AI Advocates

S4 E5: Practical Approaches for Today’s Educator

• Lisa Dieker • Season 4 • Episode 5

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0:00 | 10:09

Lisa Dieker and Maggie Mosher discuss how artificial intelligence can support teacher preparation and classroom creativity, from making syllabi more accessible through layered formats like videos and podcasts to designing “AI-proof” experiential assignments that encourage students to improve their skills in critical thinking, prompting, and problem-solving. During the episode, they introduce their new book, Empowered by AI: 10 Practical Approaches for Today’s Educators, describing it as a short, practical guide that helps educators quickly understand how AI can support their daily work without feeling overwhelmed. 

Throughout the conversation, they share examples of how AI can assist with tasks such as preparing presentations, tailoring professional development for specific audiences, and helping teachers reflect on whether technology is meaningfully supporting student learning. Organized in a chapter-by-chapter format, the book offers actionable strategies on lesson planning, tutoring, AI-driven feedback, accessibility, gamification, and developing AI fluency. 

By emphasizing process over specific tools, Lisa and Maggie position the book as a practical companion for educators who want to use AI responsibly, efficiently, and creatively, encouraging teachers to view AI not as a replacement for the human elements of teaching, but as an assistant that helps reclaim time, personalize learning, and strengthen instructional design while keeping educators at the center of the learning process.

Purchase here: Empowered by AI: 10 Practical Approaches for Today’s Educators

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Reclaim your time. Time. Time

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Lisa Dieker.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Maggie Mosher.

Lisa Dieker:

And Maggie, I'm really excited we're going to talk about teacher preparation and our new book that is out short, not expensive, meant to be a quick read on AI. So you want to kick us off. What's your best teacher-prep idea you've been using AI to help you with or to help teachers be better teachers?

Maggie Mosher:

I think my best one is taking a presentation I've already had and saying, what am I missing that you think is really important in today's society and world, because it's changing so fast that sometimes I can't keep up, and sometimes it gives me a suggestion. I'm like, yeah, no, I'm not gonna that's not important to my audience. But sometimes if I put in really specific information about my audience, like, here's the website of where these teachers you know are in what district, and here's what they know, and here's what they you know, struggle with. It gives really great teacher-prep information about, hey, this, this district has been a Brisk AI district for an entire year. So they don't need information about how to keep kids safe. They don't need information about the security training. What they need information about is, am I using the best tool for now? Like, do I really need to be using AI for this? Am I over using AI now that we're on board 100%? Could it be that this that I'm using the AI, but the students aren't actually running the show, and I'm pushing the AI where they could be, you know? So it helps me to know more about the people in which I'm giving a presentation to based on what they can find online on those people. Although it's sad sometimes I think of that, it's like the internet stalking me. What does it know about me? And is it right and what it knows about me, but it is. It's fascinating as to what it you should ask. AI sometimes, what do you know about blah, blah, blah?

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and I'm not sure I'm gonna ask it, because I may not want you know. I think we may all. It's just, you know, again, it's like Facebook, you know, you're like, okay, how much do I share and how much do I not share, so.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, what about you?

Lisa Dieker:

Well, you know, I have two things that I'm really loving it for, so it's really fun. I'm launching the semester, and actually my friend and Taunton, Amy Moynihan is doing the same with her class. And we made a our syllabus. We made a podcast. We use NotebookLM, and I have a bot called the growth mindset bot. So if you have a question about my syllabus, you have to ask my bot. But I also had it make a video and a podcast about my class. For my syllabus, and it's so I said to students, if you don't want to read the syllabus, you can watch the video or you can listen to the podcast. So I love the fact that it can do layering. But the second thing, and I give this to a challenge to teachers period, is I have now made my class, thanks to my colleague, Becky Hines, has given me lots of ideas. You've given me ideas over time. I've made it so that you can never cheat with AI in my class and and I love that fact that, you know. So like a lot of my classes, experiential, we do crazy stuff in my class. And I'm like, so if you want AI to talk about what we did today in my class, and you better make sure it comes to class with you. And so I really found it to be my personal challenge to use it in preparing future teachers to say, look, if you make your class Ironclad, AI can't cheat, you probably have a more creative class to start with. And I feel like my creativity is off the charts, because I keep saying I will make it so AI can never cheat.

Maggie Mosher:

