
Speaker 3:Well, I think first to answer that question, I need to give some more context to what communication quotient, or what we seek. You, you all have heard of IQ right, your intelligence quotient, and then we've heard of EQ right and emotional quotient, like emotional intelligence. Well, in my research and here's the next level of my own development as a non-traditional educator is now being a professor, the collegiate level, at a research one school teaching business communications. I had again it was technology technology that helped me understand how to teach communication at a business level. But now I'm seeing the gap and where our kids in the classroom at K through 12, especially in high school, are not getting the education twofold in technology and in communications. And so in my studies, within the last year of being a professor, it was communication quotient and, like I said, I had natural ineptibility quotient, and, like I said, I had natural ineptibility. Like I love words and how people process work.
Speaker 3:And communication quotient finally gave a language to what I've been trying to teach people all these years. And number one is connectivity. Communication quotient, or your CQ, is your ability to quickly connect with people. That's what if we teach it properly. Connect with people, that's what if we teach it properly. We teach the prompts to help connect faster and more efficiently with people. That's the first thing. The second component, when you talk about your CQ level of acumen, is what we want to start teaching kids is efficiency. So we're teaching them not efficient by cheating and doing the work for you, but being efficient by giving you a framework to think through the work faster.
Speaker 3:So I may so again, it's like a language. It's like coding. Coding is a language. Ai is a language. Coding has rules in a framework. Ai has rules in a framework. Communication has rules in a framework. Ai has rules and a framework.
Speaker 3:Communication has rules and a framework, and I've taught that even as a speech coach. You need a framework, you need hey. This is where I'm going to start, this is the path I'm going to take you on and this is the problem I'm going to solve, or how to complete it. So when you start teaching it, like, hey, ai or chat, gbt just happens to be the most popular, but there's thousands of platforms out there that we don't even realize that are AI. But once you teach a child, hey, you know how to get, you want to know how to really get ahead in life. Your real cheat code is create a system for yourself, and AI is the tool to create a system, if that makes sense.
Speaker 3:And again, I can't stress enough equity, especially for children. I learned this working with the technology company at the time. Educational equity starts with technology literacy and access to this technology. It just so happens that open AI platforms like ChatGPT are free and more accessible than some of the other platforms, but it's so robust. If you're willing to invest, whether in a school district where they spend a little bit more on some technology platforms, or if you can do that even as a parent, it's worth the investment to teach your child or tutor your child about framework use and communicating with AI. That gets them ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that speaks to a lot of the fears I know I have as a parent. It's like, okay, well, if I teach my kid about AI, then they're going to use that. You talk about being efficient. Hello, I can just type in this prompt and have this thing spit out a paragraph for me. But what I have learned, even in my own personal use of ChatGPT specifically, is you need to write a good prompt to get a good response from ChatGPT. You write a crappy prompt, crappy prompt. You are going to get the good quality stuff that you want back, and so even in that is teaching some level of discernment in the writing skills. How much detail do I need to add? What are some adjectives I can put in here to make my message even clearer, so that I get back something a bit more robust and less vanilla, if that makes sense?
