Hope and Help for Teachers in a Cold January 💛

I wanted to share this week’s newsletter with you. If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, go to coolcatteacher.com/newsletter and sign up. I would love to connect with you!​

Hello Reader,

How is your semester starting out? I hope it is awesome but sometimes here in North America January can be a tough month! And there’s the ice! I hope you’re staying warm!

Life isn’t quite settled without Dad yet and I’m working hard to bring the routines back including making sure I send you some awesome resources from my blog and some things I learned and shared at FETC in Orlando just a few weeks a go including a few of my slides from my Getting Past the Hype of AI preso.

Here are some resources for you right now:

AI/Privacy Literacy Lesson. TikTok Changed Their Privacy Policy in some very concerning ways. I created a “Privacy Policy Detective” Google Doc that I used along with a PDF and four different AI tools to help my eighth graders not only learn how to upload a PDF to AI, but to compare AI models, and also understand what has happened with TikTok over this past weekend.

​Claude for Excel. If you have a paid version of Claude, you can use it inside excel. Yes, inside. It runs on your computer and my understanding is It is unreal. Note that they don’t recommend it for highly sensitive or regulated data. You can also have it installed at your worksite. I’m testing it now. I would definitely say this is for an advanced user.

Google Notebook LM Infographics. I’m pulling my transcripts into Google Notebook LM to generate infographics for each of my shows. Here are some of the issues:

• The file sizes will be huge. I take them into Canva and compress them.
• It is impossible to have it do much but make an infographic if you want to add titles of a show or podcast numbers or something of that nature, you’ll have to pull it into an editor of some type.
• Typically spelling is pretty good.
• I teach this to my students when they are reviewing new content.
• I use it for new content I share with students.

Here are a few examples:

Recently, at FETC, I shared a session called “AI: Beyond the Hype” where I got deep into how I teach in my classroom. Really, the R, A, and L have already been there, and the second step, “engage with AI,” was really just “engage with Technology,” but in the days of AI, it has turned into an active use of AI and how we can effectively use it.

I wanted to share a few of those slides and also a few notes on my own views of what works in my classroom:
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Emotional Intelligence is more important than ever.
Last semester, when my students evaluated the course and gave me feedback, the two most useful things they said were, first, emotional intelligence skills, and second, prompt stacking. We actively talk about reading body language, working in teams, and focusing on people. We dig into our need for human to human contact and why having AI help you emotionally is not the best idea and why humans are better suited for that task. This has always been there but is more important than ever.
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2. We Engage with AI
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But AI is not everywhere all the time. It is a tool. We learn how to use it, whether it prompts stacking and using one tool to write the image generation for another tool, or collecting a prompt library

I’ve shared some of the slides from that section of the preso here:

​Exemplars-socialmedia.pdf

3. Activating Practice

We always use formative assessment, but I also teach them to assess themselves formatively. Which tool do they say is helping their grades and learning increase? Google Notebook LM. I don’t just show them this tool; I show them how to use this tool for review. How to upload slides (many just use it to chat with it), how to find additional content, and how to generate audio and infographics. These are all part of activating formative self-assessment made possible by AI, so they can learn and think more deeply.

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4. Look at Evidence

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We are constantly talking about standards, particularly in my AP class. But I like to create tools with the standards programmed right in. I’ve made a customGPT for my AP CSP class with the standards built in and have also made a student-facing Google notebook LM with the content and standards for them to use. I am also sharing PDFs and standard numbers on my slides to give them the content they need to train AI, so they can see the evidence of how they are doing.
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Attached are a few notes on how I engage with AI. Interestingly, I used to have AI near the end of my coursework, but over the past two years I’ve had to move it to the start of the semester. The kids want to talk about it. They want to ask questions. And many of them, when they find out how it actually works, shake their head in disbelief at their wrong thinking about what it could do for them and their lives.

I’d love to tell you life is easy, but my Dad was a huge part of my life and even at age 82 he was quite a loving human being. It can be hard sometimes to go around my small town as many are still weeping because they miss him.

Emotional intelligence is more important than ever. I work hard to teach it. I work hard to act like the kind of person who is respected enough to teach it.

Some days it is hard. So, I’ve been behind but I wanted to get this done. I’m about to head to the den now to spend time with my husband rather than writing a bunch more here than most of you won’t get to.

But if you got this far. Thank you! I hope to connect with you next week.

Joyfully in your service,

Vicki

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