AI in the Classroom: Heart First, Tools Second.

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Vicki Davis (00:00): Welcome back, educator, to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. Today’s show is heart first, tools second. How to teach and use tech in today’s world.

Announcer (00:11): Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tech tips and inspiration to elevate your teaching.

Vicki Davis (00:25): Hey everybody, this is Vicki Davis, and I’m excited about the encouragement and ideas you’re going to find on today’s show. We know from John Hattie’s research that the single most powerful thing in a classroom isn’t a program or platform, it’s a relationship. Hattie puts the teacher student relationship as worth nearly two years of learning, and his biggest effect of all is also purely human. It’s collective teacher efficacy, and all that really means is teachers and school leaders building a culture of working and believing together that they can make their school a powerful place of learning. Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do, says the evidence suggests great teachers are made, not born, because great teachers are willing to confront their own weaknesses and failures. And we all have weaknesses, but not all of us will admit it. I certainly do admit that I have weaknesses. Learning has to start somewhere, and growth begins when we realize we do have something to learn. When I think about another one of my favorite books, Fred Jones Tools for Teaching, he describes watching classrooms, some completely out of control and some with total order. And the striking thing about the ones with order. He said the teachers didn’t look like they were working hard on discipline at all, that they were relaxed and emotionally warm. That has always impressed me, and I’ve wanted to be that way. Although sometimes I will admit it’s been a struggle. So many of us feel like everything changed with the pandemic and now with AI even more. But some things have stayed the same. Great teachers learn, great teachers grow, and great teaching still happens, even in the most difficult times. When I’m struggling with a group of students, I go find a teacher who isn’t. I sit back and watch how they do it. So let’s look at what great teachers are doing right now. Our first guest, Doctor Patricia Dickenson, is the author of Smart Teaching in the age of AI. Let’s learn.

Announcer (02:27): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (02:31): Today we’re talking to Doctor Patricia Dickenson, an associate professor of teacher education at National University and a former LAUSD classroom teacher and math coach. She spent over a decade helping teachers integrate technology in meaningful ways. Doctor Dickenson is the author of technology infused Math instruction and has a brand new book, Smart Teaching in the age of AI. Patricia, one thing that you always seem to focus on is all this should be teacher driven. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Patricia Dickenson (03:09): Absolutely. Teacher driven instruction. As teachers, how do we enter the classroom? How do we show up to work with our students? Everything matters when it comes to designing instruction. I believe that teachers heart their energy. Their gifts need to be a part of the conversation. I remember my first teacher when I was in fourth grade and she played the guitar, and that’s how she made connection with the students. And my belief is that teachers need to know themselves, know their skills, and bring that into the classrooms. I tend to lean on that side when it comes to designing instruction, right? I mean, too often teachers show up for the first day of the class, and they’re given a textbook and told what to teach and how to teach. And that doesn’t really honor the teacher and who they are, what their path is, and why they chose this profession. In my work with teachers over the past 20 years. The foci is how we design instruction, not just on students assets and students funds of knowledge and students interests, but on the teachers assets, their lived experiences, their identity, their gifts and talents. And really, that’s the mark of a good teacher to make an impact on a child that’s going to last a lifetime. Just like Miss Santa Maria made an impact on me in fourth grade, I will never forget her.

Vicki Davis (04:31): Tell us who she was.

Patricia Dickenson (04:32): She was an amazing teacher. She was my fourth grade teacher, and when she showed up, you just felt like you were seen. She saw you. She connected with you. She played her guitar in the classroom. She made learning fun and engaging. She showed up and she was authentic. She was who she was. And I always encouraged the teachers that I work with is that you need to bring your authentic voice into the classroom. In fact, my first day teaching, I showed up to teach my first grade class. I had a yoga mat and a lava lamp. I’ve been a long time Yogi. It’s something that I love and something that I still continue to do. I’ve always been doing yoga with my students first grade to high school trauma informed practices like breathwork, meditation, mindfulness. So beyond all the noise and the buzz and all the gadgets and all the tools that we come in, it’s those connections that we make with the students that really make a long lifetime difference. Going back to Miss Santa Maria that year, as in fourth grade, she was actually diagnosed with breast cancer. Even saying that now I still get chills because she was just a warrior. I was, what, nine, ten years old? And I remember still coming to school and she was going through chemo and she had a wig and she still showed up for us. And that made such a huge impact, because I’ll tell you, Vicki, there was times in my life where I was tested, I wanted to give up, to let go, but I remembered Miss Santa Maria and I remembered how much she was a warrior, how she fought through all of those challenges. And she still came to school and she was still there for us. Those values, those things that she brought into the classroom, are things that I carry with me throughout my life.

Vicki Davis (06:23): As we say, more is caught than taught. There have been seasons. I went through a season where I had to learn to walk again, came back to school on a scooter. In many ways, I ended up closer to those kids than almost any other kids just because of going through that season, but then still fighting and still moving ahead. And I think that’s just such a powerful example. But some teachers are listening to you and thinking, you know, yoga mat guitar live in your life, and they’re just so regimented on what they’re told they have to do for moment to moment. Now, the title of your book is Smart Teaching in the Age of AI. I know some teachers who say this is dumb teaching. They’re not dumb teachers, not dumb. But this overregulation of scripting is. So how can we get to smart teaching in the age of AI? And can AI even help us?

