Using AI to Curate Educational Content for Elementary Teachers

[Music] welcome welcome everybody this is code hs's 2024 back to school webinar series and we have people online and we also have people who are going to be watching later so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to get started but you're in the right spot if you're here to talk about using AI to curate educational content for elementary school and we're going to do some things interactively and I'll share you with I'll share with you some tips that have worked over the last year and a half since AI came out so let's get to it right away your Cod presenters I'm going to introduce both of us my name's Dave dve Klein hands I was a 15-year teacher in the Chicago area and I at codhs for the last year and a half and so has Robin Robin was also my cohort and she's also a PD specialist here to help teachers on their journey and she'll be sharing some links in the background so you can find those links in the chat so if you want to familiarize yourself with zoom the chat's usually down the bottom with the clouds with the three ellipse or three dots and there's also h a Q&A and so if you want to participate and ask questions I'd encourage you you can use either tool the advantage of the Q&A is it's easier to kind of control the distribution list but from our perspective feel free to use either all right so first thing if you'd like a codhs account they're free and there's curriculum that you can use you can go to codehs.com signup this is not something you need for today it's just a link that you they want to hold on for the future and if you need to kind of track your PD your professional development hours you can get a certificate of completion link and that's available and Robin will also put that in the chat so you'll have that available too and to actually use this link you have to build a teacher account and codhs once you do if you have a teacher account you can just click on that link you'll receive an email and you'll also get a little screen Splash like I have here on the bottom right so what is codehs well we're a company that is focused on helping teachers deliver Computer Science Education in K through 12 school districts it's a comprehensive platform that includes a robust set of teacher tools to help with grading and pacing and academic Integrity as well as full curriculum for K through 12 so that teachers don't have to be both the designer and the deliverer of education and it's fully online fully web-based and if it's have isn't something you've used I'd encourage you to explore it I taught 10 years of computer science before using codhs and then five years after using codehs and really enjoyed the experience using the platform and the curriculum but let's talk about AI before I jump in to show how to curate content I was in the classroom in November of 20122 when chat GPT became commercially available for everybody and what was your reaction I remember the first time I signed in and played with it and if you haven't had the opportunity you're going to see it today I I think maybe I was like number one the most popular answer that I've had to this slide is number two and I don't know if that's popularity of Joey from Friends but Robin's going with the hard for here so we're going to we're going to talk a little bit about kind of the excitement and then how you can use it and when we talk about AIU here at codehs we're gonna we talk about five areas and today we're going to focus on the central area so we're going to hone in on use cases but to be I think AI proficient you need to know a little a little bit about the basics you know you need to understand chatting skills we're going to touch on each of these lightly because you need them to be able to do content creation and kind of the meat of the sandwich is that Center area which is how can teachers effectively use Ai and then there's also what apps are in what you can expose your students to and then some of the challenges you should be aware of and talk about we're not going to talk about all these areas today we're going to lightly touch on one and two so we can get immediately to three so just wanted to share with you though the whole picture and kind of the first area how does it work I think this is a great thing to do with students and I'll give you an example of what I mean this is a free software piece from Google in their lab in their lab area the Google Labs area they've created to help people understand how Ai and machine learning works so I'm going to go into it and just show you I built in about two minutes this model and I'll show you quickly how you can do it and so in this model I've uploaded some pictures of squirrels and some pictures of foxes and then I'm going to train this AI model so that when I upload other pictures it can identify is it a squirrel or a fox and so the training takes a little bit usually takes 5 to 10 seconds seconds and now I've done the training and then it looks at my webcam and says whoa who's Dave and it's saying I'm definitely squirly today a little bit of fox little bit of squirrel I can say well I'm not really interested in me I'm interested in this friend that I have and I'm going to pull an image up that I have and it's Carol who's kind of the mascot for the company and it says Carol's a fox and so I would ask students well what do you think