About This Webinar
Equip yourself with strategies to teach students about AI, its workings, limitations, and societal impact. This concise hour long webinar guides educators on fostering AI literacy, preparing students for a tech-driven future.
Equip educators with the knowledge to teach AI literacy—learn how AI works, its limitations, and how to help students interact with AI thoughtfully and critically in this CodeHS professional development webinar.
Full Transcript
Read the complete transcript of this webinar
All right, I hope everybody has had a good day. I know we've had some crazy weather lately. Maybe some of you guys had some shorter weeks. [laughter] I know we had I'm based out of Michigan, so we got hit with a lot of snow. A lot of people had a a snow day on Monday. So, nice short week.
All right. Well, this is the developing AI literacy.
we're going to be talking about what you and your students should know about AI. so thank you for taking your time out this evening to talk AI with us. so this hour it's really going to be focused on helping you educators understand what AI is, how it works, where it falls short, and how those realities impact students both in and beyond our classrooms.
[snorts]
our goal isn't to turn everyone into an AI expert. It's really to build that confidence in teaching students how to interact with AI thoughtfully, responsibly, and critically. All right. So, just going to introduce myself here. I'm Danielle Santilli. I'm a professional development specialist here at CodeHS. I started in the company last spring. Before that, I was in the classroom. I taught through my 13 years as a teacher, I taught K through 12, so like all of the levels. So I have experience with the really littles and the much bigger kids. I got my masters in technology. I really focused on computer science and building those literacy skills. really dug into AI recently, developed an AI course through codes. and I've run a couple of AI cohorts. So, this has been kind of breathing AI for the past probably 4 months here. So, and then I'm going to turn it over to Leanne to introduce herself. Hi, I'm Lean Grant. I am based in central Illinois. We got quite a bit of snow here as well. I've been with CodeHS as a PD specialist for three years. before that I was a middle school and high school computer science teacher for about 10 years and I'm very excited. I'm going to be kind of in the background with you guys today answering questions in the Q&A and in the chat as Danielle is presenting to you today. All right. Thank you, Leanne. All right. So, our agenda we're going to be focusing on, you know, kind of what AI literacy is and why it matters. We're going to dig a little bit into what AI is. then focus a little on those limitations and societal impacts that students really need to know and understand. and then what AI literacy kind of looks like in the classroom settings and then kind of wrap up with some extensions that you can use with your students or you can even use to kind of build your AI literacy on your own. all right. So, I do want to say you know, if you do require like a certificate to prove that you were here and to get those PD hours, you do have to be present, which you guys are, so yay, good for you. [laughter] and then if you have any notetakers, I know a lot of us have those AI note takers. We're talking about AI, kind of built into your your Zoom, then you just make sure that they're muted and chat disabled so they're not kind of jumping in here. [snorts] another thing too is if you have questions throughout the session, Leanne's going to be monitoring those. You can just click that Q&A and ask your questions. She'd be happy to answer those. Another thing, too, is we're going to do a couple of games and interactive activities. You can always use the chat for that. and that's also going to be where Leah's going to be posting a lot of the the links into what we are going to be working with today. Okay. And she already threw the links to the slide presentation in there, AI literacy slides. so the links are in the slides, but they're also going to be in the chat, too. So, you have that. All right. Oh, so great to to to meet you guys. I know we have people probably from all over the United States. You're welcome to go ahead and share where you are, your experience. First year teaching computer science. I've definitely been there before. So, I know it can be a little a little challenging, especially in this world of AI. I thought it might be fun to start with a game. So, this is a game that I made. it's a teachers guessing game where you can kind of, see what educational tools that we interact with as teachers. which ones actually have AI and which ones don't. So, if you go ahead and click that link, Leanne threw that in the chat here, you'll pull up this game. it says AI or not, a teacher's guessing game. So, can you identify which educational tools utilize artificial intelligence? All right. So, essentially here it's just going to give you a message and you just say guess if you think it uses AI or it's not AI. it's a little quick little fun activity. So, go ahead and click that link and see how well you guys do. I think there's 10 prompts here. So, we'll just take, you know, a minute or two, see see how well you guys score. If you if you get all 10 out of 10, please go ahead and share that in the chat as well. You are AI experts here. All right. Once you select, you just would hit that submit guess and then it tells you if you're correct. gives you a little, you know, blurb about it and then moves on to that next question. eight out. Nice. All right. Not too shabby. A couple eight out of tens here. Oh, thanks Leanne for throwing that in there. If you are joining in a little late, we're just playing a little fun AI or not AI guessing game. Oh, we do have someone who says 10 out of 10. Nice. Nice. All right. All right. Nine out of 10. Okay. Okay, so we have some 10. Everyone, everyone who's sharing out has gotten some high scores. I did get a 10 out of 10 myself, but I made the game, so I feel like that's kind of a disadvantage here. A little bit of a cheat. [laughter] All right. All right. So, I just thought that would be a fun So, you can kind of see just by doing this activity like how many how many tools that we use every day already have AI in them. and I feel like especially if you I I I taught at a Google school, so we used, you know, all of the the Google, you know, Google Slides, Google Sheets, all of that. I mean, now AI is in all of it. I mean, it's just pops up right when you open it up. So, it really is getting more and more embedded in what we're using every day as teachers. So, just being able to kind of recognize that, I think is really is a really helpful feature. All right. a lot of I think eight out of 10, nine out nine out of 10 and 10 out of tens. We're we're we're ready. We we know we're know what's up. All right. So, AI literacy. when we talk about AI lit Oh, I should probably go back to the slides here. That would help there. Now, now we all see where we're where we're at here. Okay. So, what do we mean by AI literacy? we're not talking about knowing every tool or feature. I mean, as you just saw, it's it's everywhere now. if we were to learn how to use every single tool, it would just be too much. So, it's really about understanding these four things. Understanding how AI systems work, recognizing both strengths and limitations, evaluating AI generated content critically, and knowing when AI use is appropriate and when it is not. All right. So, we want to be able to use AI in in scenarios where it's helpful and it's beneficial and it it it makes our jobs easier, our lives easier, helps with our learning. but it's not always going to be applicable in every situation. So, being able to identify those. So, it's really it's focusing on thinking skills, not technical skills. All right. So, what does AI or why AI literacy matters for students? I mean, we just kind of did a little fun activities where we saw how AI was embedded in stuff that we use as teachers. I mean, it's already embedded in our students lives, too. So, through search, recommendations, images, videos, study tools, even AI is there. So, students will encounter AI generated content regardless of school policy. So even if AI tools are restricted in class, AI outputs are everywhere outside of it. So AI is also becoming a baseline skill in many careers and industries. So students won't necessarily need to build AI systems, but they will need to work alongside them. So having that AI foundational skills is going to help them when they leave our classrooms and enter the real world. and we're really doing them a disservice by not teaching them how to use it appropriately. So, I feel like the key idea for today is avoiding AI doesn't protect students. Understanding it does. So, if they can understand what AI is and isn't and how to use it appropriately and how it works, they're going to be better students. They're going to be better learners. They're going to be better when they enter the real world and join our workforce. All right. So, now we're just going to kind of do a very light introduction into what AI is really. So before we talk about because before we talk about AI literacy, we kind of have to have a little bit of a basic understanding because many misconceptions come from assuming AI thinks or reasons like humans which it does not. [laughter] That misunderstanding causes a lot of issues for students. All right. So what AI is? Okay. So identifies patterns, predicts outcomes, but does not understand meaning or truth. So I think it's really important to recognize what AI cannot do. AI does not think. It does not reason. It does not have consciousness. All right? It doesn't understand meaning or truth. It just predicts what sounds right based on patterns. So I thought this kind of leads us to the concept of predictive versus generative AI. So one helpful way to build AI literacy is distinguishing between predictive and generative AI. So predictive AI classifies, scores or recommends. Generative AI creates new content like text, images or audio. Now most real world tools combine both of them. So this isn't about labels. It's kind of about understanding behavior. So these are some two kind of fun games. And what I like about these two is these are also fun games that you can use with students. in fact I saw like when I was in the classroom a lot of kids really enjoy quick draw. [laughter] so we're going to take a look at these two games. so we can kind of see this in action here. So, Quick Draw, if you're not familiar, and Lean just threw that link in the chat for us. This game is kind of training AI to recognize what we're drawing. So, if you go and click on that link, it's going to take you to a screen like this, and we'll click let's draw. And it's asking us to draw Oh gosh, a raccoon. [laughter] Man, they give me a hard one right off the bat. I hope they gave you guys a little easier ones on your end here. All right, so let's let's see how I do here. as a nose,
I see circle or moon or donut or cookie or face. I see bear or mouse or panda. I see frying pan. Oh, I know it's raccoon. [laughter]
Wow. All right, it got it. I wonder how you guys did. All right, I'll try I'll just do one more and then we'll try out the other game. But you guys let me know how you're doing on your end if it's able to to guess what you have. [snorts] Okay. I see ear. I see circle or potato or apple or blueberry. Oh, I know it's sea turtle.