Patricia Dickenson (07:15): If you haven’t started using AI, I definitely encourage all the teachers. Start checking it out, start playing with it. Start getting to know whether it’s Gemini or ChatGPT and exploring some of the functionalities. My ChatGPT and it sends me updates every day. It tells me what the weather is going to be like. It tells me how my stocks are doing. It’s just like my personal assistant. But beyond that, I’ve actually programed ChatGPT to create generated preformed transformers to support the student teachers that I work with. Whether it’s knowing how to unpack a content standard. We’re not living in the age of NCLB, where it’s very specific skills. They have to be able to unpack the standard and know what do students need to know? What students need to be able to do? What are the concepts that they have to understand? I’m a fourth grade teacher. I don’t know what they should have already learned by the time they get into fourth grade, but I programed this ChatGPT. So given the content standard, that teacher, that new teacher that has very limited experiences with the standards can see that entire progression of the standard. That way, when they walk into the classroom and they see a student’s struggle, they understand what gaps they may have, what foundational knowledge they might need, and then they’re able to then design a pre assessment to figure out what should my student already know before I even start using this standard? Let’s say I have a whole classroom of English language learners. What kind of scaffolds should I provide? What is the academic language in this content standard that I’ll need to explicitly teach? What are some Spanish translations that I can use to support my students that might have limited English proficiency? And what about my student? Maybe they have auditory processing disorder, which I have limited experience working with. How can I best support them? Because we have to remember that ChatGPT is literally an encyclopedia of information. It’s all of this data, large language models that are accessible. You and I, we had exposure to encyclopedias, and we used to go to library with in our card catalogs. Our students don’t have to do that. They can just type information, and we can harness the power of AI in a way to support us in designing instruction, supporting differentiated instruction for diverse student learners. We can have AI analyze our data. Let’s say you’re a secondary teacher and you have over 150 students just given a math test. Are you going to have time to go through all those 150 quizzes? Or can you use AI to say, I just gave this test on multiplication matrices? Where are the biggest gaps where students struggling? What skills do they need to work on? What do they know and what can I do with them? And then, given that 150 students who has this skill, who do I need to pull out into a small group and give additional support? So there’s so much functionality there that AI can help us with. And you don’t need a subscription to all these different resources. It’s out there. ChatGPT is free. Google Gemini. It’s embedded in a lot of your web based browsing tools, and it’s all accessible for you.

Vicki Davis (10:39): If you use it the right way, it’s an amplifier. Use AI the wrong way, it’s actually a diminisher. If you’re offloading your thinking, but if you actually understand how to use it, it can amplify your voice. It can help you to do more. Let’s travel back and talk about one thing you said. You’re building custom GPTs. You can also, in Gemini of course, build Gems. And I’m a big Claude user. I use Claude Cowork heavily. Love that tool. But you can build all these different things to help. And the one thing about custom GPT is that you can really give it the specific standards of the specific data, and it becomes far more accurate than just writing a prompt. I’m not sure that that whole customization is something that we all understand. So how do you explain what is a custom GPT or a Gem to your teachers?

Patricia Dickenson (11:33): So I actually have a video of how to make your own customized GPT on my YouTube channel, Teach with Dr. D in there, you’re interacting with the user interface. It’s pretty much like creating a template. So if you think about you want to share a template, or you want to create document that has specific things, specific scaffolds for you to add in there. When you’re creating a GPT, you’re restricting the type of information, but you’re also creating a customized template for you to work in. So let’s say you want to create a newsletter every single week for your classroom. And all you have to do is create a customized GPT. So let’s say my newsletter is going to have information like what we’re working on each week. What’s the sound of the week? What are the skills of the week? What events are happening in the classroom? You know, some tips for working with your students at home. Maybe that’s just kind of the things that I have every single week in my newsletter to parents. Now obviously, as we know, is teachers having structure is really important, having consistency. So that newsletter based on those prompts I just shared with you, the GPT will then ask me those questions, and then I give them that response and it will create that newsletter for me in the format that I desire, including like, let’s say I want dates on there or icons or I’ve already told it how to contact me or where my website is or anything like that.

Vicki Davis (13:00): A really cool thing is the voice interaction that you can have with it, because you can type, or if you can’t really type, open it up and hit the microphone button and you can just talk to it like telling an assistant to write that newsletter for you. Such a powerful approach. It’s such an interesting time because it’s like a double edged sword, like one part of AI could really harm education. People who think that AI can somehow replace a teacher and don’t really understand what we do every day, and then also kids that are wild West AI use, you just know I’m going to stop doing all schoolwork. One thing you said it was really interesting is that one of our issues that if our goal is a grade AI is a really fast way to get there.