Speaker 3:so that I get back something a bit more robust and less vanilla, if that makes sense, yeah, absolutely. But you just substantiated my case here that the quality of the prompt and the quality of your communication with AI determines the quality of the response you get. So I think the investment to override that fear of just having AI think for you is we have the responsibility to teach kids how to communicate ethically with AI, and that's where a lot of the gray area and debate is the ethics of it, the standards around it. The ethics of it, the standards around it. Even I was doing some recent research about different platforms to help identify AI in writing in the classroom and detect the software, and much of that is not reliable, quite honestly. And I think here's another important thing to teach your child when you have the conversation, there's always a human behind the machine. I think that's important to highlight.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, there's always a human, and the thing is, the humans with the highest IQ set the tone for the CQ that you get out of AI. If you get what I'm saying, it's those that have. It's kind of like look at it as having a tutor for your child from somewhere that has a level of knowledge or education or acumen in an area that your child doesn't, so it's teaching them. Hey, this could be a supplement or a tutor for you with the right prompts and framework, so it might be worth. Hey, let's come up with some prompts to help you in this subject and let's work on that together, not just, hey, go use it. It's just like sending your child outside to play and not supervise them. Supervise and engage and make it fun. Where you do these things together with prompts, together and have your own framework for efficiency for your household, for your classroom, for your assignments. And the way you come up with those prompts is what is the outcome I want. What role do I need AI to play? You can essentially tell that open platform who you want it to be for you, so you may tell it hey, chat or hey, whatever platform. Right now I need you to be a mathematics tutor, specifically in geometry, on a 10th grade level. Assume that I'm at the beginner stage. You see where I'm going like. You're telling it the situation and who you need to be for you in the situation, and then the next thing is you want to tell it how you want the information disseminated back to you.
Speaker 3:Um, one example my mother gave me while I was preparing my mom's 10th grade math teacher. That's why I use that example. Um, sharing with me an ai platform that works as a scientific calculator, but it doesn't just do the calculations, it spits out the graph for you. So now you save time on having to graph out your results. I was like man, where was that when I was in school? It was just. It blows my mind and you know, especially for old school like hey, no, give me some long math. I don't want to work, I don't want but to see her as a math teacher. She's like I appreciate it, because I understand that they need math to do for them something different than what it had to do for me quickly I got you.
Speaker 1:That's very insightful and, I think, enlightening too, because it's almost like a taboo topic that you're not really ready to talk with your kid about, but you feel like you need to before another friend introduces it to him. Do you know what I'm saying? So that's how I've kind of approached ChatGPT or even AI with my own kid, like well, if I don't say anything about it, then he won't know anything about it. And then he brings me this clearly chat GPT generated paragraph. I'm all how did you even know about that? He knew about it without me saying anything. Why?
Speaker 3:is it taboo? I'm curious to you all as both as parents and having that, but why is AI considered taboo for parents?
Speaker 2:Val you want to share. Well, I'm different. Okay, so it hasn't been, and this could possibly be because of my educator background too, but as a parent, I was never really that like hands off of it, don't approach it. Anything that's come new, especially in the education world. I've always kind of looked at it as oh, let me see how this works, let me see how this can be incorporated into what I'm doing in the classroom. Let me broaden it what I'm doing with the kids that I work with, whether they're someone else's kids in the classroom or my own kids at home.
Speaker 2:I am notorious for saying Google it when students ask me questions, because I look at, I look at it as just a source for information, and so when it comes to, like, the topic of steering away from it, I'm like no, I want to embrace it, because one, it's here, one, we're immersed in it everywhere. I went to Bojangles the other day and AI is taking my order. I did not feel comfortable with that. I didn't even want to say yes so that it could record my voice and use it for something else. But it's here and we're in it In the classroom. But it's here and we're in it In the classroom. You know, I encourage my students to use their technology.
Speaker 2:I think, with AI, one perspective that teachers can take from it is to actually think about technology. What type of answers are you expecting from your kids? Are you only giving them assessments that require low-level thinking answers? Because, yeah, ai is going to spit that out, google is going to spit that out all day long. They don't have to do any thinking. So I think we as educators and as parents have to get creative in the level of responses we want. Do our responses require evaluation of the information that they're getting? So, you know, give them a prompt that says use AI to X, y, z, and then the actual assessment and grade comes from how that kid evaluates it. Or, for math, what does this graph mean? Analyze this particular part of what it spits you out and then answer this other question. I like that.