Carol looks like and I think most students Elementary or not would say hey that that's a dog that's that's neither of these and I would say well how come the AI tools wrong and most students come back and say well it's because you haven't told it that dogs exist and so you can quickly say well let's remedy that so I'm going to click the add button I'm I'm going to create a new group called dogs and I'll go ahead and upload some pictures so I have some pictures of some dogs so I'm G to open it and then I'm going to retrain my model and so now I'm going to educate my AI model that there's not just squirrels and foxes out in the world there's also dogs I'm still squirly but a little bit of dog in me too now I'm going to go to the file and click on that and it says oh maybe this carol could be a squirrel or it could be a dog but I think it's more likely a squirrel and then you ask your students why has AI misidentified carol which we're pretty sure is a dog and most students will come up and say well maybe you need more pictures of dog or you need one that looks like it or if you look at squirrel there's a cartoon squirrel and you have a cartoon dog those are all answers that students have come up with and so I'll say you're right you know all those are valid so let's order let's add another picture of a dog so now I add a profile of a golden retriever let's train the model again it goes through the steps and now for me it's all you know I could be a squirrel or dog let's see let's go back to that file and it starts rethinking and it changes the percentage and I start shifting more to dog so this is how AI works and it kind of covers all the areas I talked about before how does it work what are the basics and what are some of the challenges for me to ultimately remedy this I would need more pictures of dogs and preferably a cartoon dog that would match kind of the squirrel image here so you you get the idea one of things I'd encourage you to do as a teacher is if you want to expose kids to how AI thinks this is a great vehicle so bookmark teachable machine and it's it's a just a great way I think to introduce AI into the classro all right now let's move on to that second area okay now that we know a little bit about the basics what's an AI chat well the reason they call it a chat is it's essentially a back and forth conversation but unlike conversations that we have it tends to be initially more text based but now that's changing with some of the voice ability that starts started to exist in Gemini which I have on my phone which has kind of replaced Siri in many ways or Okay Google or hello Alexa so let's go look at that when you chat you first need to pick a bot and there's free ones out there I have chaty PT today I've used Gemini I've used co-pilot I've tried them all all of them they kind of have a free capability where then you can also layer in some Pro features and we'll talk about some of that today but for today I'll be using chaty PT and if you have your favorite bot bring it up because you can practice some of the things and one of the things I share with my students when we talk about AI is well why is important to chat and I have another kind of Link here that's in the Google experiment area that I like to do to show them the importance of chat and so I'm going to go ahead and begin and you'll see this they generate a picture for us I'm going to skip this one I'm gonna get some a little spicier they generate a picture for us here and this is a Ramen bowl and we have to describe it we have to chat with the AI tool and if we chat successfully it will generate a picture much like that picture so I ask students to help me construct the chat and we'll see how effective we are and so a lot of times the students will go oh tell them to draw a bowl or create an image of a bowl of ramen and some students will say soup or Ramen and then I'll say what else and they they'll say with noodles a half of an egg I don't know what that other stuff is on there maybe that's a pickled I don't know pickled accessories no they wouldn't know the word accessories but I would say oh pickled onion and I would go on and on and I can't wait have 120 characters to try describe a bowl Ramen and I may say what the container is in a ceramic Bowl I'm going to go ahead and say go and that's my chat with the I tool now it's generating the image and the more successful my chat was the closer the image will be my image to their image and here I got an 87% match woo I'll be honest with you though I've done this with other teachers and I've seen people get 92 so I still have people who have beaten me and so you can say the students well what did I miss out and maybe I misidentified ingredients but that's a pretty good job I don't know what this stuff is on the top of my Ramen Bowl though all right so when I chat chats about having a DI dialogue with an AI tool and for to be meaningful to the AI tool we need to be very specific and that last example was you know showing you that but when you're doing it in a classroom and when you're doing it to create content you need to really construct your chat with kind of this pneumonic in mind Parts you need to talk about what your role is what the objective of the response you're looking for or what you're trying to construct the recipient who's your target audience so it could give you an age appropriate response what