Using AI to Curate Educational Content for MS/HS Teachers

[Music] all right I am going to go ahead and I'm going to put the link to the slides in the chat and so you can see the slides are in there for you and we are going to go ahead and get started today's webinar is using AI to curate educational content and this one is geared toward middle and high school teachers so what we'd like you to do is in the chat let us know where you're from and what grades you teach to see if we have more Middle School more High School a good mix of both I'm coming to you right now from Chicago oh Arizona grades 9 through 12 all right high school middle school and high school computer science and Robotics in Oklahoma very nice High School South Carolina Welcome all right right I'll let keep people keep putting their information in there for us but we're going to go ahead and go to the next slide all right and so my name is Robin Lesley and I taught High School business and computer science and graphics and all sorts of good stuff for 15 years in Indiana and I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Sarah do you want to introduce yourself sure I just realized I am not muted and I can't mute because I'm SC sharing my screen so I'll be real quick so hi everyone my name is Sarah strong my pronouns are she her and I teach high school computer science in water Ontario Canada so my curriculum's a bit different than yours but we teach a lot of the same Concepts and skills so I teach grades 10 11 12 which is age 15 15 to 18 or so nice thank you and she is going to be your presenter for today but I do have some more information to go over with you so Sarah if you could go to the next slide all right our agenda for today is what AI tools are available looking at prompt engineering to make sure you get what you're looking for and also of course curating educational content you go ahead so in order to ask questions you can just go ahead and type those right in the chat chat for us and we can get them from there we probably don't need to use the Q&A today so if you come up with a question you would like to ask me or you would like to ask Sarah you can go ahead and type those into the chat go ahead and then if you don't already have a code HS account getting a code HS account is totally free and I am going to put that into the chat for you there there you go awesome the next slide please so here is the certificate of completion link and in order for this link to work you need to be signed in to codehs so make sure you're signed in before you click this link that is now in the chat for you and that's just going to send you an email that says thank you for attending this 45 minute webinar nothing exciting or flashy happens that just pops up the up on the screen and says thank you for attending but again make sure you are logged into your codehs account if you could go to the next slide for me so if you're new to Cod HS I just want to give you a little bit of information we do offer curriculum now for grades K through 12 so we go all the way from kindergarten through senior year and almost all of it is web- based right on our site unless of course you're doing something like game design with unity in which case students would need that but we try to have everything that you would need to be able to teach computer science to your students the curriculum the professional development like we're doing today tools and resources for teachers so we try to make it easy for you to use our curriculum and you can go to the next one here are some of the things that we offer instant feedback I know teachers love to have things that are autog graded and so did I for sure so that is something that we have grading and tracking tools and lots more so you can go to the next slide all right and now I'm going to have Sarah take over and give you guys some more information on how to use AI hey welcome everyone so I was looking through the chat and I can see that a lot of you actually everyone that posts in the chat is from the US so as mentioned before I'm from Canada and today September 30th is actually a very important Day in Canada so I'll briefly tell you about that so today's the national day of Truth and Reconciliation also known as orange shirt day and that's the reason why I'm wearing a bright orange shirt it's not a coincidence so today is a day of reflection and learning about Canadian history and even if you're not from Canada if you live in any Western Country with a history of colonialism it's a very important topic to learn about so very briefly so in Canada we had something called residential schools which were a way for Western settlers to help indigenous indigenous kids call settle into Western culture and it did a lot of damage to indigenous communities so in the US you may use the term Native American or Aboriginal we use the word indigenous it's a more Global term and so today is that day to learn about that and even in the US it's important to learn this type of History so without further Ado let's begin talking about AI so we've all heard the term AI but we may not be able to distinguish what tools are actually Ai and which tools people think are AI so here are six examples of things some of which are Ai and some of which are not and I'll give you around 10 seconds to read through them and think to yourselves which ones are Ai and which ones are not and you don't have to use the chat for this all right so how can we tell if something is actually AI so AI tools learn from data and they improve over time whereas non- AI tools follow static rules and have predefined responses so for some of these they don't actually change over time and for some of them they do so for example an autog grader it just checks if something's right or wrong there's no learning along the way it just checks is this the right response but for facial recognition software as it reads more faces it gets better it learns better it can be better at matching faces that's AI traffic lights I wish they were AI I wish they were better they were programmed for us to not hit five red lights in a row but it's not AI all right video recommendations yes they are because as you watch more videos and as more people watch more videos it learns it realizes what videos are related and someone likes one video they might also like another video spell checker nope it just checks a dictionary that's already made for them it doesn't grow that dictionary on its own we need a human if we want to update