Wow. I feel like maybe QuickDraw has gotten even better at recognizing what I'm drawing or I I've just become an artist over the years. I don't know. Maybe I missed my calling as an art teacher. highly doubt that. All right. So, you can kind of see. So, this is a really fun one that you can do with students as well. So, I like this one. the next one is XYZ toy. So, that link is also in the chat for you guys. And now, as you'll notice, both of these come these are from the Google Experiments catalog. they have a ton of fun little AI activities that you can do with students. These are just two that I use to kind of teach the these concepts of generative and predictive AI. All right, so this one is can you guess the hidden word based on the clues in the text? So, here I'm just going to go ahead and click launch the experiment. All right. All right. So, all of the letters had balloons in them. So, the word was balloon. All right. Okay. All right. So, just kind of some fun little activities that kind of teach those two different kinds of AI and action. And I'm sure some of you guys will be playing those for the duration of our our [laughter] time together. but yeah, these are some really just fun activities that both help you understand the difference, but also things that you could bring into the classroom if you ever wanted to do some fun AI activities with your students. All right, but I'm going to jump back over to our presentation here. All right, so All right, so hey, how AI models learn. So at a high level, AI models are trained on large data sets. These they learn statistical patterns and use those patterns to predict likely outputs. All right, so this leads to one of the most important ideas in AI literacy. AI learns patterns, not facts. One cool, now we're not, this is, you know, we're playing a lot of games in here, but this is one that I definitely recommend if you are going to work with some of your students. We're not going to do it together cuz it's a little bit timeconuming and we only get an hour, but this is a really fun, if you haven't seen it already, it's called Teachable Machine. And essentially, it teaches you how to train an AI. So, what you do is you would gather a bunch of photos. for example, you could do like maybe you're training the AI to recognize the difference between cats and dogs. You could insert a bunch of pictures of cats and then a bunch of pictures of dogs and click train model and then you give it a picture of either a cat or a dog and you have to see if they're able to identify if it's a cat or a dog. So, it's a really nice kind of way to teach or to actually see how AI kind of learns. It's really just a ton of data. The more data you give it, the more accurate it is. It's a really fun lesson that, you know, you could bring into the classroom, too, if you're wanting to kids to explore a little bit more with training AI. a fun little recommendation for you, but it helps them kind of understand how AI works. So, definitely a good take-home if you aren't familiar with that one. Definitely recommend you play around with it a little bit later. But yes, AI learns from patterns, not facts. All right? And that single idea really explains many of AI's strengths and its limitations. Which leads us to AI limitations and societal impacts students must understand. And I say students must understand, but I feel like everyone really needs to understand that. cuz these limitations don't just affect schoolwork. They really affect how information spreads, how people form beliefs, and how trustworthy content appears online. I mean, we've all heard things like fake news or we've seen AI generated videos. it's it's out there and people definitely, you know, fall for it. So we really need to train the this next generation on how to how to spot these things and to know that it's there because understanding these issues is really part of preparing students to be informed citizens. It says digital citizens but really just citizens. All right. So very important concept and we kind of talked about this a little bit before but AI does not understand. So this is a huge misconceptions that student have. AI has no intent, no awareness and no concept of truth. It follows instructions but has no goals of its own, right? Its instructions are what it was used to be programmed, right? The data that we gave it. But it's not, you know, it's not a real person. It doesn't have consciousness. It doesn't know what's true or what's false. it just knows based on the data that it was given and trained on. And this really is a big misunderstanding or a big misconception that AI understands. And this is the root of many classroom challenges with AI use. So we're going to kind of focus on these two main ones which are hallucinations and biases. So AI can sound confident and still be wrong. I will say that AI is getting better at with hallucinations right off the bat, especially like if you're very direct and say like, you know, I I don't know. I'm trying trying to think of an example [laughter] of like a very blatant one, but it it is getting better at the right away being able to identify truth from fact or truth from fiction. However, this next part is where you fall into the hallucinations, which is errors scale with complexity. What that means is as you're talking and a conversation is formulating between you and AI, AI is actually more likely to make mistakes and those mistakes are harder to notice because of the back and forth that you've been having with the AI. So that's really the main takeaway. It actually progressively gets worse the longer that conversation gets. so just kind of you know something to be aware of. biases are [snorts] also a big issue. They appear even without intent because AI reflects patterns in its training training data. Right? We gave it the information. the information we gave them is not necessarily unbiased, right? Oh, I've noticed sometimes getting the days of the week wrong. Yeah, that's kind of a big one. It is not really good at knowing dates. Yeah, I'll like put in things for like a specific day, you know, I'm making an agenda for this day and it'll like mess up the day on it or it'll say that it's a Tuesday when it's really a Wednesday. Yeah, AI really is not good when it comes to time and days of the week. So that's a that's a great observation. but another thing too is because we're giving it the information, it's learning the same biases that we that's in our data that we're training it on. So it's going to reflect that in what it comes up with. And I've seen that even happen when you say like generate a picture of a classroom. Like maybe it'll be a classroom where everyone's wearing uniforms or it just kind of has that idealized I guess vision of it. and so that's kind of reflective of the biases that it was trained on. And another thing, too, is that these aren't rare glitches. They are known limitations. So, it's not like, oh, it's a fluke. These things happen and people need to be aware of that, especially our students who are relying on it sometimes way too heavily in our classrooms. All right. So, of course, another game. All right. So, this is a fun little game where you're just going to practice spotting inaccuracies. And this is another one that maybe you could even try with your students. essentially, you're just going to try to you'll read the prompt and pick if you think it's reliable, questionable, or a hallucination. Select clues and verification steps, and then check your results and move to the next round. So, this one has four rounds here. and it also has some, you know, scoring. Three points for correct classification, one point per strong clue, max of two, one point per strong verification step, and then a negative point for risky or incorrect choices. All right, so here. All right. So, it'll give you an example, and you select what you think, what clues tipped you off, and what you would do to verify. So this is also a cool activity with students because it kind of walks them through the steps on how they need to really not just use what they say, you know, oh AI told me this is true. I'm going to go ahead and use that kind of okay. So should we trust it? Is there anything that we should be aware of? And how do you verify? That's what we should be re you know reinforcing to our students too. Don't just accept it as truth. We need to go ahead and dig a little deeper. So, let's go ahead and take like a few minutes here to go through this activity and feel free to tell me how how you did. Throw your score in the chat. All right. Nice. I got seven points on my first one. Oh, and I like this too. It has a little show explanation. It kind of tells you why and best practices. Let's try another one. Oh, I think we all can tell that question B is is not a good one. Oh, no. Okay, let's see. I have another link for this one, actually. So, thanks for letting me know. let me pull that up real quick. Come on. There we go. All right. Let me see. This one is spot the hallucination. Isn't that in here? Oh, I thought I had a second link for this one. I might not have built this one in pool then. Oh, I'm so sorry. That's frustrating. I'll have to come up with an alternative link for you or for for that activity. Anyone else have issues? I'll try to see if I can get that worked. All right. Oh, so someone got a score of 20 over here. 17. Okay. Okay. Yeah. What's interesting about example C is it's really just one word. Oh, not quite. It says hallucination. Oh, I put questionable. I should have said hallucination. My bad. Ah, and I only got four points for that one. yeah, because really it's just one word that's off. would have said plant cells. All right. All right. Okay. I got 21. All right. 