Vicki Davis (15:25): We recently got through our new technology presentations in my ninth grade class, and I was encouraging my students to use AI tools to help create their presentation. They’re like, can use AI to create the presentation. I said, yeah, but I don’t want you to read your presentation. I want you to follow these guidelines. AI is a bit wordy. It puts too much on a page. It’s trying to write out the presentation like, you know, it gets to be 60% of the way there and then you’ve got to tweak it. So are my students able to talk about their topic? Are they able to answer questions? And I know a teacher that stopped doing papers and started doing oral reports. In oral conversations. The kids are happier, the teachers happy, your learning is happening. And I know this whole burden of going oral and talking about things. It’s hard when you have a lot of kids, but doesn’t it kind of seem that’s part of smart teaching is actually we’re interacting more?

Patricia Dickenson (16:22): Exactly. We’re working in what I call their zone of proximal development. At the beginning of the book, I talk about developmental learning theory, and we go back and revisit frameworks like Piaget, and we look at students learning development so that we can really understand the learner. I reference books like 10 to 25. We’re talking about what’s happening in that sweet spot of those kids that we’re working with. What does it mean to give good feedback? It doesn’t mean that we don’t write anymore. Writing is still a form of communication. In fact, there’s a ton of work coming out from UC Davis. They have a PAIRR framework, and this is a research-based approach to how to teach writing. And they’re doing this work with undergraduate and graduate students across all sorts of disciplines, from school of Business to English. And it’s a framework for using AI as a partner and giving feedback. It stands for peer and AI review and reflection. Check out their website because also they have a ton of prompts. So a big piece is, and this has been talked about forever. Yes, we know the students are going to use AI. And then how can we teach students AI literacy said that they are using AI smarter. They’re using AI as a tool because we all know that there’s all sorts of stuff that’s coming out from AI. There are clones, there’s hallucinations, there’s deep fakes. Not everything you get back is real. And so we need to teach our students AI literacy. And so part of their framework, that first part of their framework in terms of the steps is to teach the literacy, teach them how to be a critical thinker and a consumer of AI. Then we go through that process of writing a paper, writing a draft, getting feedback from a peer, and then getting feedback from AI from an AI tool, reviewing that feedback from both your peer and AI, and then reflecting like, what are you going to take this? What are you going to add to your writing? And again, they have already created a ton of prompts because we need to teach our students how to prompt and interact with AI.

Vicki Davis (18:54): I tell my students is, I’m not going to use AI really to grade you because I expect you to use it for it gets to me. I don’t want any typos. I don’t want any grammar problems. I kind of want you to work through that with AI and with your peers.

Patricia Dickenson (19:06): Vicki. There’s also some amazing school districts out here in California, like ABC unified, where they’ve actually created an app for teachers. And part of this app, you can tell it will tell the students how they can use AI and what type of AI use is accessible in the work that they’re submitting.

Vicki Davis (19:27): So what do you tell teachers who come up to you in your workshops and your keynotes and say, okay, I’m just really overwhelmed by all the AI options and the tech options. And so I’m just thinking about just like getting rid of all technology and let’s go old school, because a lot of schools and folks are kind of talking that way. There’s like, hey, if I can’t keep up, I’m just going to quit. And just to go back to just whatever. We had old school in the 80s, and a lot of times old school was not the greatest. What do you say to those teachers?

Patricia Dickenson (19:55): Big fan of John Dewey and John Dewey believe that our schools should be a reflection of the societies that they live in, learning by doing democracy and education? So yes, if you decide not to bring it into the classroom, does that mean they’re never going to use it? And what happens when they do use it and they don’t have the understanding of how it works and how it functions, and they don’t have the literacy or the understanding of AI. What then happens? So I’m a believer that if our goal in education, our vision and mission is to prepare students for the future, for the future of jobs, for the future of workplace, and we know. Check out the World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs. That is what it is. The types of jobs that students are going to be coming into the workforce, whether or not there are Carpenter or whether or not they’re an engineer. AI is everywhere, right? It’s not a fad. These are culturally relevant tools. Think of Vygotsky — cultural tools that are part of our society that students need to know how to use. Personally speaking, I have three kids. I want my kids to learn how to do something when they’re in my house so that I can guide them. The whole phenomenon of giving guardrails. In fact, one of my really good friends, her husband’s a pastor. She’s Christian. And I always asked her, I said, how come you sent your kids to public school? You guys are a Christian. You’re in the pastor, blah, blah, blah. And she said, the end of the day, my kids are going to go out into the real world, and when they’re living in my house, I want them to have real experiences in the real world so that I can support them and teach them the right way versus being on their own, discovering these things without any guidance, without any support. AI is definitely here to stay, and so if you decide not to incorporate it, then they’re going to learn it from somewhere else. Yeah, I say let’s incorporate it, because then we’re going to have more time to do the things that we really want to do. Maybe we want to support our students more social, emotional. Maybe we want to have more time to really develop those soft skills with them. Well, if we offset some of the load of that cognitive skills, then we can have more time for that social emotional support my dissertation examined those types of engagement and the best predictor of students engagement was their emotional connection with their teacher. If the students are feeling like this is my world and you don’t see the value in my world, you don’t identify with my world. This is the world that they are growing up in. I say, let us teach them how to use the tool. Let us harness the tools that they’re already using. They’re walking around with these tools in their pockets.