that dictionary doesn't do it automatically all right on the other hand grammarly it does learn so as more people use the app it gets better at giving recommendations so that's a brief overview of how to tell something is AI or if it's not AI all right so a lot of apps that we use and our students use have a AI so here are a couple of them so in Spotify anything they recommend to you is based off of user data it's based of what other people have listened to and it also helps make playlists using that data as well Netflix same idea except for TV and movies for Shopping product recommendations if someone buys something and something else they might recommend the second thing to you and kind of the scary thing here is predictive shopping which is when it buys something for you I don't know if anyone's everever dared to try that but that that is a feature that Amazon shopping has that uses Ai and for Instagram a lot of the same things discovering content making recommendations advertising targeted ads facial recognition software and this is interesting filtering out inappropriate content so it has to learn what things gets taken down and it gets better at realizing what is appropriate content and what it should take down right away here are some other apps Google Maps so root optimization traffic predictions all of this uses AI it uses data that it collects from users who use the app Uber same idea for all that root planning also price surging and predicting the time when you arrive and for voice assistance software as it listens to more voices and tries to figure out what you're saying it gets better at doing that all right so here are some terms that come up a lot when we talk about AI so first AI stands for artificial intelligence so what is that it's the signs of making machines that sorry my face is in the way of making machines that can think and learn like humans the reason why think and learn AR in quotation marks is because it's not real intelligence it's artificial artificial means fake like artificial coloring like I'm sorry that is not a real banana flavor it's artificial so it it's scary how real it feels but it's not real it's artificial all right so large language model this is a type of AI system that processes and generates human-like text based on vast amounts of data and I mean vast amounts of data if you think about how complicated English is it has the largest vocabulary out of any language in the world think about how much English it has to consume to actually write something that looks like natural English so this is the part where it generates text based on all of this data all right so what about a neural network whenever we see the word neural chances are has something to do with the human brain like neuron or neurobiology so neural network is a computer system that models on the human brain so that is part of the research in Ai and another part is machine learning this is the learning this is the getting better this is the field of AI where it takes information and improves itself without any human intervention all right so when we use AI we have some things to be concerned about so it's important to know what some of the limitations are because it's not perfect and it can be dangerous sometimes if we misuse it so first of all it doesn't actually understand what it's saying it's scary how it feels like something a human might write but it has no idea what it's actually saying and especially when you don't give it in a context it'll just make stuff up it's amazing what it'll make up and say with full confidence even though sometimes what they write is complete garbage another issue is accuracy on the topic of making things up it might make up references is it might make up stories that didn't happen and again that's just because of the way the large language model works it has no idea whether what it's saying is factually correct although it will use really good English to do that and the most important issue I think when we use AI to understand that AI is limited to the training set and there are human biases that come into the training data that is used in particular for example facial recognition software is best used when you're skin is light and that is because of human biases that's because the training data contains more light faed faces than dark faed so as a result it doesn't do a very good job of recognizing people with darker skin colors and there of course other biases that's just the most common mainstream example when AI lacks diversity due to human issues all right so of course we're Educators and we want to know how do we use this in our classroom and that's why you came to this seminar right so for writing here are a couple of them if you want to screenshot these tools I'll give you a chance when I have everything on the slide so for writing there are a lot of tools that can help us improve our writing and the one I like the most is brisk although I also use grammarly quite a bit and so I'll talk about brisk later but here are some there you don't have to know every single AI tool but it's good to have a list that you can choose from so you can explore on your own so I don't know all of these I know about half of these I've used about half of these so for text to speech I personally have not used a lot of these but I know a lot of kids really benefit from having H textto speech software to help them with they're writing and also teachers can benefit from this too to save some time typing and for adaptive learning so I've played with K Migo a bit so this is the app that KH Academy uses and it's basically just a really intelligent personalized tutor that doesn't give you answers it helps guide you along the way it helps you explain your thinking helps you find mistakes without doing all the work for you it's really fascinating AI so I mentioned that brisk is one that I use a lot and that is my focus for the next slide so what is brisk so brisk is an AI tool that helps with writing and the tool that I use the most is called change reading level so if you open a Google doc and you have the brisk extension see this little dark black icon with this b shape in it that's the brisk icon if you click on it after you've downloaded the extension you get this popup that says create inspect writing boost Student Activity give feedback and change level so change level is something that I use often and what it does is it goes through the Google Doc and it predicts what reading level it's at and it can