25. Nice. Okay. All right. What's interesting I like about example D is that overconfidence. I feel like sometimes it can be especially when it comes to and you have to be super careful obviously you guys know when you're coming up with you know helping you know differentiating for students with IEPs or five or fours making sure everything that you put in AI is doesn't have any identif identifiable information you're not putting names not putting you know anything like that [snorts] yeah and yeah it likes to just kind of jump to conclusions makes a diagnosis year based on just some so I think yeah I like that choice of use a safer prompt ask for general strategies without diagnosing right keep it more vague I think that's a great great option too all right well thanks for sharing out but yeah this is kind of a cool little activity here we kind of see ways that AI can it not very blatantly say something super obvious especially with that example C where it was just that one word animal cells when it should have said plant cells. I think that was interesting. So all right so some cool activities to kind of see how that works and that kind of brings us to the next part our presentation which is what AI literacy looks like in the classroom. And the main thing to recognize is that AI literacy isn't like a single lesson or unit. It's a set of habits that students build over time, how they question information, evaluate sources, and make decisions. so, you know, you can do a little one-off AI activities. I mean, we did a couple even just in our half hour that we've spent together so far with Quick Draw, XYZ, you know, hallucinations game. So, you can have different little one lessons activities that you kind of sprinkle in, but that's not really AI literacy. It's kind of building these skills over time and teaching them, you know, how it works and how to use it. another thing too is that AI literacy is not tool training. It's not sitting down and saying this is how to use chat GBT, right? Or this is how to do build, you know, it's not doing that. It's really because when you think of tool training, it's more like this is how you click this button and this is what you do here and how to troubleshoot, right? A literacy focuses on, you know, how the system behaves, how to evaluate the outputs and those transferable thinking skills because as we know tools will change, thinking skills won't tools change all of the time. I feel like they're constantly updating things even non AI related just in general everything gets updated you have to relearn how to do it. so just kind of think of the overall philosophy. All right. So AI can support learning when used intentionally and reviewed by humans. It can help with idea generation, learning support, revision, but it should never replace student thinking. And I feel like this main thing is human oversight is not optional. It's essential. You always have to, you know, I I use AI all of the time to help me with these three things really. I mean, I think about coming up with different ideas and brainstorming and, you know, revising things. sometimes I I use it or revise everything now with it and I just like, okay, I can just trust it. I don't need to double check everything. But it can be very helpful. But you always have to have that oversight. You can't just copy and paste, put it into your assignments as many students that I saw would like to do. so just kind of teaching them how to use it. All right. So modeling responsible use. I feel like modeling is really the most important thing that we should be doing as teachers. we should be showing students how we use it and how they should use it. and I really feel like that might be even the most important idea in this entire session. Students are going to learn how to use AI by watching how we use it, not necessarily just by reading a policy about it. You know, just by saying you can use AI for this and this, not for this and this. You know, show them how you use it, how they can use it in their different activities. Transparency. being transparent about when and why AI is being used. When we use AI in front of our students, we should say it like, I'm using AI to help me brainstorm or I'm using it to get a starting point. You know what that shows is that AI has a purpose, but it's not like magic. It's not doing everything. It's just filling in what we're using it for, which part of the learning process we're using it to assist in. So being very transparent about it. verification, checking its accuracy, checking its logic. So modeling, you know, when we're using it to verify facts. Okay, here's what AI said. Let's go to another source, a trusted source or a reliable source, and see what it says about it. to show that we're not just taking it as as as fact because we know that it's not always super accurate. When I was in the classroom, I taught digital literacy and I did this unit on like lateral reading. I don't know if you're familiar with that concept, but essentially it's just, you know, you you instead of we read web pages from the bottom, top bottom, and we scroll down, we just kind of read that information. Lateral reading is you're investigating that information. So you're pulling up multiple tabs and you're going to those reliable sources and seeing if it what it has to say about, you know, where you're getting that information. So really, you know, getting those sources when we're getting information to verify what we're getting is accurate. So kind of being transparent and showing students how they can how to do that. also of course ethics and decision- making, knowing when AI is and is not appropriate. All right. So saying things like students, we need to see that there are times when AI is appropriate and times when it's not because not just because it's cheating, but maybe because it undermines learning. It undermines the trust that you're building with your students, right? You know, kind of showing them that it's you you don't want it to replace the learning. You want it to just be a a helpful guide, right? and then that human judgment a aspect because if we treat AI as invaluable students will too. So every time we review, we revise or we reject AI output or modeling something critically to our students. Humans remain responsible for the final decision. Right? What we're saying is, you know, we're modeling when we want to use it, when it's appropriate, when it's not. But at the end of the day, we're looking at what AI is generating and we're the ones that decide what we're going to move forward with, right? We might use it to brainstorm ideas, but then we're taking those ideas and we're putting it in our own words, right? You know, or maybe we're we wrote something out and we're using it to help us revise, right? You know, we're using it to maybe revise some of it, but we're deciding what changes we want to make and what changes we don't want to make, right? And then we're going to make those changes or whatever we decide to use from that AI feedback to come up with that final product. So where AI kind of helps and is being used, but then we have that oversight to decide what we're actually going to take away from it. So we are always responsible for that final decision. and even kind of being modeling when you're using AI to even help with your lesson planning, being transitioned with that. I used AI to brainstorm five different, you know, Oh no, a fire alarm is going off in your building. Okay, well hopefully they get that taken care of very quickly and I hope that it was a false alarm. [laughter] but yeah, so just kind of modeling if you are saying, well, I used it to generate five bell ringers today, you know, even even maybe even having a conversation like what did you guys think of this one? or I don't know, just kind of having a conversation, being transparent when you're using it so that they understand that they can be transparent about when they're using it and be very explicit about when they're allowed to use it and when they're not allowed to use it. I think having that conversation and modeling and being transparent really will help build that trust around AI and let students know that it's there as a tool, but not as a replacement for learning. All right. So, some classroom ready AI literacy moves, right? and these work even in classrooms with AI restrictions, right? So, comparing our AI to trusted sources, revising vague prompts, evaluating explanations, and discussing inappropriate use and to reinforce that critical thinking. Now, AI literacy doesn't require constant AI access. It just requires intentional instruction. So even if you have certain things blocked saying how they could use it because another thing too is you might have all of these blocks at school. I know a lot of schools will block you know Jet GBT or Gemini or you know have a lot of restrictions on those AI but then they go home and they only have smartphones now like you know so I feel like cracking down and restricting putting all these restrictions you can't use it you can't use it that's not really showing them how they are going to use it so when they go home here is how you can be using AI if you choose to or you know just kind of just being more intent knowing that they have these tools even if they're they're locked down at the school level. and then if you another thing too is if you're wanting to dig deeper into AI at code we have a lot of instructional resources for AI and you know and some of them are short like for example this intro to AI for middle school has some mini some little lessons you know 10 hours you can oh good I'm so glad it was resolved quickly but it has you know some really cool activities that you can sprinkle in that kind of expose students to AI, learning a little bit more about the literacy, about how it works. some towards middle school, some that are longer. I mean, we just launched this past semester, a full semester long introduction to AI for high school, which really, you know, digs into what is AI, you know, the ethics behind it and actually using AI to build you know, prototyping and stuff like that. So that that it's a really cool course. so if you do have time, especially if you're a computer science teacher and you want to, you know, have some AI specific lessons pre-built for you, these are some really great resources. I want to let you know that codes these all of these courses are available for free. So you are welcome. You can create a free account, you can use them. They're here for you to to access. And some of the activities that we did, I know like teachable machine is something that is actually built into this course. I feel like I want to say quick draw XYZ toy were were pulled from these as well. so definitely some really cool resources to check out and explore if you want to dig deeper with your students into that. Another resource too is if