Vicki Davis (22:51): What is the one thing in the book that you think will surprise educators the most?

Patricia Dickenson (22:56): Probably that I do believe that we need to have a balanced approach to how we use AI. Yes, I believe technology has a place in the classroom. No, I don’t think students should be on the computers all day. And so when you’re reading the text, you’re going to see, wow, I’m really excited about being a teacher because I’m giving you the tools, like we talked about in the beginning, to unlock your potential and take a more creative and innovative approach to using AI and to incorporating it in your classroom. Let me tell you an example. I was teaching sixth graders. We were learning about composite shapes. It’s such a boring lesson. We were looking at 2D shapes that are irregular and my students are like, okay, this is boring. But then I asked AI. I said, look, my students really love art. How can I make this lesson more fun? So they’re more engaged? And AI gave me an idea to have the students create city skylines using composite shapes. It created a rubric for me. It even gave me an idea for a video suggestion. You know those kids love those. The art videos. Have you seen those where they’re watching like a little video and then they get to draw something that they never drew before? This lesson that was I was just teaching from the textbook became a fun art project. Honestly, Vicki, it took me about ten minutes to create it because AI made the rubric. It created a criteria chart. I told it what I wanted students to do based on what I knew the standard was expecting them to do. But then our classroom became like a Zen space because I was playing lo fi hip hop music. Kids were drawing on graph paper, making their city skylines. And then, even though it was a sixth grade standard, I was able to differentiate even more. Some of my students were like, wow, well, I want to create like a stratosphere here. And I was like, oh, well, you need a circular shape. And that’s actually a seventh grade standard of, you know, finding the area of circles. But I can show you how to do that because all my other kids are busy and engaged. Just one example of how you can harness the power of technology, even if it’s just like a little dip. Put your toes in. You see what it feels like to just mix things up. A lot of math teachers also use building thinking classrooms, and it will create all of those prompts for you so that you can work in student’s zone of proximal development with the types of tasks that you ask and that way you really differentiate instruction.

Vicki Davis (25:36): I would teach given speeches, and my students have given some of the best speeches we’ve ever had, but I really wanted to have a little bit of fun and went into my AI tool of choice and was like, let’s just pull up some research on how to make things more fun. And this is what I’m teaching right now. And it came up the greatest idea. It was called the worst speech ever. And it was like a one day thing that we did where they divided up into groups and they had a rubric, and we looked at the ten elements that would make a terrible speech, and they had to count. They each group had to give and they could tag team. They had to give a one minute speech on these random topics that I had them draw out of a jar, and they had to pick one and try to give the worst speech ever. And everybody was checking to see how many terrible things they did. The funny thing is, we laughed so hard they said it was the most fun ever. I love that, but then I got the greatest speeches I’d ever gotten and I was like, what’s happened here? And they were like, you know what? It’s kind of like we learned what not to do. So then we were comfortable doing what we needed to do.

Patricia Dickenson (26:39): I was thinking of how in math, a lot of countries like in Singapore, they actually show the students all the mistakes of a problem. The students kind of have to be like engineers and they go in, fix the problems. So that’s another way you could approach. Using AI is like looking at all the mistakes and having the students make revisions.

Vicki Davis (26:59): Today we’ve been talking with Doctor Patricia Dickenson, the author of Smart Teaching in the Age of AI.

Patricia Dickenson (27:07): Thank you so much. I’ve been a long time fan, and I love your show and all the work that you’re doing.

Announcer (27:12): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (27:16): Patricia reminded us that the teacher’s heart comes first and the tool comes second. Jim Henson, the man behind the Muppets, said it like this. Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are. And here’s where the research gets hopeful. Right now, only about a third of teachers 32% use AI weekly, but the ones who do are saving close to six hours every week. Think about that. That’s six full weeks a year handed back to a teacher. Six weeks to plan, to rest, to sit with a kid and be your best. And our students, they’re not waiting on us. Roughly 7 in 10 teens are already using AI, whether we’ve taught them how or not. The World Economic Forum lists AI and data among the fastest growing skills employers want. This isn’t a fad, it’s the world we’re preparing our kids to walk into. So we’ve talked about the heart of being a teacher is our relationship with our students and each other. Now we’re going to learn that the heart of a great app developer is compassion for the person using the app, because the best tools solve real problems. Now, I want to give you a heads up before this next conversation. Part of what we talk about touches on suicide and the research being done to detect and prevent it. If you or a student you love is struggling. Here in the US, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Hotline anytime, day or night. Our next guest could have spent his whole career publishing papers that nobody ever reads. Instead, he made himself a pledge. Work only on things his own mother would care about. Here is Doctor Jie Tao. Let’s learn. Today we’re talking with Doctor Jie Tao, an associate professor of business analytics at Fairfield University, in founding director of the AI and Tech Institute. He helps executives understand AI. But his real superpower is translating complex AI concepts into practical skills that any leader can use. So, Jie, you went from teaching business analytics to founding a whole AI institute. Walk us through that shift. What did you see happening that made you think, I need to move in this direction?