you want the style and tone to be and the format you know how you want it constructed you want a numerical list or do you want a bulleted list and what kind of this Parts pneumonic or This Acronym here this represents a little bit of what you just saw in that last example a way for me to structure my query with the AI bot so I get the most relevant response so let's let's go do that and we're going to do that in the create content area but when we talk about AI uses in the classroom I just put this slide in here because I don't want you to think it's just solely to create content you can brainstorm to come up with ideas have it do seating charts do things that are kind of the administrivia of teaching help students tutor to kind of create a baseline for your students differentiate multiple quizzes review also analyze analyze test Readiness look at performance of students on homework or quizzes and see hey are we ready for kind of a unit summation or formative assessment but we're going to focus on content and I'm going to do it across the different subject bands that Elementary teachers focus on so English talk about vce you know correct pronunciation of vowels here's a good here's a good prompt I'm a first grade teacher that's the persona that's who I am designing an assessment for my first grade class who are new to understanding vce so that's the recipient I want you to create a worksheet for my students to show their understanding so that's the aim of what I want you to do and I want you to write the instructions simple and easy to understand language that's the theme in a numbered format that's the output structure so that prompt has all different components of our parts methodology so I'm going to go and let's feed that to chat GPT let's do this and I'm going to go ahead and I'm just I so you don't have to watch me type I have put these prompts in a doc so I'm going to go copy them in to chat GPT and I'll also I'll just throw them in the chat if you're using gemini or co-pilot or something else you can give it a shot so after I paste it into chaty PT I just hit the enter or the up arrow and go ahead and it'll generate this content for me let's I'm going to do it again here I might have timed myself out here we go oh no let me try again maybe open AI is having an issue that's okay well we'll try it again there we go and you can see how it's thinking which is pretty interesting and not all AI tools do that I'm going to go back up to the top as it's going through it kind of gave me oh I'm trying to decode what VC is so it does an investigation it says oh that's vowel consonant that's what we're doing and then have to kind of pinpoint some assignments then Target it for first grade so you can kind of one of the things that chat chbt has done is tried to demystify what's going on behind the scenes all right and then it gives some instructions for the worksheet read the word look at each word below read it out loud say the sound say the vowel draw a picture color your drawing and then it says you know here's the words to practice and so you would say cake or rake or one of these long words and then ask you to draw so pretty simple worksheet and then it says match the words and it says draw a line from the word to the correct picture and so it would look for you to put pictures in I don't really like that and so I can say can you generate a picture of a cake and a bike so that I can have these to display to my class and so that might be a better way to do it oh so it it does it with emojis and asky art maybe I don't like that so I can say well one of the things with chat GPT is I can choose kind of which AI engine I'm working with and 40 gives me a little more robustness and robustness and will generate real live images so I can say generate a photo quality image of cake of a cake and a bike and let it go off and generate that image and so you can see that it can construct that worksheet for me it'll go ahead and generate an image and I'm like oh that's that's pretty cool that's a good looking cake and a in a bike I can keep modifying I can say add other objects to the image and then I can once I get multiple objects to the image I can present it to the students and say what object up here what item up here comports to the vce standard and it says what other objects do I want and so I'll I'll say well table's already there how about a chair and a man and I can keep going so one of the things that you see is the iterative nature just like conversations of working with a ey so we'll allow it to finish we'll come back and look at it and we'll look at other examples so that's one way to curate content let's let's move up the academic chain a little bit and talk about you know adding fractions I'm a fifth grade teacher designing an assignment for my fifth grade class where new to understanding multiplying fractions very difficult create a worksheet for my students to show their understanding the aim simple fraction write the instructions again and simple easy understand language in a numbered format and then probably in that last example I probably would have said don't include instructions I'll include them as the class for first graders because they're not going to be probably reading the instructions at that level so I'm going to go ahead and say I am a fifth grade teacher I'll pop this in the chat and then I'm gonna go give it