you feel like you need some more or you would like to dig deeper into AI literacy and applied AI and using AI tools in your professional landscape. We have an AI cohort for the 2627 school year that they're going to start releasing information about in the coming weeks. I think they've already started showcasing some of the marketing materials. So, I know that that's going to be coming out. So, if that's something you're you're interested in, definitely keep an eye out for that those materials cuz we're going to be sending those out and maybe you can get some of your admin to to get you involved in those cohorts. and that one is going to be one that I'm leading. So, if you enjoyed working with me this evening, you can see a lot more of me if you decide to go on with that cohort. and this is a corset I I worked on and developed. So, I'm excited to be showcasing that. All right. So, next. Oh. All right. So we also have a lot of other resources available for you through codes if you want to connect with other educators or you want to stay relevant with some of the other courses or credentials that we have or just follow us on social media like you want you're excited to find out more about that AI educator cohort definitely follow us on social media and we'll definitely you know get involved with that. All right. So hopefully you found and got a lot out of our session together. we value your oh the your feedback. We would like to click that link and share your feedback. And then if you would like to receive a certificate of completion, if this is something that your school will give you credit, PD credit for or something like that, you need to have something that says, "Yes, I attended this hourlong session on AI." you can click this link. However, with this link, you do need to have a code account. and our codes accounts are free. You can easily make one at codjs.comsignup. for that you it will just it's a free teacher account and then once you have your account you can click the certificate of completion and then it will say thank you for attending our our webinar. So I know it's kind of a lot if you don't already have an account. Hopefully you guys are familiar with code HS or have experience with us. Maybe you even use us in the classroom. If you are a CodeHS teacher, you can go ahead and throw that in the chat and see. I'm curious to see how many of you guys are using code HS. I know I use CodeHS as a teacher. I know Leanne used CodeHS as a teacher as well. I used a couple of the courses when I was at the high school. so yeah, go ahead and create an account if you need one. click that attendance. So I would love especially if you get any sort of credit or PD hours for that. Oh, computer science foundations in Tennessee. All right, very cool. Oh, school blocking. That is tough when they they block things. It's hard to I always I felt like I always had to, you know, contact my IT. Oh, please whitelist this website. Whitelist this. So, oh, oh, web design, coding and web. Web design was my favorite code HS class to teach. I just loved it. I love making websites. I had a lot that was one of my favorite things about when I was building that AI course was like building all the sites and all the tools that I used. But yes, I'm I'm a huge fan of the web design, web development courses. That's a lot of fun. All right, so we had a couple people using that. Oh, I think I Oh, and then of course, if you're interested in bringing codes to your school, you're you're really liking some of these options that I was telling you about some of those AI student courses, you you know, go ahead and learn more about it, but you can always just have your free teacher account as well. Okay, so use a mix of a couple different CS things. All right. Very cool. Yeah, there's there's a lot of great resources. what I've noticed too is though is that a lot of the AI training focuses on very specific tools. So, what I like about our curriculum is that it's very broad. It's very about the concepts and the foundations, not necessarily about like this specific tool. So, as you're looking at different AI literacy programs, that is something to kind of keep an eye out for. You don't want to necessarily just be trained on one piece of, you know, AI technology because things change so rapidly. tools. I just even remember all the different like websites and tools that I used during COVID when I was teaching online and then like all of a sudden like all of them went away or this this got I think one of them was one of them was a Google one too like jam boards. I remember when jam boards were like a big thing and everyone was like oh learning how to use it and then they're like oh yeah we don't have that anymore. So, just kind of be aware as you're looking at different AI programs. Just want to keep it more about the foundations, not tool specifics. All right. Then, if there are any any kind of questions that you guys have for me, but thank you so much for spending your evening learning about some AI. just kind of some basic foundations. But definitely hope that you kind of spend some time and look at maybe some of the tools that I shared with you today. maybe some of the codes courses that we have available to you. but yeah, definitely some really great resources that you guys can bring back into your classrooms. Oh, well, and thank you so much for spending your time this evening. Absolutely. I'm so glad that you you got a lot out of our session together.
Danielle, we have a question in the Q&A. Is any chat GPT specific teaching techniques?
okay. Okay, so chat GBT specific. I like, you know, being I use chat GPT for like all of the things. but I created in my course just like a whole like unit just on how to use chat GPT. I say the main thing is the more specific you can be in your prompting, the more successful you'll be. Another thing, too, is if you have I like to organize chats into different folders. So, that's a great way to kind of stay organized. Like, I have a folder that I just use that's all of my chats based on like my AI course. And then I have another one for just for when I'm creating specific PDs for beginning teachers. So, I have like different folders. And what that helps do to do also is to help organize not only your your chat conversations, especially if you want to go back to a specific conversation that has that kind of information. I definitely recommend using the folders. Another thing, too, is if you do have like the the paid version of chat, like if you pay the I think it's like what, like $20 a month or whatever. If you do have the paid versions, you can create those custom GPTs. those are really helpful, especially if you're generating like specific content over and over again or you're you're constantly sending out like newsletters or something like that and you just want to kind of give it a bunch of information. and then you want it to be formatted a certain way. I say those custom GPTs are really helpful with that. However, you can also turn any chat into a custom chatbot just by always having very specific like prompt template that you can use and put into those. however, if you do have the paid version, it just is a lot easier because then it's just there for you. But yes, that's kind of how I use chat GPT. But I also find that the more information and specific you can make your prompt, the better that outcome's going to be. But yeah, definitely also using those folders because I think the folders are on free accounts as well. I don't think you have to have the paid for that.
There.
All right. One of the things I like to do is the personalization. So in the settings, you can go into personalize. So if you are teaching students or even you to in the personalization part if the more information you put about you the more it learns about you. So you put your degree, you put your background, you put your your teaching position, you put your anything that it knows about you, even where you live. it will customize answers to you. So if you do that for your students as well then it will actually tailor answers to the students and the conversations to the students then as well and the answers that it gives back to the students. and so say you're they're 13 year olds or 14 year olds it'll actually speak to them as if they're 14y olds in you know instead of as their 42year-old professors you know so it I like the personalization part and that's in the settings part too. So that's why
Oh, and then someone in the a chat said that they made chatt talk like it's John Madden. So it get so he gets a lot of boom and football cliches. [laughter] That's great. That's a really good one. So yeah, there is a lot of fun chat GPT. I will say not chat GPT specific, but if you are a fan of Gemini, I will say that you can create custom chat bots called gems in Gemini for free. So that is you if you like the idea of creating a custom chatbot but you don't have the paid version of chat GPT Gemini might be a good outlook for you to use and then also if you are a fan of the Google verse like I was a very I was at a Google school and used all of the the Google tools it's really AI is really embedded in a lot of those you can see that little button at the bottom of Google slides say beautify my slide oh I don't mind if I do right a lot of the slides my presentation you know were you know generated with the help of that that feature here. So I mean it it can be very helpful make things look I mean a slides presentation can make it look a lot nicer just by clicking a button and seeing what AI can do for you. So I do like some of those AI integrations in the Google platforms. But yeah. All right. What were there any other I don't see any other questions in the Q&A, but any other in the chat or I think we're good. Well, thanks again you guys for, you know, spending this hour with me. I love talking AI. and you know, here at CodeHS, we're here to help and we're constantly creating new and updated AI materials for you guys. So definitely recommend following us on social media or even just checking the the website periodically to see what what new stuff we have. cuz we're we're really we really have our finger on the pulse when it comes to AI here. So awesome. Well, thank you again. I'm going to stop sharing here and you guys have a great evening.