Jie Tao (29:37): Around Covid time, I made a pledge to myself. I said, I’m doing all the academic work, teaching, research. And what’s the point? If my own mother wouldn’t read my research articles, what’s the point of doing that? I made a pledge to myself. I was only working on impactful research that people actually care from this point on. To give you an example. The second most recent publication I had is actually to detect suicide ideation from social media. Clearly you can see people care about that. Not only that, but not just publishing this and nobody going to read it. Like I said, I don’t want to do that anymore. We are actually working with 18 clinicians in the US and China, and they are actually using the research prototype. It raised their outreach rate from five per clinician per week to 25 and raised their detection accuracy from low 70s to high 80s, almost 90%. The other reason is also pretty personal. I built a tool called HealthBody. What it does is basically you subscribe to a keyword, and every Monday morning you get an email telling you what’s going on regarding that keyword, basically the latest drug trials and experimental treatment and all that stuff behind that is also very personal. My dad was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer years ago. I wanted to do research for him, and even with a doctorate I spent, I’m spending hours every day to read those medical papers. I don’t really understand what’s going on, so I need a tool. I’m building this tool. This is free to public, and we are actually testing this with a group of people, and they are subscribing to whatever condition they care about. And they’re getting those summary emails every week.

Vicki Davis (31:15): That’s fantastic. Since you brought up the suicidal ideation issues because you this is just a huge issue. And so many of us have been heartbroken. And we’ve reported on the show about Adam Raine and the first wrongful death suit, and they’ll probably be many, many more. Now you’ve created these red rules. Okay. What are they? Help us understand, because I think these are really important.

Jie Tao (31:40): They are very important. And particularly when the project started, I wasn’t involved. The project started in 2010 or 2011. Way before I joined the project. The motivation is simple. On one social media platform, there is actually one user committed suicide and a lot of people even after he committed suicide. A lot of people will actually go to his page and pay tribute to this particular user. This group of clinicians find out actually these people paying tribute. A lot of them are actually at risk. That’s why they’re paying tribute to this particular user. They tried all kinds of different ways. They tried manually reading this. They’re trying to curate a dictionary saying if you mention these words, you have suicidal thoughts. You can see you and I as humans, we can see the problem is exact word match is very problematic. What if the word is actually behind a negation and things like that. It cannot capture that. When I joined the team at 2019, we already have this thing called language model. It’s not the ChatGPT you think about, it’s actually GPT-2. It is. OpenAI did develop that, but that doesn’t have a chat interface. You have to access it programmatically, meaning via computer code. We first we’re trying to introduce this human knowledge, this dictionary into GPT. And they’re like they don’t work. Well. Then the last research decision in that project we did is we did a very expensive brain surgery in that little brain of a language model, if you may, is basically before it talks back to us, we intercept it’s brain waves and we marry or enforce human knowledge into these brainwaves, fuse them together and let that drive the decision. That’s how we can raise the detection accuracy from humans. Low 70s to an AI high 80s.

Vicki Davis (33:35): So what are the red rules? Are these guidelines or this is just an algorithm to detect. Is that what it is?

Jie Tao (33:42): It is an algorithm. It is basically architecture that impose on the language model. As a brain. We force it to reason like a clinician. It’s still very rudimentary comparing to a human brain. But for detecting linguistic cues about suicide ideation, it did reach a satisfactory level.

Vicki Davis (34:03): So you also have a workshop called Stop Arguing with a robot. What is broken in how people are currently using AI and just arguing, trying to get what we want.

Jie Tao (34:15): I have two terms. There’s one term I always mentioned in my own podcast and everything. I call it Prompt and pray. So prompt is basically how you communicate with these chatbots, right? You submit a query and give you responses. So the query is submitted as a prompt. If the prompt is not carefully designed, you pray that whatever AI you’re using will give you a decent enough response. So to me that’s very frustrating to people I work with. That’s very frustrating because you don’t really know where you get a brilliant answer or something you can never use. Consistency is actually something we’re looking at, and particularly if we go beyond the personal use, if we actually want to use this for, say, workflows or business processes, we can actually live with slightly lower quality as long as the output is consistent, is consistently at 70% quality. That’s good. It’s consistently follow a certain structure that’s good. That’s why what we do is we basically have a prompting framework regulating the AI to think in a certain way along certain routes. It will always deliver consistent and robust responses. They may not be the most brilliant responses, but they are reliable.

Vicki Davis (35:38): Well, one thing that I teach my students, when they really have not a lot of knowledge on a topic, is to have the AI tool go back and forth with an interview, ask me questions until that part of something that we should be doing with students or not.

Jie Tao (35:51): Yes, exactly. The interview pattern. Based on my experience and the people who I trained, their experience is actually the most powerful pattern. What I would do actually with every session, I would say first read the information I provided, either through upload the file or in my prompt. Basically that’s called priming its context. So the context is memory right. We all know a large language model has a memory of a goldfish, but you still want to fill up that memory with all the information you have. Then I would say do not assume anything. If you identify any cognitive gap, ask me a question about it. The interview pattern you just mentioned. That’s the most powerful pattern ever. What I also do is whenever I start an interview, I would ask the language model. The chatbot will start a thing called a scratchpad. So the scratchpad is a structure basically records every bit of information I provided. I will directly say only use the information I provided in a scratchpad. Do not use any from your memory or doing web search because you know these days you’re not directly in the web search. You don’t know if the sources are real or not.

