Utilizing AI in the Library #TLChat #SchoolAI

I am really excited about the work I have been doing the past few weeks with the amazing Shannon Miller and SchoolAI. There has been so much content created to support classroom teachers to help make school awesome every day, but we did not want our amazing librarians and media specialists to feel left out. Working with Shannon, we created a couple of really cool Spaces that we think you will love. 

What Book Should I Read Next?!

One of the tough things for a young reader is to figure out what they should read next. There are so many options, it can be tough to choose if you do not know what might be perfect for you. The Teacher Librarian might be unavailable when the students needs to ask questions about their next book or the student is at home and wants to be able to choose their next book as soon as possible. I built a Space to help with this exact problem! Shannon took the Space to FETC and shared it with her workshop with over 100 librarians and they loved it! You can remix the Space and add any other parameters you want to meet the needs of your school. You can even add a csv file of your catalogue so it can only recommend books from your collection. If you want the Space to have a specific theme for a specific month to recommend certain books, you can do that too! Have some fun and play around with the Space and let me know how you made it your own. 

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus Research Space

Many years ago, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus took media literacy circles by storm. It was an amazingly silly resource that educators started to use to help teach media literacy using the Internet. This amazing collection of information put together by Lyle Zapato on his site, has helped thousands of students understand that, just because it is on the Internet, does not mean it is true. I think about the PNWTO often, which is admittedly weird, and how it was such a fun way to engage students in an important learning task. As I was thinking of ways to explore media literacy and AI, I thought about the PNWTO again and came up with a Space that can be used to help students understand that AI needs to be understood in a similar vein as basic Internet searches from years ago. 

I also used SchoolAI to create a worksheet to help the students prompt the Space and write down their answers. You can find the worksheet here and make your own copy as needed. If you want the prompt I used to generate this worksheet, you can find that here. Using the prompt will allow you tag any standards from your state that you might need. The overall goal of the Space is to engage students in using AI to research a topic and the Space will give more and more ridiculous answers to the questions until the students starts to question the accuracy. Once that happens, the Space will start to ask the student how they could go about verifying information they find online or through using AI. Let me know if you use this with your students and how it went. 

SchoolAI Librarian/Media Specialist Community Space

Lastly, I am excited about the launch of a space in the SchoolAI Community dedicated to librarians and media specialists. You spoke up and we listened! The contribution to edtech from these educators is immeasurable. They are having amazing conversations around AI in schools and we wanted to make sure they could continue to have these conversations and share their ideas in the community. As part of that, we had Shannon Miller on the SchoolAI Sandbox! Join us for an hour filled with important conversation on the role of AI in the library and schools as a whole. We are really excited about this partnership with Shannon Miller. Watch the recording here! The last time Shannon and I dove headfirst into a project, we organized The Epic Romeo and Juliet Project. If you do not know what that is, please check it out. 

We hope to see you in the new Community space to lead, innovate, and collaborate. 

As always, big hugs and high fives, 

-Nerdy

Citations in the world of AI #EngChat #EdChat

I encountered a great question about citing things students finding using AI resources. If students were using a Space in SchoolAI and they were given information they wanted to use in an essay, how might they go about citing that? Well, the folks at MLA and APA are one step ahead and have provided examples on how to do that. I was able to take that work and build a Space that will help students with their citation questions that you can use with your students. 

What is nice about this Space is that it will not only properly format their citations, it will provide help with in-text citation as well. In-text citation was one of my big focus points when I taught writing to my grade nine and ten students. I really drilled it home because I always viewed proper citation as a mechanical function that should be completed and checked during proofreading. I was probably a little too hard on it, but I feel like it payed off for students. 

I once had a former student visit the classroom during their Fall break and they told me their professor told them that they were the only one in the entire lecture hall sized class to have accurate in-text citations and they wanted to make sure to tell me. It made my entire week. It was even better because they came in and told me while I had my Freshmen with me, so they got to hear the story as well. 

Citation can be a tedious part of any writing process, but it is much easier than it has ever been. There are plenty of programs out there that will create citations for you and and you no longer have to worry about having too many spaces or not enough spaces in the citation. You do not have to worry about the punctuation in the citation. I remember being marked down for these thinks in high school. With the advent of AI, how the heck to you cite ChatGPT? I remember when we asked the same question about wikipedia and other websites. Well, MLA and APA do not let their writing community down. There are guidelines on how to cite chat conversations with AI. There are even guidelines on citing memes! 

To help cut through the noise, I built a Space that will help users with their citations. It is built to help with citing AI specifically, but I also built in examples and pdfs from MLA and APA to help with all citations types and to even provide examples to showcase what they user should have. I have also built the Space to NOT write essays for students, but help them insert in-text citation as needed. 

If you want to explore the Space, give it a look over and see how it might help you or your students. 

MLA and APA Citation Space

Make Moments with AI #EdChat #SchoolAI

Time. The most valuable asset of any teacher. Teachers have been asked to do more and more over the years, but the schedules have never allowed for more time. Added bus duty, recess duty, aftercare duty, etc. All of these take time away from all of the other little things that teachers need to do to do their job effectively. All this really means is that the time do these things gets moved to personal time. Longer days in the classroom or longer nights before bed are needed to complete many of these tasks. Worse yet, the stress of coming up with new lesson idea, assignments, projects, etc, can make it hard to create on the spot before tackling the numerous other responsibilities we have as adults. I wasn't sure what role AI was going to play in my life as a teacher, but when I opened the door to the possibility of AI helping me with the little things, I found myself reclaiming my time. 