Speaker 1:Val. That's a good strategy and a way to implement the use of AI. So it, you know, in some ways satisfies their need to use it, but then also teaches them how to analyze what AI is spitting out to you, because you know there's a human behind the machine. But as humans, we all have the opportunity to give incorrect information or to give information that you know isn't quite accurate, talks about something in a roundabout fashion, but I think that was really insightful. For me, ai has just been taboo because I feel like it's like you take the lid off the cookie jar and then all of a sudden all the cookies go. Like I didn't want to take the lid off the cookie jar, I don't want the smell to get out, I didn't want no temptation there and you know pride that lid open on his own. So now we have a conversation about it. But if we're looking at AI in schools and how that is impacting the workplace, melissa, where do you see this all going? What that could look like in the next five to 10 years?
Speaker 3:Well, I can tell you, starting with what's happening right now, I don't know that we're really aware of the impact that AI has had, and I've had the opportunity to work with some of the best and brightest minds in AI through our co-working community, where AI in and of itself has been around at least the research of it 30, 40 years, and we don't even realize that. And so there are people that have looked at and projected this way further out, 20, 30 years out, because it's not new. It's new to us, but there are government agencies, business entities that have been using it in other countries. There's a level of innovation that I have to be honest, sometimes we're behind in that, and so it scares me a little bit to talk about the future of it because of how far even some of us, especially in Black and Brown communities, how far behind we are in it. So I say this, you know, cautioning us to kind of catch up with some of the innovations and a list of those and this comes from just information I got from the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce the three main skills gaps right now are technology, skills, gaps in the workforce and communication, so the two very things we're talking about.
Speaker 3:However, I think the hope for me is that communication human communication will never fully be replaced by AI because of the need of effective, high-quality of the need of effective, high quality, world class communicators that are needed to even run effectively.
Speaker 3:So we need to be prepared to be better linguistic and written communicators, whether it's the written language that we speak, whether it's technical code and language.
Speaker 3:Start teaching those things to our children now so they're prepared to compete in today's workforce and even if you want to put them in advanced classes or looking for any opportunity outside of the classroom to do immersive programs. There's a fellow TEDx speaker, a friend of mine, yolanda Martin. She has a platform called RevereXR and it's how to code, how to use AI and virtual reality to teach history, and it's called like historical preservation. So that's light years ahead of where a lot of our children are. So I think it's really important to start teaching our kids what problems do they see in the world right now and getting them in immersive programs and STEM, science, technology and using AI to do that now, so that when they enter the workforce, they're equipped with equitable opportunities. And that's my biggest concern and, like I said, that's not been five to 10 years down the road, that's now, and so it's sometimes difficult to have that conversation about the future of AI when our community is already lagging and behind on the adoption and the innovative thinking and knowledge of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow. Well, that spoke right to me because I feel like I'm contributing to that problem with keeping AI away from my kids. So if anybody else listening is on the same page as me, don't do that anymore.
Speaker 1:Expose your kids, get them to use it teaching them how to use it responsibly, ethically, and then making sure that you show them how you even use it in your own day-to-day life to help you be more efficient in certain areas. I think that was a real good takeaway there, but I love how you highlighted so many positives, because I think the tone in education is that it's mostly negative about AI, because we don't want kids to have help doing work for them when a lot of them are already challenged by the work themselves, and then we're giving them this method of of cheating, if you want to use that word.
Speaker 3:I can say this as, as we kind of wrap up, for me, being a collegiate educator, professor, like my classroom alone represents about 26, 27 different countries around the world and it is very evident where our kids here, local to the US, are behind in communication skills and innovation, even conversely, in a collegiate classroom, which really began at the tone that was set in the home or in the classroom in K-12. So I'm encouraging you from a collegiate perspective to prepare your child now so that they can compete, because I see it every day in my own classroom.
Speaker 1:I love that. Thank you so much. This has been very informative, so hopefully you all listening and watching tonight took something away from this. If you did, be sure to share it, comment on this video like it, tell us what stood out to you, maybe what changed your perspective on AI as well, and then, with that, we will see you all next week for another great episode of Tuesday Talks. Have a good one, bye you.