rewrite it for you in a different grade level so for example I gave it a piece of text which it determined was a grade nine level and if I select fifth grade and change reading level I get a new document with the same text except at a lower reading level so it simplifies things it rewrites it to use a simpler vocabulary simpler sentence structures and I find that really helpful so even though I teach High School I try to keep the reading level quite low because I know a lot of kids struggle with reading and they might be very behind and also because I have a lot of multilingual Learners in my classroom so students whose first language is not English and is keeping instruction at a low reading level is very helpful for understanding so here's an example of what I did with brisk so the top box here is something that I got from chat GPT and it it's a ninth grade reading level I put it in brisk and it gave me a simpler set of instructions that say the same thing but with simpler language which makes it easier to understand so this is a tool that I like to use in my classroom all right so let's talk about prompt engineering so how do we get AI to produce output that is useful to us so first you may have heard of chat bots so first what exactly are those so in the context of AI a chat is an interactive session where you exchange messages back and forth so even though a lot of us use chat TPT just for a single prompt and then we just copy the First Response a chat is really that interaction back and forth where you say I like your answer but do this or can you do this instead or can you improve by making it shorter and things like that that entire that entire session is really what a chat is not just the first response you get that's exactly what I just said all right so here are some examples of chat Bots you may have heard of and use so Gemini is the is it m no it's Google right sorry I forget I haven't used Gemini very often so there's Gemini and of course there's chat GPT so one quick note about using chat bots in your classroom is that there is there is a rule for what age you're allowed to be so double check that I believe Gemini is actually 18 plus whereas chat TBT is 13 plus which is why I tend to prefer it and have my kids use that it does require parental consent and that's something that will be important when using these tools all right so prompting is the idea of giving it a message so that your AI can generate some text back to you and if you give it something vague without a lot of context it probably won't produce the result you want so here are some tips to ensure that you actually get a useful result so first is a customize it I'll show you what that looks like in a bit and there's an acon you can follow to make sure that your prompt has all the parts in it that are going to be useful for it to give you a good response and also to really just go back and forth and refine it as needed if the first result is not what you want all right so first up is how to customize the chatbot oh also understand that AI is limited to the training data so sometimes you keep repr prompting and it doesn't do what you want and it's not a problem with your prompt it's a problem with what it's able to do so how to customize it so if you're on chat GPT if you go to the top right corner there's an option to customize so you can do something here where you give it a little more information that lasts throughout your entire conversation for example you can say Talk Like a Pirate that's a fun example where anything it gives it says R and things like that and the tool on the right is actually the chat GPT playground which is not like if you go to chat GPT you're probably going to just land on the chat page but there's another page called The Playground where you have a lot more freedom to customize things for example one of the things you can change is the temperature and this affects the probabilities of what word comes next if you have a temperature of one every output is the same no matter like if you give the same prompt over and over again it'll give the same result but as you play with that setting you get different variability of Randomness and if you use the playground it doesn't actually count as training data because you're playing with it whereas if you use a chat GPT where you just go back and forth as usual it does use that to improve on itself all right so what does Parts stand for so I mentioned that this is to ensure that your prompt has all the components you need to make it useful and to ensure that the response has all the context that you're looking for so Persona is p and it's your goal so I'm a high school teacher that's my Persona aim so what do I actually want this prompt to give me so for example I might be asking it to make an assignment for me and I can describe what that assignment is recipient your audience so I can say that I'm going to give this to my high school students who are age 14 to 18 or so theme so I could say I want this in a paragraph form I want this in bullet points I want this in a table so that the output is useful to me and S is sorry I got that backwards style and tone is formal for example formal English dot jots things like that whereas the format would be the table or the paragraph form or dot doots all right so here's an example of that so here's a prompt that I gave chat GPT so I'm a computer science teacher designing an assignment for my teenage students who are brand new to coding design a task for students to show their understanding of while loops and python write the instructions in simple formal language and in paragraph form and this is what it gave me so not bad right it's a paragraph it has all the information that I was looking for and it's actually pretty good task it's actually quite similar to what I actually give it the only main difference is is that if it's outside the range so if they guess 101 it says invalid guess try again and the other thing is I let them do it in seven tries and when I ask or my students ask me why seven I tell them we're going to learn that next year when we learn about binary searching but seven is the perfect number you need to guess a number from one to 100 if you say higher and lower so this is actually a really good output that's actually similar to what I made without the use of AI all right so the last topic is curating content so this is the idea that we can have ai do a lot of the work for us and save us time but of course we still have to