to chat GPT oh and here's my final picture looks pretty good which of these objects ma comport to vce what we've learned about vce and you hope your students would say by B and Cake not shair or men or whatever but let's start a new chat and the way I start a new chat is I just go click on the new chat button which is the pencil on a sheet of paper and I say okay now we're shifting over to math it goes ahead it'll run you'll see some of the same things here we can definitely have some written instructions tells the students here you go here's what you should do review the basics simplify your answer now practice and it gives them some examples and I like the challenge problem it actually creates an extra there so you may say hey this is great for kind of a let's start class we worked on multiplying fractions yesterday let's do this what would you want next as a teacher well I'd want a few things I'd say generate three versions at the same difficulty level so I could kind of have multiple goes at this or students are sitting next to each other maybe having them have different assignments so I could say go ahead and do that it'll go off and generate that and then I could also say generate solution keys for each version so as a teacher I can have a check you know on my work and so here it's running off and it's doing the work giving me three different versions all right there's version three coming up so if you're a teacher who's had to kind of build content for the student or before a quiz students always ask can I get more extra problems great vehicle to do it generates solution keys for each version it's off and running and it even shows me the multiple steps the reduction step as it said and I'll stop we don't we don't need to see that but this is another great way of curating content let's go look at again at another example so that was math oh wait what about word problems those are always hard for fourth and fifth graders well can I have one worksheet with word problems for multiplying fractions and those are hard to come up with and I could have specified it to be topical on sports or fashion and here it gives me two responses and ask me which one I like best so we can let it run a little bit and we will oh there's a pizza party I'm already leaning towards on the right response number two response number one doesn't say anything about pizza oh there is a cake now it's an equal toss up all right so we have two different choices and it starts going through the word problems we'll let it run a little bit and then come back all right how about in science what could I do well second grade when you start learning about the plant life cycle let's go through the same things hey I'm a second grade teacher design an assignment for my second grade class the recipient to understand the plant life cycle create five projects it's a little different than a worksheet now I'm asking it to kind of brainstorm and create different ways that they could demonstrate their understanding to me to give some flexibility see what's going to resonate with them and then write the instructions again in simple language and provide the answer in a checklist format so I'm going to go grab that and and I am going to feed that to chat GPT oops I grabbed too much let me just grab this I'll put this in the chat if anybody wants it they could try it in gemini or whatever you want to do so I'll go to chat GPT it's still working but let's take a look what it did oh it came up with some word problems on a pizza party gardening baking cookies running track painting a room book reading and these are really some good ones there's some that don't resonate with me like gardening like an acre are we really talking about Acres yet that may be a concept we haven't exposed one of the things that you can do in chbt not in other tools is I could specifically ask it to take out number two and substitute sharing cake from number one and that's a new capability they have called canvas and so maybe at a future webinar we'll share that so I say I prefer response one and there are my word problems all right let's do that science example I copy and pasted that so we're looking at the plant life cycle so what else so it is all you could draw a picture label each part show the order color your drawing this is what I did I remember a long time ago planted a seed in the cup watched it grow my cat ate it and then number three create a little book fold a sheet of paper we used to do that you create a poster act it out I don't I don't know but that'd be pretty cool to watch a student acted out but those are really creative and if I don't like it I could say how about some that are more digital and maybe that's not good for second graders but maybe a little parent help I could see what it comes up with oh slideshow I don't know if they their views their sides animation a Google drawing a little book they give you some tools you can play with Google Jam board or padlet maybe a podcast lot of different creative ideas but I think you can see how easy it is to come up with project ideas let's look at the the last one social studies Veterans Day I'm a fourth grade teacher we're covering all the grades here in elementary maybe not third grade designning an assignment for my fourth grade class who are new to the understanding of the important of Veterans Day generate some poster ideas for historical