One of my biggest issues when it came to lesson planning was Lesson Block. A cousin of Writer's Block, Lesson Block is when a teacher has some sort of idea, but they just can't put it into words or the format needed to roll out in class. Too often, seemingly awesome ideas would never fully develop because I could not get over Lesson Block. Sometimes the idea would finally fully form, but after that part of the unit has passed. I used to be able to pop into another teacher's classroom and bounce ideas off of them to help flesh out the lesson, but those windows of time are few and far between because all of us are so busy. I needed a thought partner and one that could be there for me when I needed to explore an idea. I turned to ChatGPT to see if it can help me. 

I first explored the free version of ChatGPT and then eventually turned to the paid version. I started with a casual conversation exploring what it knew about lesson plans, education, state standards, etc. I was impressed by what it knew and understood with my various prompts. I decided to give it a broad idea of what I was thinking for a lesson and I wanted to see what it would do. Well, it gave me a lesson that was amazing...for someone else's class. The lesson would not work for the students I had in the class and rolling that out would have been trouble. But, that failure of a lesson was helpful to me in the long run. It gave me a starting point for exploring a similar type of lesson that would work best for my class. So, similar to how I might go to my teaching partner and ask for their thoughts on my ideas, they might not have an idea that would work, but it could lead me to the idea that works for me. This conversation with ChatGPT was great in its failure to understand my class dynamic and that back and forth and the creation of the lesson took less than 10 minutes! 

After exploring multiple school specific AI tools because I was concerned about data security and model training, I settled on SchoolAI because it was fully COPPA and FERPA compliant and I just loved the UX more than the others. I can be a bit of snob about those things. Anyway, SchoolAI has an assistant called Coteacher that functioned in a similar fashion as ChatGPT, but it was designed to better understand classroom dynamics and the things that a teacher might need when requesting different solutions. It became one of my go-to tools to help me work through ideas quickly. There was even a time when I had an idea mid class that I was trying to articulate and I dropped it into Coteacher and it was able to put into works my jumbled idea to use in class and it worked! When I started to explore Spaces and how I can prompt a chatbot to support the students in class, that was a game changer. 

One of the first things I did with SchoolAI Spaces was to build a Space to help students building in Minecraft. The Minecraft House Builder Space was designed to help students with varied experience with Minecraft to build a house using the Design Thinking approach we covered in class. The common issue with this lesson was that the class has a wide range of experience with Minecraft. I had students who have never played Minecraft and some students that kill the Ender Dragon for fun on a Saturday night. I am somewhere in the middle of those two groups. I am either spending lots of time with the first time users or I am struggling to help the advanced student figure out how to do something beyond my experience. Either way, I am spending too much time on one type of student. What the Space does is support all students based on their skill level. It will help newbies explore Minecraft with basic steps on getting started and it will also help students use redstone in wildly creative ways. That frees me to engage more fully with the whole class and observe how all of the students are doing, not just the top and bottom of the experience ladder. That reclaimed time allows me to connect with more students. 

Being able to connect with students with the reclaimed time is a huge part of using AI correctly and effectively. By creating that Space to support students, I was able to focus on the thing that makes teaching so amazing; connecting with students and helping them 1-on-1. That is my hot take when it comes to AI. Using AI effectively can lead to more human moments, not fewer. Reclaiming 5 minutes here and there might not seem like much, but that student that you connected with during that time felt seen and heard for the first time all day, week, or month. Teaching is all about the moments. If AI can help create more opportunities to have those moments with students, then it is worth every bit of time spent learning how to utilize it in the classroom for yourself and for students. 

I'd love to hear how you are using AI in your class to create more moments with your students. 

Hugs and high fives, 

Nerdy

Note: All images are AI Generated using SchoolAI and do it that way saved me tons of time!

Presentation Moderator @GetSchoolAI Space Template #EdChat #FETC #TCEA #ISTE25

Hi! It's been a while. I've been super busy with SchoolAI creating some content and running trainings. I have not forgotten about where all of this EdTech stuff started. I built something that I think is awesome to use in presentations to help answer questions people might have and to also see what people are asking about in your sessions to better help inform future presentations. 

A Space from SchoolAI can be prompted to do just about anything. It can act as a tutor, be a Bellringer or Exit Ticket, or story teller, an essay feedback bot, and so much more. Last year, I had the idea to build a Space that people could access while I presented to ask questions about my content and work through ideas. Some people will never be comfortable asking a question in a conference session, so using the Space is a step toward more inclusivity. Using the Space for yourself is simple. 

1. Click the link

2. Click Remix

3. Change the prompt by adding your session's information

4. Click Start Preview and test it out

5. Click Launch

6. Click Use a Space Code 

7. Copy QR Code and link and share at the start of the presentation

Things to Note:

Free Account users are limited to 75 users in a Space for 24 hours. If you are having a small workshop or a smaller session, this is perfect for you. 

Pro Users have unlimited Space access. 

If you want to know more about Pro Access as a individual teacher or an institution, follow this link. 

This worked really well at my sessions at ISTE last year and I will be using this again for my upcoming sessions at FETC, MACUL, and ISTE 2025! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on the socials @TheNerdyTeacher and I can help you!

Hugs and High Fives, 

NP