All right. Well, this is the developing AI literacy.
we're going to be talking about what you and your students should know about AI. so thank you for taking your time out this evening to talk AI with us. so this hour it's really going to be focused on helping you educators understand what AI is, how it works, where it falls short, and how those realities impact students both in and beyond our classrooms.
[snorts]
our goal isn't to turn everyone into an AI expert. It's really to build that confidence in teaching students how to interact with AI thoughtfully, responsibly, and critically. All right. So, just going to introduce myself here. I'm Danielle Santilli. I'm a professional development specialist here at CodeHS. I started in the company last spring. Before that, I was in the classroom. I taught through my 13 years as a teacher, I taught K through 12, so like all of the levels. So I have experience with the really littles and the much bigger kids. I got my masters in technology. I really focused on computer science and building those literacy skills. really dug into AI recently, developed an AI course through codes. and I've run a couple of AI cohorts. So, this has been kind of breathing AI for the past probably 4 months here. So, and then I'm going to turn it over to Leanne to introduce herself. Hi, I'm Lean Grant. I am based in central Illinois. We got quite a bit of snow here as well. I've been with CodeHS as a PD specialist for three years. before that I was a middle school and high school computer science teacher for about 10 years and I'm very excited. I'm going to be kind of in the background with you guys today answering questions in the Q&A and in the chat as Danielle is presenting to you today. All right. Thank you, Leanne. All right. So, our agenda we're going to be focusing on, you know, kind of what AI literacy is and why it matters. We're going to dig a little bit into what AI is. then focus a little on those limitations and societal impacts that students really need to know and understand. and then what AI literacy kind of looks like in the classroom settings and then kind of wrap up with some extensions that you can use with your students or you can even use to kind of build your AI literacy on your own. all right. So, I do want to say you know, if you do require like a certificate to prove that you were here and to get those PD hours, you do have to be present, which you guys are, so yay, good for you. [laughter] and then if you have any notetakers, I know a lot of us have those AI note takers. We're talking about AI, kind of built into your your Zoom, then you just make sure that they're muted and chat disabled so they're not kind of jumping in here. [snorts] another thing too is if you have questions throughout the session, Leanne's going to be monitoring those. You can just click that Q&A and ask your questions. She'd be happy to answer those. Another thing, too, is we're going to do a couple of games and interactive activities. You can always use the chat for that. and that's also going to be where Leah's going to be posting a lot of the the links into what we are going to be working with today. Okay. And she already threw the links to the slide presentation in there, AI literacy slides. so the links are in the slides, but they're also going to be in the chat, too. So, you have that. All right. Oh, so great to to to meet you guys. I know we have people probably from all over the United States. You're welcome to go ahead and share where you are, your experience. First year teaching computer science. I've definitely been there before. So, I know it can be a little a little challenging, especially in this world of AI. I thought it might be fun to start with a game. So, this is a game that I made. it's a teachers guessing game where you can kind of, see what educational tools that we interact with as teachers. which ones actually have AI and which ones don't. So, if you go ahead and click that link, Leanne threw that in the chat here, you'll pull up this game. it says AI or not, a teacher's guessing game. So, can you identify which educational tools utilize artificial intelligence? All right. So, essentially here it's just going to give you a message and you just say guess if you think it uses AI or it's not AI. it's a little quick little fun activity. So, go ahead and click that link and see how well you guys do. I think there's 10 prompts here. So, we'll just take, you know, a minute or two, see see how well you guys score. If you if you get all 10 out of 10, please go ahead and share that in the chat as well. You are AI experts here. All right. Once you select, you just would hit that submit guess and then it tells you if you're correct. gives you a little, you know, blurb about it and then moves on to that next question. eight out. Nice. All right. Not too shabby. A couple eight out of tens here. Oh, thanks Leanne for throwing that in there. If you are joining in a little late, we're just playing a little fun AI or not AI guessing game. Oh, we do have someone who says 10 out of 10. Nice. Nice. All right. All right. Nine out of 10. Okay. Okay, so we have some 10. Everyone, everyone who's sharing out has gotten some high scores. I did get a 10 out of 10 myself, but I made the game, so I feel like that's kind of a disadvantage here. A little bit of a cheat. [laughter] All right. All right. So, I just thought that would be a fun So, you can kind of see just by doing this activity like how many how many tools that we use every day already have AI in them. and I feel like especially if you I I I taught at a Google school, so we used, you know, all of the the Google, you know, Google Slides, Google Sheets, all of that. I mean, now AI is in all of it. I mean, it's just pops up right when you open it up. So, it really is getting more and more embedded in what we're using every day as teachers. So, just being able to kind of recognize that, I think is really is a really helpful feature. All right. a lot of I think eight out of 10, nine out nine out of 10 and 10 out of tens. We're we're we're ready. We we know we're know what's up. All right. So, AI literacy. when we talk about AI lit Oh, I should probably go back to the slides here. That would help there. Now, now we all see where we're where we're at here. Okay. So, what do we mean by AI literacy? we're not talking about knowing every tool or feature. I mean, as you just saw, it's it's everywhere now. if we were to learn how to use every single tool, it would just be too much. So, it's really about understanding these four things. Understanding how AI systems work, recognizing both strengths and limitations, evaluating AI generated content critically, and knowing when AI use is appropriate and when it is not. All right. So, we want to be able to use AI in in scenarios where it's helpful and it's beneficial and it it it makes our jobs easier, our lives easier, helps with our learning. but it's not always going to be applicable in every situation. So, being able to identify those. So, it's really it's focusing on thinking skills, not technical skills. All right. So, what does AI or why AI literacy matters for students? I mean, we just kind of did a little fun activities where we saw how AI was embedded in stuff that we use as teachers. I mean, it's already embedded in our students lives, too. So, through search, recommendations, images, videos, study tools, even AI is there. So, students will encounter AI generated content regardless of school policy. So even if AI tools are restricted in class, AI outputs are everywhere outside of it. So AI is also becoming a baseline skill in many careers and industries. So students won't necessarily need to build AI systems, but they will need to work alongside them. So having that AI foundational skills is going to help them when they leave our classrooms and enter the real world. and we're really doing them a disservice by not teaching them how to use it appropriately. So, I feel like the key idea for today is avoiding AI doesn't protect students. Understanding it does. So, if they can understand what AI is and isn't and how to use it appropriately and how it works, they're going to be better students. They're going to be better learners. They're going to be better when they enter the real world and join our workforce. All right. So, now we're just going to kind of do a very light introduction into what AI is really. So before we talk about because before we talk about AI literacy, we kind of have to have a little bit of a basic understanding because many misconceptions come from assuming AI thinks or reasons like humans which it does not. [laughter] That misunderstanding causes a lot of issues for students. All right. So what AI is? Okay. So identifies patterns, predicts outcomes, but does not understand meaning or truth. So I think it's really important to recognize what AI cannot do. AI does not think. It does not reason. It does not have consciousness. All right? It doesn't understand meaning or truth. It just predicts what sounds right based on patterns. So I thought this kind of leads us to the concept of predictive versus generative AI. So one helpful way to build AI literacy is distinguishing between predictive and generative AI. So predictive AI classifies, scores or recommends. Generative AI creates new content like text, images or audio. Now most real world tools combine both of them. So this isn't about labels. It's kind of about understanding behavior. So these are some two kind of fun games. And what I like about these two is these are also fun games that you can use with students. in fact I saw like when I was in the classroom a lot of kids really enjoy quick draw. [laughter] so we're going to take a look at these two games. so we can kind of see this in action here. So, Quick Draw, if you're not familiar, and Lean just threw that link in the chat for us. This game is kind of training AI to recognize what we're drawing. So, if you go and click on that link, it's going to take you to a screen like this, and we'll click let's draw. And it's asking us to draw Oh gosh, a raccoon. [laughter] Man, they give me a hard one right off the bat. I hope they gave you guys a little easier ones on your end here. All right, so let's let's see how I do here. as a nose,
I see circle or moon or donut or cookie or face. I see bear or mouse or panda. I see frying pan. Oh, I know it's raccoon. [laughter]
Wow. All right, it got it. I wonder how you guys did. All right, I'll try I'll just do one more and then we'll try out the other game. But you guys let me know how you're doing on your end if it's able to to guess what you have. [snorts] Okay. I see ear. I see circle or potato or apple or blueberry. Oh, I know it's sea turtle.