figures relevant to Veterans Day again write the instructions and provide a sample poster image oh so we'll try this so we'll see what we got here so I'll go ahead and copy that prompt put a chat PT ask it to run so we'll see what it comes up with here so here I've asked it to do two different things so I'm curious what it will come up with so here it generated a sample poster and one of the things that you should notice if youve been an earlier user of any of the ey tools the embedded text is getting better and better and better and if you use mid Journey or ideogram you can get it to generate whatever you want I had to generate a picture of saying Taylor Swift says Dave for president and I'm Canadian that can't happen but I have her endorsement so but these these text is getting better and better so that gave me one but I didn't really get some other ideas so I can oh it did I just didn't give it enough time so here it says pick a veteran choose a famous historical figure draw their picture write their name big clear letters w give me some ideas well how about provide a balanced list of 10 historical figures for my students to choose from so you gave them an example but maybe you'd like to give them hey here's some people that you should think about and here we go George Washington Harriet Tubman Theodore Roosevelt Audi Murphy and so we start seeing a little more of a balanced list Pat Tilman I could say what about the code Breakers and we add to the list and then goes on we'll regenerate the list but should include the Navajo code Breakers and you can see kind of the iterative nature of what we're done did it did it put the code breaker in no did not boo and so that's one of the issues you'll have oh no it did now here we go so I didn't specify Navajo to get a Native American I so it took code Breakers as like a technology cyber type person and so that's an area where we'd have to be more specific so that's an example of kind of the different content generation that you can do and there should there should be some big takeaways and one should be that you do want to use all all components of the parts method so specifying the Persona the recipient the aim or the goal of what you're trying to do what the tone should be and then how you want it structured the other is what you get is an iterative one part in an iterative step of your journey for creating content and then the last thing is I didn't show this but you have the ability to say okay if I want save that list as a PDF or a CSV and sometimes this could take a little longer than just a standard promp but you'll actually be able to get your content in a ready format to use for the classroom hopefully saving you some time so we'll come we'll come back to that and take a look at it so now now it's your turn you know what ideas do you have you know what what do you want to put in take this as a template going forward and you know think about what you're currently working on and if you're interested you can share in the chat anything that you would like to try a topic area we could run it here or any questions that you have but my challenge for you today is to get started to start doing it right away and if you're if you're new to AI it's a real easy and incremental Journey you don't need to be an expert and if you're interested in other resources and continuing to learn about you know what we're doing explore us check out our Facebook group follow us on social media and then provide you know just some feedback to us we're interested in where you would need some additional help and if some of these idea spark some creativity today and then finally we do have a certificate of completion if you need a professional development and I will say before you click on this last link make sure you're logged into to codehs it'll require you to log in or sign up and if you haven't it's just codehs.com signup and if you'd like to learn more we have many more activities that are available and free webinars free PD and some of these how to run an hour of code before csed week great time to talk to your students about the importance of computer science in their education and starting the journey early and you can even have a cods representative come to your classroom so keep following us look for free PD and during CSD week we'll go to two 200 schools to visit and educate students on on AI and Cs and the importance of it in their lives and the last thing if you want a special visitor we have a CSN Ambassador traveling the country 22-year-old named Blake a recent graduate who's traveling living out of a pink van and visiting schools and trying to learn what they're doing and to excite them on their Journey so if it's something that you think you're classroom would benefit from Blake's leaving Toronto today and on his way to New York sign up and he'll swing through and maybe visit your classroom and your kids and you'll see the pink van and hear a little bit about Blake's journey in CS as a young professional and if you'd like to learn more about codehs I believe this is our last link you can go to codehs.com to learn more to explore how you can bring Cod HS to your school or your District but thank you so much for your time today I appreciate your involvement and keep keep in touch let us know how you're doing on your AI Journey we're curious and we're excited for you take care team [Music]