And I love your classes too, because they can defend what they're presenting, because they know it. So you know that they know it and I think that you do a really great job at that, I will say too I found in creating this course for Johns Hopkins University, it's on XR in AI and extended reality and AI, and the students are very diverse. It's engineers all the way to business people to educators. It's such a diverse population that I was like, I don't even know how to meet every single one of their needs in this one course. And so I asked AI for help and making sure I'm meeting every single need in this course. And I had already differentiated. I'd already made the course UDL, so there are already options. You could choose between ABC. There are already plenty of options. But what I liked about what AI added to my options was it gave me ideas on, okay, great. You have all these options. These options are great. You're going to make sure that these options become live products like I had the business people are going to go through a pitch deck. They're going to actually sell me the AI and XR that they create. By the end of that class, they're going to sell it to us, whereas the education they're gonna talk about why they chose this AI for their teachers. You know, I had very specific tasks based on what they were doing, but my problem was, now I'm going to grade all of those, and it helped me a lot with, why? Why are you the only one grading it? What are the mid checks you could be having AI help you with? You're doing the end grading, for sure, but what mid checks Could you help that would make this more streamlined, so that I'm not the only person grading all of these different projects with different rubrics, and I loved that. It gave me kind of a break with that, and then I could tell the students that, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is how AI is going to help us in this class. It's gonna be your first read, and then I'm going to be your final, giving all your feedback, but that first read makes sure you tell me in your final how you changed it based on what AI told you. And I think that that was really fun, because they became better prompters, and they became better at asking AI how to help themselves in what they're presenting. And they're going to use that for the rest of their lives. I'm not going to have me telling them what I like and don't like, but they will have AI. So I thought that that was really helpful.

Lisa Dieker:

Well, and with much savvier technology and digital literacy of other students, one of my favorites is I used to have a form that they had to fill out because they have a service learning component, and they had to have the supervisor sign it. And I can't tell you how many students lost points because the supervisor wasn't available or they forgot that, and so now they just have to take a picture of them at that site.

Maggie Mosher:

Awesome.

Lisa Dieker:

With the name of the address. I don't need a signature, because I have video evidence you were there. And it's funny. And I said, and if you choose to use AI to cheat, then that is so much more work than what I was looking for in the first place. And they all laugh at me, but it's a good example of taking something I'd always done and saying, why am I still doing it that way? And that's what, what I think is fun, and I think Maggie that kind of leads to where we are going to kind of end this podcast talking a little bit about a new book we have out, not here to sell you a book, just telling you that that it's even a new way of writing books. This is a book that we've self published for the reason that by the time we got it through a traditional publisher, it would have been out of date. And we're using a mechanism here at KU to do that, but it's called Empowered by AI: 10 Practical Approaches for Today's Educator. You want to highlight kind of the format of that book and how it's even a little different, because it is about AI?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, I think what we found is we had so many teachers asking us questions, so many people asking us to come present, and there's two of us, and there's only so many hands and so many people we can train. And so what I love about the book that we collaborated, and I love the way both of our minds work so differently because we were able to come up with, okay, what are some AI-powered lesson planning tips? What are some intelligent tutoring systems that are safe for kids and where can they go? What are some saving time mechanisms in special education? How can I make sure that AI is giving really good feedback to students? Or AI for accessibility? I love our chapter on gamifying learning with AI. It's one of my favorites. And then also things like, okay, we know AI is the new essential literacy in AI, how do I get my students to become AI literate, and not just AI literate? We talk about that a lot, AI fluent, like I can be literate and not use it correctly, and not use it accurately, not use it fluently. How do we get them to be AI fluent, and then reflecting on our AI practices, is this really the best tool for this time? And how do I know? How do I know that there wouldn't, it wouldn't have gone better if I had just used myself in my relationship with students. How do I know that AI really improved this lesson or this assessment or this project? How do I know and I think that we really kind of looked through each of those things, and especially the chapter on AI being a Virtual Teaching Assistant. I think we all want as an educator, we want a personal assistant. I've always wanted as a person, and I think figuring out which one's the best personal assistant for you, once you've got that, I use very specific AIs for very specific things, like Copilot and Gemini Pro, those two for certain tasks. I choose each one differently, and I choose what I use each one for and I've created bots in each one. And then for my classes, I mostly use BoodleBox because they can all talk to the same bot that I created. And so based on what I'm using, if I want a personal assistant, I use these. If I want something that's talking to all of my students in the same class, and we can all collaborate together with the same bots. I use BoodleBox. If I want these, I use the ones that are better for me. So knowing, how do I figure out who's the best personal assistant? It's like giving a job interview. How do I know where to start interviewing? So figuring out that, I think it does a great job. What do you think, Lisa?

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and I just as if you're interested in it, A. We made it really low cost. It's only, I believe, 90-88 pages, so it's not long. It's meant to be a quick read, but it's also meant to read each chapter at a time, and I think that's individually, so you don't have to read it from beginning to end. Buy one and share it across your school. Maggie and I aren't here to sell you a book, but again, if somebody wants to have an intelligent tutor, here's a short tip, again, similar to the podcast, quick reads, quick and fun, and we're really excited to think differently even about writing a book, because we know whatever we print, even when I present on my slide, say this presentation is outdated before I gave it, these podcasts are outdated before we record them. And so keep in mind that's something you want to think about is that with AI, it's learning faster than we can learn, and we don't need to be smarter than that. We just need to harness it to save us time.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, so keeping in mind that when you go there, some of the tips are things that are going to be forever this way with AI, it's not just here are the sites because they're changing all the time, or here are the apps because they're always changing. Yes, we give some of those to help you out, but a lot of it is the process and the technique and how you're using it, and I think that's really important, and it'll save you a lot of time and money.

Lisa Dieker:

Thanks for joining us.