Wow. I feel like maybe QuickDraw has gotten even better at recognizing what I'm drawing or I I've just become an artist over the years. I don't know. Maybe I missed my calling as an art teacher. highly doubt that. All right. So, you can kind of see. So, this is a really fun one that you can do with students as well. So, I like this one. the next one is XYZ toy. So, that link is also in the chat for you guys. And now, as you'll notice, both of these come these are from the Google Experiments catalog. they have a ton of fun little AI activities that you can do with students. These are just two that I use to kind of teach the these concepts of generative and predictive AI. All right, so this one is can you guess the hidden word based on the clues in the text? So, here I'm just going to go ahead and click launch the experiment. All right. All right. So, all of the letters had balloons in them. So, the word was balloon. All right. Okay. All right. So, just kind of some fun little activities that kind of teach those two different kinds of AI and action. And I'm sure some of you guys will be playing those for the duration of our our [laughter] time together. but yeah, these are some really just fun activities that both help you understand the difference, but also things that you could bring into the classroom if you ever wanted to do some fun AI activities with your students. All right, but I'm going to jump back over to our presentation here. All right, so All right, so hey, how AI models learn. So at a high level, AI models are trained on large data sets. These they learn statistical patterns and use those patterns to predict likely outputs. All right, so this leads to one of the most important ideas in AI literacy. AI learns patterns, not facts. One cool, now we're not, this is, you know, we're playing a lot of games in here, but this is one that I definitely recommend if you are going to work with some of your students. We're not going to do it together cuz it's a little bit timeconuming and we only get an hour, but this is a really fun, if you haven't seen it already, it's called Teachable Machine. And essentially, it teaches you how to train an AI. So, what you do is you would gather a bunch of photos. for example, you could do like maybe you're training the AI to recognize the difference between cats and dogs. You could insert a bunch of pictures of cats and then a bunch of pictures of dogs and click train model and then you give it a picture of either a cat or a dog and you have to see if they're able to identify if it's a cat or a dog. So, it's a really nice kind of way to teach or to actually see how AI kind of learns. It's really just a ton of data. The more data you give it, the more accurate it is. It's a really fun lesson that, you know, you could bring into the classroom, too, if you're wanting to kids to explore a little bit more with training AI. a fun little recommendation for you, but it helps them kind of understand how AI works. So, definitely a good take-home if you aren't familiar with that one. Definitely recommend you play around with it a little bit later. But yes, AI learns from patterns, not facts. All right? And that single idea really explains many of AI's strengths and its limitations. Which leads us to AI limitations and societal impacts students must understand. And I say students must understand, but I feel like everyone really needs to understand that. cuz these limitations don't just affect schoolwork. They really affect how information spreads, how people form beliefs, and how trustworthy content appears online. I mean, we've all heard things like fake news or we've seen AI generated videos. it's it's out there and people definitely, you know, fall for it. So we really need to train the this next generation on how to how to spot these things and to know that it's there because understanding these issues is really part of preparing students to be informed citizens. It says digital citizens but really just citizens. All right. So very important concept and we kind of talked about this a little bit before but AI does not understand. So this is a huge misconceptions that student have. AI has no intent, no awareness and no concept of truth. It follows instructions but has no goals of its own, right? Its instructions are what it was used to be programmed, right? The data that we gave it. But it's not, you know, it's not a real person. It doesn't have consciousness. It doesn't know what's true or what's false. it just knows based on the data that it was given and trained on. And this really is a big misunderstanding or a big misconception that AI understands. And this is the root of many classroom challenges with AI use. So we're going to kind of focus on these two main ones which are hallucinations and biases. So AI can sound confident and still be wrong. I will say that AI is getting better at with hallucinations right off the bat, especially like if you're very direct and say like, you know, I I don't know. I'm trying trying to think of an example [laughter] of like a very blatant one, but it it is getting better at the right away being able to identify truth from fact or truth from fiction. However, this next part is where you fall into the hallucinations, which is errors scale with complexity. What that means is as you're talking and a conversation is formulating between you and AI, AI is actually more likely to make mistakes and those mistakes are harder to notice because of the back and forth that you've been having with the AI. So that's really the main takeaway. It actually progressively gets worse the longer that conversation gets. so just kind of you know something to be aware of. biases are [snorts] also a big issue. They appear even without intent because AI reflects patterns in its training training data. Right? We gave it the information. the information we gave them is not necessarily unbiased, right? Oh, I've noticed sometimes getting the days of the week wrong. Yeah, that's kind of a big one. It is not really good at knowing dates. Yeah, I'll like put in things for like a specific day, you know, I'm making an agenda for this day and it'll like mess up the day on it or it'll say that it's a Tuesday when it's really a Wednesday. Yeah, AI really is not good when it comes to time and days of the week. So that's a that's a great observation. but another thing too is because we're giving it the information, it's learning the same biases that we that's in our data that we're training it on. So it's going to reflect that in what it comes up with. And I've seen that even happen when you say like generate a picture of a classroom. Like maybe it'll be a classroom where everyone's wearing uniforms or it just kind of has that idealized I guess vision of it. and so that's kind of reflective of the biases that it was trained on. And another thing, too, is that these aren't rare glitches. They are known limitations. So, it's not like, oh, it's a fluke. These things happen and people need to be aware of that, especially our students who are relying on it sometimes way too heavily in our classrooms. All right. So, of course, another game. All right. So, this is a fun little game where you're just going to practice spotting inaccuracies. And this is another one that maybe you could even try with your students. essentially, you're just going to try to you'll read the prompt and pick if you think it's reliable, questionable, or a hallucination. Select clues and verification steps, and then check your results and move to the next round. So, this one has four rounds here. and it also has some, you know, scoring. Three points for correct classification, one point per strong clue, max of two, one point per strong verification step, and then a negative point for risky or incorrect choices. All right, so here. All right. So, it'll give you an example, and you select what you think, what clues tipped you off, and what you would do to verify. So this is also a cool activity with students because it kind of walks them through the steps on how they need to really not just use what they say, you know, oh AI told me this is true. I'm going to go ahead and use that kind of okay. So should we trust it? Is there anything that we should be aware of? And how do you verify? That's what we should be re you know reinforcing to our students too. Don't just accept it as truth. We need to go ahead and dig a little deeper. So, let's go ahead and take like a few minutes here to go through this activity and feel free to tell me how how you did. Throw your score in the chat. All right. Nice. I got seven points on my first one. Oh, and I like this too. It has a little show explanation. It kind of tells you why and best practices. Let's try another one. Oh, I think we all can tell that question B is is not a good one. Oh, no. Okay, let's see. I have another link for this one, actually. So, thanks for letting me know. let me pull that up real quick. Come on. There we go. All right. Let me see. This one is spot the hallucination. Isn't that in here? Oh, I thought I had a second link for this one. I might not have built this one in pool then. Oh, I'm so sorry. That's frustrating. I'll have to come up with an alternative link for you or for for that activity. Anyone else have issues? I'll try to see if I can get that worked. All right. Oh, so someone got a score of 20 over here. 17. Okay. Okay. Yeah. What's interesting about example C is it's really just one word. Oh, not quite. It says hallucination. Oh, I put questionable. I should have said hallucination. My bad. Ah, and I only got four points for that one. yeah, because really it's just one word that's off. would have said plant cells. All right. All right. Okay. I got 21. All right. 