Vicki Davis (37:00): You know, I’m using Claude Cowork so heavily, I’m pretty sure a scratchpad is just part of how it operates. And of course the folder access. And you’ve gotten into some agentic AI research. How would you simply explain agentic. And what are some of your thoughts on where this is heading for us as users of AI?

Jie Tao (37:23): First, there is no universal definition of agentic AI right now. Nobody has that. So the common understanding is like we said a few minutes ago, a large language model is basically just the brain. The brain cannot directly interact with the real world. So you need tools. For example, a brain cannot even do a web search if you want. Back in the day, before they built these web search tools into Claude and ChatGPT, it cannot even search the web before you give it that tool. So once the brain decide how to use the tool, for example, you can give it five tools at the same time at any given task, at any given stage of a task, it can decide which tool to use, which tool is the proper way to use, and which tool to use next. That’s what we call basically an agentic process. And that’s different from I don’t know, you know, how many people follow this. And I think you should is, you know, what we call fully autonomous AI, something like OpenClaw. I’m sure a lot of people heard about that. So OpenClaw is basically you give full autonomy to these agents, you know, basically give a very brief description of the task. Go ahead, do it. That’s slightly different from what I do. I define what I do as an agentic workflow, meaning I still define what are the steps. And within each step I give limited autonomy to the agent to say, okay, here are the tools, here are the rules. You figure out how to carry out this step.

Vicki Davis (39:03): I’m with you somewhat limit. I mean OpenClaw is interesting as just I just read that Claude no longer allows OpenClaw access. And of course, supposedly you can’t find a mac mini just about anywhere because everybody’s buying those to put OpenClaw on them because they don’t want to put them on their main device because you are giving access to everything. But a lot of people are hooking up these tiny little computers just to be like an agent to do things and are finding it extremely useful. So it is something worth watching and educating yourself about for sure. Because one thing I like about Claude Cowork is I can just really toggle very specific I have. It helped me triage my email it my draft email, but I’m the one who has to put it in there and type it.

Jie Tao (39:51): Yes.

Vicki Davis (39:52): I am very, very granular about the control I would give. But you know, I’ve thought, hey, OpenClaw, that approach may be in our future, right, Jie?

Jie Tao (40:04): Yeah, yeah. So we are clearly heading to that truly autonomous agent environment. My I don’t know nobody can make predictions these days. Right. You know, things are moving so fast right now. But I would say this at least this is my understanding. We’re not there yet. I’m not ready to give up the levers and the controls to a fully autonomous agent is because you know of two things without being too technical. One is what we just said. They have a memory of a goldfish. If you let them run too long. That’s okay about why they’re there. So you can see a lot of these OpenClaw agents got trapped in a circle because they don’t remember why they started that task. And the second is the current architecture. Behind all these large models, there is a limitation. There is a glass ceiling. We don’t know when we’re going to hit that glass ceiling, but sooner or later we will. And that’s when I started researching these things. And I know what the structure is. And I think, you know, we will hit the ceiling. We have several promising alternative frameworks on the horizon. So once one of them become mainstream, maybe we will see fully autonomous agents.

Vicki Davis (41:23): So if a teacher is listening right now and they’re talking to their students about artificial intelligence, it could be of all different ages. I noticed you talk about AI as a brain, and I actually am really cautious about not anthropomorphizing AI because of how children tend to view how trusting they are if I anthropomorphize it. Are there some tips you have for teachers based on your understanding of okay, this is how it works, and then what we’re seeing with the negative outcomes of interacting with AI.

Jie Tao (41:58): So I think the suggestions are simple. One is always keep it in a controlled environment, meaning we should have human regulating how it behaves in essence. One thing I recommend, for example, for businesses, and I do deal with K-12 teachers. And my recommendation to them is if you are basically tuning your tool, whatever you’re building, don’t make it directly student facing or client facing the first one. Test it thoroughly. Try to break it. I always tell my students, try to break it yourself. If you cannot break it, then there’s a, you know, less chance other people will break it. Because think about this. We just talk about suicide ideation and that kind of stuff. If the chances are if it actually breaks, it could be life and death. So that’s my first recommendation is keep it in a controlled environment. The second recommendation I say is actually understand it fully and not really fully understand the mechanism under the hood, but fully understand what it can and cannot do. I think that that basic literacy is important. According to MIT study published a few months ago, 95% of people think either AI is God or garbage. It’s neither. Right? It cannot do everything for you. It’s not God. It’s not garbage. Some of the information are very valuable. To give you an example, until four months ago, I was proud of myself writing. I’m a programmer, so writing every line of my computer code by hand. I say, you know, like my grandfather did. My grandfather never coded, by the way. But now I barely write a single line of code. But that’s because I fully understand what it can and cannot do. I know when I have to step in and steer it to a different direction, so do not give up the control. Once you know clearly in your particular context what it can and cannot do. That’s my second piece of advice.