make sure that the outputs are what we want and we are not being too lazy we just want to ensure that it's saving us time and we still get things that are helpful to us and something that we could have made without AI so the here so here are a couple tools and the one that I'm going to focus on is defit so to be honest I I only heard of a couple of these before and and I've played around with a few of them and I really like defit so I'm going to share what that is so defit is a tool where you can just give it a topic if it's a common subject like math History Science you can tell it that and if you're in the US you can align to the US standards so I didn't select that option and there's also a fiction or non-fiction option interesting option I guess if you're talking about an English story or or something in history that makes sense to modify that reading level is here and language is here it does use other languages as well it's interesting so all I put was while Loops in Python and you just learned that for prompting that you want to include a lot more information so this is a very vag prompt but even with this little information let's see what it gave us so here are a couple screenshots so first of all gave us a summary of what a while loop is in Python it gave me some multiple choice questions if I want to quiz them here are some questions that I could use if I want short answer questions to get a deeper understanding than multiple choice here are some questions and also some here also here are some open-ended prompt with some questions for students to think about so even though I probably wouldn't use a lot of this content I could look through to see what parts of this are really useful to me and maybe I will make a quiz and maybe I will use some of those questions and just make some small modifications all right back to Robin awesome see I learned something new today actually a couple of new things so thank you so much anyway I have a couple of links that I want to put in the chat for you guys but before I do that we wanted to make sure that we answered all of your questions so if you would like to see something again you had a question for Sarah about something we would be more than happy to answer those questions if you just type them out in the chat and I'll give you guys time to do that and then while you're doing that I just wanted to point out a couple resources we have if you're not already in our codehs Facebook Educators group it's a really great group on Facebook where teachers who use cod HS interact with each other and share resources and ask questions and so that's kind of a really happening space you can also earn codehs micr credentials you can become a codehs certified educator and of course you can follow us on all of our social media we do have one question Sarah have you had any difficulty getting parental consent for students to use chat GPT no because we do it as a department so once they sign it once it's good for all courses so as long as you collaborate with other teachers on that it's really helpful when you have teachers who also use it in their class and it's just good to get it done once no push back so far that's a good question I understand that it's it's part of the curriculum it's it's computer science using using AI as part of computer science so that's understandable awesome if you could go to the next slide and keep typing in your questions as we go I do want to put the webinar survey in the chat for you it's right there it's only a couple of questions and it lets us know how we did what you would like to see things like that and it's pretty brief and then the other thing and I know I gave this to you earlier but I think some people came in after I put it in the chat and this is the certificate of completion link just says that you attended the webinar today and if you could go to the next one so take a look we do have several back to school webinars still coming up and as you know they are free so if you want to check those out and register for those you can I put the link in the chat and the other thing I wanted you to know is that if you see one that you would like to attend but you know you're not going to be able to it's at a bad time bad day whatever it may be you can sign up and register for any of the webinars and since you registered we will send you the recording and the slides so if you cannot attend but you're really interested in that content make sure that you register anyway so that you get the video and the slides but you see we have apcsa coming up apcsp and then we have using AI to curate content for elementary teachers so we probably won't see any of you at that one but we do have some good ones still coming up if you could go to the next slide and if any of you teach apcsa we are starting a Meetup a little PLC group for teachers who teach apcsa to get together share resources talk find out what other teachers are doing we know that many times high school and middle school even computer science teachers are usually alone many times it's a department of one in many high schools and so you don't get to chitchat with any other computer science teachers but you would at this so if you want to sign up for that they're planning on meeting quarterly and the link to register is there and then if you could go to the next [Music] one and then this is our road trip so it's actually starting I think he's already had one visit somewhere but I'm going to put this link in the chat as well and what happening is we have a cods Ambassador who is going to be traveling across the country in this super cool looking pink van and showing up to various schools across the country to talk to them about computer science and so if you would like the pink van and Blake to show up at your school you can go to this link and you can put your information in there and maybe your school will get put on the list to have him show up there and then the next slide is just if you are interested in bringing codehs to your school if maybe you're looking to have it in your District or several people in your school you can go ahead and go to that learn more link there and that is it let's see did we have any other questions while I was going through that I don't see any other questions man you guys are getting out 15 minutes early very nice very nice all right well thank you so much for attending thank you Sarah for the great information and we hope that you guys have a great week we'll see you later bye [Music]