25. Nice. Okay. All right. What's interesting I like about example D is that overconfidence. I feel like sometimes it can be especially when it comes to and you have to be super careful obviously you guys know when you're coming up with you know helping you know differentiating for students with IEPs or five or fours making sure everything that you put in AI is doesn't have any identif identifiable information you're not putting names not putting you know anything like that [snorts] yeah and yeah it likes to just kind of jump to conclusions makes a diagnosis year based on just some so I think yeah I like that choice of use a safer prompt ask for general strategies without diagnosing right keep it more vague I think that's a great great option too all right well thanks for sharing out but yeah this is kind of a cool little activity here we kind of see ways that AI can it not very blatantly say something super obvious especially with that example C where it was just that one word animal cells when it should have said plant cells. I think that was interesting. So all right so some cool activities to kind of see how that works and that kind of brings us to the next part our presentation which is what AI literacy looks like in the classroom. And the main thing to recognize is that AI literacy isn't like a single lesson or unit. It's a set of habits that students build over time, how they question information, evaluate sources, and make decisions. so, you know, you can do a little one-off AI activities. I mean, we did a couple even just in our half hour that we've spent together so far with Quick Draw, XYZ, you know, hallucinations game. So, you can have different little one lessons activities that you kind of sprinkle in, but that's not really AI literacy. It's kind of building these skills over time and teaching them, you know, how it works and how to use it. another thing too is that AI literacy is not tool training. It's not sitting down and saying this is how to use chat GBT, right? Or this is how to do build, you know, it's not doing that. It's really because when you think of tool training, it's more like this is how you click this button and this is what you do here and how to troubleshoot, right? A literacy focuses on, you know, how the system behaves, how to evaluate the outputs and those transferable thinking skills because as we know tools will change, thinking skills won't tools change all of the time. I feel like they're constantly updating things even non AI related just in general everything gets updated you have to relearn how to do it. so just kind of think of the overall philosophy. All right. So AI can support learning when used intentionally and reviewed by humans. It can help with idea generation, learning support, revision, but it should never replace student thinking. And I feel like this main thing is human oversight is not optional. It's essential. You always have to, you know, I I use AI all of the time to help me with these three things really. I mean, I think about coming up with different ideas and brainstorming and, you know, revising things. sometimes I I use it or revise everything now with it and I just like, okay, I can just trust it. I don't need to double check everything. But it can be very helpful. But you always have to have that oversight. You can't just copy and paste, put it into your assignments as many students that I saw would like to do. so just kind of teaching them how to use it. All right. So modeling responsible use. I feel like modeling is really the most important thing that we should be doing as teachers. we should be showing students how we use it and how they should use it. and I really feel like that might be even the most important idea in this entire session. Students are going to learn how to use AI by watching how we use it, not necessarily just by reading a policy about it. You know, just by saying you can use AI for this and this, not for this and this. You know, show them how you use it, how they can use it in their different activities. Transparency. being transparent about when and why AI is being used. When we use AI in front of our students, we should say it like, I'm using AI to help me brainstorm or I'm using it to get a starting point. You know what that shows is that AI has a purpose, but it's not like magic. It's not doing everything. It's just filling in what we're using it for, which part of the learning process we're using it to assist in. So being very transparent about it. verification, checking its accuracy, checking its logic. So modeling, you know, when we're using it to verify facts. Okay, here's what AI said. Let's go to another source, a trusted source or a reliable source, and see what it says about it. to show that we're not just taking it as as as fact because we know that it's not always super accurate. When I was in the classroom, I taught digital literacy and I did this unit on like lateral reading. I don't know if you're familiar with that concept, but essentially it's just, you know, you you instead of we read web pages from the bottom, top bottom, and we scroll down, we just kind of read that information. Lateral reading is you're investigating that information. So you're pulling up multiple tabs and you're going to those reliable sources and seeing if it what it has to say about, you know, where you're getting that information. So really, you know, getting those sources when we're getting information to verify what we're getting is accurate. So kind of being transparent and showing students how they can how to do that. also of course ethics and decision- making, knowing when AI is and is not appropriate. All right. So saying things like students, we need to see that there are times when AI is appropriate and times when it's not because not just because it's cheating, but maybe because it undermines learning. It undermines the trust that you're building with your students, right? You know, kind of showing them that it's you you don't want it to replace the learning. You want it to just be a a helpful guide, right? and then that human judgment a aspect because if we treat AI as invaluable students will too. So every time we review, we revise or we reject AI output or modeling something critically to our students. Humans remain responsible for the final decision. Right? What we're saying is, you know, we're modeling when we want to use it, when it's appropriate, when it's not. But at the end of the day, we're looking at what AI is generating and we're the ones that decide what we're going to move forward with, right? We might use it to brainstorm ideas, but then we're taking those ideas and we're putting it in our own words, right? You know, or maybe we're we wrote something out and we're using it to help us revise, right? You know, we're using it to maybe revise some of it, but we're deciding what changes we want to make and what changes we don't want to make, right? And then we're going to make those changes or whatever we decide to use from that AI feedback to come up with that final product. So where AI kind of helps and is being used, but then we have that oversight to decide what we're actually going to take away from it. So we are always responsible for that final decision. and even kind of being modeling when you're using AI to even help with your lesson planning, being transitioned with that. I used AI to brainstorm five different, you know, Oh no, a fire alarm is going off in your building. Okay, well hopefully they get that taken care of very quickly and I hope that it was a false alarm. [laughter] but yeah, so just kind of modeling if you are saying, well, I used it to generate five bell ringers today, you know, even even maybe even having a conversation like what did you guys think of this one? or I don't know, just kind of having a conversation, being transparent when you're using it so that they understand that they can be transparent about when they're using it and be very explicit about when they're allowed to use it and when they're not allowed to use it. I think having that conversation and modeling and being transparent really will help build that trust around AI and let students know that it's there as a tool, but not as a replacement for learning. All right. So, some classroom ready AI literacy moves, right? and these work even in classrooms with AI restrictions, right? So, comparing our AI to trusted sources, revising vague prompts, evaluating explanations, and discussing inappropriate use and to reinforce that critical thinking. Now, AI literacy doesn't require constant AI access. It just requires intentional instruction. So even if you have certain things blocked saying how they could use it because another thing too is you might have all of these blocks at school. I know a lot of schools will block you know Jet GBT or Gemini or you know have a lot of restrictions on those AI but then they go home and they only have smartphones now like you know so I feel like cracking down and restricting putting all these restrictions you can't use it you can't use it that's not really showing them how they are going to use it so when they go home here is how you can be using AI if you choose to or you know just kind of just being more intent knowing that they have these tools even if they're they're locked down at the school level. and then if you another thing too is if you're wanting to dig deeper into AI at code we have a lot of instructional resources for AI and you know and some of them are short like for example this intro to AI for middle school has some mini some little lessons you know 10 hours you can oh good I'm so glad it was resolved quickly but it has you know some really cool activities that you can sprinkle in that kind of expose students to AI, learning a little bit more about the literacy, about how it works. some towards middle school, some that are longer. I mean, we just launched this past semester, a full semester long introduction to AI for high school, which really, you know, digs into what is AI, you know, the ethics behind it and actually using AI to build you know, prototyping and stuff like that. So that that it's a really cool course. so if you do have time, especially if you're a computer science teacher and you want to, you know, have some AI specific lessons pre-built for you, these are some really great resources. I want to let you know that codes these all of these courses are available for free. So you are welcome. You can create a free account, you can use them. They're here for you to to access. And some of the activities that we did, I know like teachable machine is something that is actually built into this course. I feel like I want to say quick draw XYZ toy were were pulled from these as well. so definitely some really cool resources to check out and explore if you want to dig deeper with your students into that. Another resource too is if