Vicki Davis (44:24): What do you think the biggest mistake teachers make when they first try using AI in their classroom?

Jie Tao (44:32): Like I said, it’s not Google. It’s not a textbook. Not everything it says is true. It’s basically the term I always use is a overconfident intern. It’s pretty knowledgeable about a lot of things. Think about it. Every piece of AI we face right now is basically trained on the whole internet. So whatever you can find that you can find, but it’s still due to the memory issue and the framework issue. You still have to carefully guide it. So a lot of people I think my suggestion, I wouldn’t call that the biggest mistake, but my suggestion is be very cautious about your expectation of AI. It can do certain things, but there are certain things it cannot do. It maybe can do things better, or maybe can do things it wasn’t able to do with your guidance. So provide the proper guidance.

Vicki Davis (45:33): So Jie, is there anything about AI that we haven’t talked about that you think is really important for educators to consider as they try to stay abreast of what’s happening with artificial intelligence?

Jie Tao (45:45): I’m not a big picture person. I’m a very practical person. So I want to give teachers a few pieces of advice. And these are things that I follow every day. One is find the structure of your prompt. Doesn’t matter what kind of structure, as long as you like it, as long as the results are satisfactory to you, use that and stick with that. You can make changes, but you know, basically keep it consistent, as consistent as you can. That’s my thing. Because these models, they’re not really learning on the fly, but they will get used to how you communicate with it. That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing is be very specific. So provide as rich context as you can to the don’t just say I need a syllabus for the science class I’m teaching that semester. Tell you know, the AI, what kind of science class to what grade, what are the learning objectives? How do you plan to teach it? Be specific. Always help. And the last thing I think is I want to say is you won’t break it. Keep trying. Try things that you never thought of with it. The worst thing you can do is it will tell you you cannot do it. Then you know you waste what, a couple of minutes. But still. What if you can do it? You’ll save a lot of time as return.

Vicki Davis (47:13): And of course, the biggest issue is when it claims it can do it and it can’t.

Jie Tao (47:17): Yes.

Vicki Davis (47:17): And people.

Jie Tao (47:18): Don’t seem to remember. Yeah, it’s an overconfidence intern. So that’s why when you have to put the foot down and say, this is not the way, do it again.

Vicki Davis (47:29): We’re talking with Doctor Jie Tao, associate professor of business analytics at Fairfield University and founding director of the AI and Tech Institute. I think that you and I could get nerdy really fast, and some folks might not want to.

Jie Tao (47:44): Go there, but this is exciting.

Vicki Davis (47:48): Well, that’s what you get when you talk to an AP computer Science principles teacher who went to Georgia Tech. So there you go. Nice. Anyway, thank you for coming on the show, Doctor Tao.

Jie Tao (47:58): Thank you. Vicki. Have a great one.

Announcer (48:00): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (48:04): The best technology is built by people who care about real human problems. Heart first. Tools second. Now let’s move to a practical coach of instruction technology, Amy Storer. Amy and I spent some time together at the FETC conference this past January. She is truly a coach with heart. Her job is making the technology actually work for teachers and not add to their plate, but lighten it. Amy calls it coaching that clicks. She’s an innovative learning specialist in Texas and a nationally recognized edtech speaker. Let’s learn from Amy. So we have somebody on the show today, Amy Storer, who I was excited to meet her at FETC. We were both featured speakers in the teacher strand. She’s an innovative learning specialist in Montgomery ISD in Texas. She’s a nationally recognized edtech speaker whose work centers on purposeful technology integration that makes teaching and learning easier, more creative and authentic. She is known for coaching that clicks. Amy, thanks for coming on the show. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Today we are going to talk about all the tools that have teachers excited, whether they’re new or old. And I know that you do training on all these, but what are teachers getting the most excited about that you’re sharing about these days? Amy.

Amy Storer (49:36): Big part of my job is working directly with teachers. Each month I come with a theme or a topic. One month it was all about Canva. This month is all about falling in love with the Adobe Express and diving into that tool as teachers and students. One of the tools that I’ve been sharing is one of their newest and it’s Create a Podcast. It is professional studio podcast type of experience for students. Introduced it to a third grade teacher last week. She used it within two days. The animated character feature in Adobe’s Right, but the podcast is now a button that kids and teachers can click on the Adobe Express home page. It’s a blue button. You can do things like add intro music, and they have an entire music library. You can even invite people onto your show. All of that you can do in that one tab. And even better, let’s say that the kids are recording in a busy hallway in school, which happened last week with these kids. You can then click the enhance button and drown out that background noise and make your voice cleaner and crisper. It’s just the one stop shop.

Vicki Davis (50:41): Oh, my kids love Adobe Express too. Are there any other things that what are your teachers say about Adobe Express, and what are the features that they really like in their.

Amy Storer (50:50): Animated character? It’s a very easy lift for even your littlest students. They get up to two minutes to record, which is just enough time to share what you need to share. And what it does is it takes the recording of the student, and the character’s mouth will move in sync with that recording. And we did an animated Valentine card. The quick actions for teachers have been really popular to do things like edit a PDF, merge documents together, some of those really simple tasks that teachers are having to go to multiple websites to do. You could do all inside of Adobe Express and I’m team anything that saves teachers time.