you feel like you need some more or you would like to dig deeper into AI literacy and applied AI and using AI tools in your professional landscape. We have an AI cohort for the 2627 school year that they're going to start releasing information about in the coming weeks. I think they've already started showcasing some of the marketing materials. So, I know that that's going to be coming out. So, if that's something you're you're interested in, definitely keep an eye out for that those materials cuz we're going to be sending those out and maybe you can get some of your admin to to get you involved in those cohorts. and that one is going to be one that I'm leading. So, if you enjoyed working with me this evening, you can see a lot more of me if you decide to go on with that cohort. and this is a corset I I worked on and developed. So, I'm excited to be showcasing that. All right. So, next. Oh. All right. So we also have a lot of other resources available for you through codes if you want to connect with other educators or you want to stay relevant with some of the other courses or credentials that we have or just follow us on social media like you want you're excited to find out more about that AI educator cohort definitely follow us on social media and we'll definitely you know get involved with that. All right. So hopefully you found and got a lot out of our session together. we value your oh the your feedback. We would like to click that link and share your feedback. And then if you would like to receive a certificate of completion, if this is something that your school will give you credit, PD credit for or something like that, you need to have something that says, "Yes, I attended this hourlong session on AI." you can click this link. However, with this link, you do need to have a code account. and our codes accounts are free. You can easily make one at codjs.comsignup. for that you it will just it's a free teacher account and then once you have your account you can click the certificate of completion and then it will say thank you for attending our our webinar. So I know it's kind of a lot if you don't already have an account. Hopefully you guys are familiar with code HS or have experience with us. Maybe you even use us in the classroom. If you are a CodeHS teacher, you can go ahead and throw that in the chat and see. I'm curious to see how many of you guys are using code HS. I know I use CodeHS as a teacher. I know Leanne used CodeHS as a teacher as well. I used a couple of the courses when I was at the high school. so yeah, go ahead and create an account if you need one. click that attendance. So I would love especially if you get any sort of credit or PD hours for that. Oh, computer science foundations in Tennessee. All right, very cool. Oh, school blocking. That is tough when they they block things. It's hard to I always I felt like I always had to, you know, contact my IT. Oh, please whitelist this website. Whitelist this. So, oh, oh, web design, coding and web. Web design was my favorite code HS class to teach. I just loved it. I love making websites. I had a lot that was one of my favorite things about when I was building that AI course was like building all the sites and all the tools that I used. But yes, I'm I'm a huge fan of the web design, web development courses. That's a lot of fun. All right, so we had a couple people using that. Oh, I think I Oh, and then of course, if you're interested in bringing codes to your school, you're you're really liking some of these options that I was telling you about some of those AI student courses, you you know, go ahead and learn more about it, but you can always just have your free teacher account as well. Okay, so use a mix of a couple different CS things. All right. Very cool. Yeah, there's there's a lot of great resources. what I've noticed too is though is that a lot of the AI training focuses on very specific tools. So, what I like about our curriculum is that it's very broad. It's very about the concepts and the foundations, not necessarily about like this specific tool. So, as you're looking at different AI literacy programs, that is something to kind of keep an eye out for. You don't want to necessarily just be trained on one piece of, you know, AI technology because things change so rapidly. tools. I just even remember all the different like websites and tools that I used during COVID when I was teaching online and then like all of a sudden like all of them went away or this this got I think one of them was one of them was a Google one too like jam boards. I remember when jam boards were like a big thing and everyone was like oh learning how to use it and then they're like oh yeah we don't have that anymore. So, just kind of be aware as you're looking at different AI programs. Just want to keep it more about the foundations, not tool specifics. All right. Then, if there are any any kind of questions that you guys have for me, but thank you so much for spending your evening learning about some AI. just kind of some basic foundations. But definitely hope that you kind of spend some time and look at maybe some of the tools that I shared with you today. maybe some of the codes courses that we have available to you. but yeah, definitely some really great resources that you guys can bring back into your classrooms. Oh, well, and thank you so much for spending your time this evening. Absolutely. I'm so glad that you you got a lot out of our session together.
Danielle, we have a question in the Q&A. Is any chat GPT specific teaching techniques?
okay. Okay, so chat GBT specific. I like, you know, being I use chat GPT for like all of the things. but I created in my course just like a whole like unit just on how to use chat GPT. I say the main thing is the more specific you can be in your prompting, the more successful you'll be. Another thing, too, is if you have I like to organize chats into different folders. So, that's a great way to kind of stay organized. Like, I have a folder that I just use that's all of my chats based on like my AI course. And then I have another one for just for when I'm creating specific PDs for beginning teachers. So, I have like different folders. And what that helps do to do also is to help organize not only your your chat conversations, especially if you want to go back to a specific conversation that has that kind of information. I definitely recommend using the folders. Another thing, too, is if you do have like the the paid version of chat, like if you pay the I think it's like what, like $20 a month or whatever. If you do have the paid versions, you can create those custom GPTs. those are really helpful, especially if you're generating like specific content over and over again or you're you're constantly sending out like newsletters or something like that and you just want to kind of give it a bunch of information. and then you want it to be formatted a certain way. I say those custom GPTs are really helpful with that. However, you can also turn any chat into a custom chatbot just by always having very specific like prompt template that you can use and put into those. however, if you do have the paid version, it just is a lot easier because then it's just there for you. But yes, that's kind of how I use chat GPT. But I also find that the more information and specific you can make your prompt, the better that outcome's going to be. But yeah, definitely also using those folders because I think the folders are on free accounts as well. I don't think you have to have the paid for that.
There.
All right. One of the things I like to do is the personalization. So in the settings, you can go into personalize. So if you are teaching students or even you to in the personalization part if the more information you put about you the more it learns about you. So you put your degree, you put your background, you put your your teaching position, you put your anything that it knows about you, even where you live. it will customize answers to you. So if you do that for your students as well then it will actually tailor answers to the students and the conversations to the students then as well and the answers that it gives back to the students. and so say you're they're 13 year olds or 14 year olds it'll actually speak to them as if they're 14y olds in you know instead of as their 42year-old professors you know so it I like the personalization part and that's in the settings part too. So that's why
Oh, and then someone in the a chat said that they made chatt talk like it's John Madden. So it get so he gets a lot of boom and football cliches. [laughter] That's great. That's a really good one. So yeah, there is a lot of fun chat GPT. I will say not chat GPT specific, but if you are a fan of Gemini, I will say that you can create custom chat bots called gems in Gemini for free. So that is you if you like the idea of creating a custom chatbot but you don't have the paid version of chat GPT Gemini might be a good outlook for you to use and then also if you are a fan of the Google verse like I was a very I was at a Google school and used all of the the Google tools it's really AI is really embedded in a lot of those you can see that little button at the bottom of Google slides say beautify my slide oh I don't mind if I do right a lot of the slides my presentation you know were you know generated with the help of that that feature here. So I mean it it can be very helpful make things look I mean a slides presentation can make it look a lot nicer just by clicking a button and seeing what AI can do for you. So I do like some of those AI integrations in the Google platforms. But yeah. All right. What were there any other I don't see any other questions in the Q&A, but any other in the chat or I think we're good. Well, thanks again you guys for, you know, spending this hour with me. I love talking AI. and you know, here at CodeHS, we're here to help and we're constantly creating new and updated AI materials for you guys. So definitely recommend following us on social media or even just checking the the website periodically to see what what new stuff we have. cuz we're we're really we really have our finger on the pulse when it comes to AI here. So awesome. Well, thank you again. I'm going to stop sharing here and you guys have a great evening.