Vicki Davis (51:26): My students really, really like Adobe Express. So okay, so teachers are getting excited about Adobe Podcast, Adobe Express, Adobe Animate, all those little cool things. What else? Because you have a big toolkit.

Amy Storer (51:39): Canva code. The first time that I used it, I was beside myself with how much time it saved me and that it was going to be interactive and engaging for students. So if it’s not something that you’re familiar with, you know, you don’t have to know anything about coding less than zero. But you think about like your dream interactivity that you want to build with students. I’m a science teacher. We’re studying food chains to wrap up our unit. I want them to play a game where they’re having to organize organisms into buckets producer, consumer, etc. I don’t have time. I don’t have money to build it or pay for it. This is where Canva code comes in. So on the Canva website there’s a Canva AI button. Click Canva AI. You will see another button that says code and you just copy and paste in. Once you have everything there, you click the button to generate it. It’s writing all those lines of code for me, and even better is once it’s done writing the code for that interactivity, I can keep talking to it.

Vicki Davis (52:38): Anything else about Canva that your teachers are going, oh yeah, this is awesome.

Amy Storer (52:42): They’re magic studio. So when you’re in the designer and you are designing presentations, graphics on the left hand side, that panel, there’s the Magic Studio. It has things like remove background, generate backgrounds, things like that.

Vicki Davis (52:58): So we got all this Adobe stuff, Canva stuff. What else?

Amy Storer (53:00): A tip that I found out recently, if you’re in presentation mode in Canva and you click any number on your keyboard, it will pull up a timer overlay on top of that presentation. I was like, I did not know that.

Vicki Davis (53:14): And push like seven. And it gives me a seven minute timer or one and it gives me a one. Wow. Now that is cool.

Amy Storer (53:20): So when I was in one of the tools scribe scribe, what scribe does is it’s an extension you put on your computer, and when you turn the extension on, a side panel pops up. And what it’s doing is it’s just recording everywhere that you click. When you’re done capturing the steps, you click stop capture. A new tab will open and it’s the steps from start to finish, but not just the steps. They have grabbed screenshots and wherever you have clicked, they have added a hotspot. So it will say number one, go to the Google slide link. Teachers would click that when they get there and shows them a picture. You’re going to click here, click here. I call it like a how to flowchart from start to finish. I just made one for families recently on how to get into class link and get to different apps for students. It’s good for sharing instructions with teachers for my favorite tools to share and use.

Vicki Davis (54:13): You’ve given us a lot of tools. Let’s just shift a little bit. How are teachers feeling these days with all the AI that’s happening? What’s the mood?

Amy Storer (54:23): You think it’s a mix. Many are leaning into it. How it can support them, support teachers. Which is how I started. It was teacher facing for me. And still a lot of what I do is teacher facing. I think the older the kids get, the more worrying teachers and families do have. If AI is helping or hurting. And with student learning, I really firmly believe that once our teachers get more comfortable with it and have used it and can understand how it can support, not replace, I think that’s going to help. But I do think it’s a good mix and understandably, and I think it’s important to have policies in place no matter what district you work in, just to help guide that learning and support our students the best that we can. It’s a pretty good mix across the board.

Vicki Davis (55:05): So Amy Storer has been with us today. She’s a learning specialist in Montgomery ISD in Texas and a nationally recognized ed tech speaker here in the US, and it was really awesome to spend time with you.

Amy Storer (55:17): Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

Announcer (55:19): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (55:23): I love how Amy talks about buying back time with AI. I know it’s possible I felt it and I need to disclose the truth here. It does take time to learn about these tools, to use them well and train them where they can ever give that time back, but it is worth it. The best kind of technology is the kind that compassionate humans build to help other people with real problems, and teacher time stress is certainly a real problem right now. Teaching is difficult and it’s so hard right now. But let me say this as plainly as I can. Teachers, as you pour yourself out for everyone else, please remember that you matter. Teacher, you are so very special. All of you, educators and parents and the kids, teachers. We can get so lost in serving others that we forget about taking time for ourselves. When I think about how hard education is right now, I remember one of my favorite authors from childhood, Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the little House series in the book The Long Winter, in a moment when hope seemed nearly gone. Laura Ingalls wrote that she felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low, but no winds could make it flicker because it wouldn’t give up. That tiny light, that’s you. Don’t give up. Keep going. Author Clare Boothe Luce, put it this way. There are no hopeless situations in life. There are only people who have grown hopeless about them. So hear me, remarkable educators. I’m here with you. I see you. Our work is so important, and our work is hard. Our work is underappreciated. But teachers, you are noble and you are doing work worth doing. No, you’re not paid enough in money or in respect. But you are special. And we all still have more to learn together. Let’s keep moving forward. As always, this show can be found at CoolCatTeacher.com. I’m Vicki Davis and you’ve been listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. See you later, educator.

Announcer (57:48): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Follow @coolcatteacher everywhere you connect.