In today's episode of the Educational Duck Tape Podcast, my guest is Dan Fitzpatrick, the author of the best-selling book, the AI Classroom. Dan and I discuss what he calls Frontier AI Tools, like ChatGPT and Gemini, as well as Tools like Magic School, School AI, Diffit, Brisk, Gamma.app, and his prepared framework for generative AI and more. (upbeat music) My wife jokes that I have a weird obsession with our Roomba, and it's not just a joke. It's true, I love Mr. Belvedere. Yes, yes I did name our Roomba after the titular English butler in a 1980s sitcom. And yes, I might spend a little too much time admiring Mr. Belvedere as he vacuums our floors. There's something so satisfying about pressing a button and letting him do all the work. After he's done, I'll even go tell my wife, I vacuumed the bedrooms today. She knows it was actually Mr. Belvedere, but I like to think I deserve a little credit. You know, that's the magic of automation, isn't it? You get the satisfaction of a job well done without actually doing the work. And just like Mr. Belvedere handles the floors in my house, today's sponsor, visor, handles the heavy lifting when it comes to managing school devices. Imagine being able to automatically update your students and colleagues about a device's repair status, remind them to return a device, or let them know where to pick up a new one with personalized email notifications, all without lifting a finger. Just like Mr. Belvedere, visor handles it all. For you educational duct tape listeners, visor has a special deal waiting. Head over to visor.cloud/jake. That's vi-z-o-r.cloud/jake for special pricing and some awesome swag, including a copy of my book, Educational duct tape. Trust me, with visor, managing devices will be as easy as well as easy as watching Mr. Belvedere clean the floors. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to give Mr. Belvedere some much deserved praise. Oh, and while I'm doing that, you should head over to visor.cloud/jake. (upbeat music) Welcome to the Educational duct tape podcast with Jake Miller. (upbeat music) Hey there, duct tapers. Whether you're a long time listener or tuning in for the very first time, or welcome to the show, I'm Jake, an educator from Ohio, and by joining us today, you're officially a duct taper. That means you're on board with the Educational duct tape metaphor, seeing educational technology not as the end goal, but as a powerful tool like duct tape used to solve problems, achieve goals, and meet learning standards. Before we get into it, I want to apologize for the long gap between episodes. I had hoped to make this a weekly thing, but my day job and my dad job have kept me from making that happen. From here on out, I'll aim for weekly, but I hope you'll understand if there's a week off here and there. Next, really quickly, I ran a contest in the month of August and wanted to tell you who the winners are. 10 awesome duct tapers are winning a free signed copy of my book Educational duct tape. If I list your name, please send me an email to
[email protected] or a DM on any social media platform with your address and I'll get that book in the mail to you. And by the way, if you'd like the book to be a gift to a friend or a colleague, just let me know when you send me that message. All right, here are our 10 winners. Number one, Brian Carpenter, number two, Tim Kavie, number three, John Hartman, number four, Vicky Hoypole, number five, Michael Morrison, number six, Janice and Janice Apologist, if I can't say your last name here, Medanika or Medanice, I don't know. I, that's, that's you Janice, you want? Members of the heaven, Chris Nessie, number eight, Robert Lewis, number nine, Ainsley Hill, and finally number 10, John O'Neill. I have a feeling that some of those folks already have their copies of the book because they've been supporting the show for years, but I also have a feeling that they know some colleagues or coworkers or friends that they'd be happy to pass the book along too. So just send me those messages with those addresses. To those of you who entered, but did not win, I'm sorry, but don't worry, I've got another chance for you. So listen up, as I've shared in previous episodes, I'm excited about an idea that I have in this iteration of the podcast. The creates a space that's even more collaborative and interactive than any other educational podcast or past episodes of this show. So here's how it works. During the five or six days after this episode drops, I'm inviting you, the duct tapers out there, to share your thoughts on the topics that Dan and I dive into. Whether it's your reactions, your additional insights, or maybe even something that you think we missed, we want to hear it. And here's the cool part. Those contributions are likely to be featured in the next episode. Yep, I'll be taking your audio snippets, mixing them with my own thoughts and crafting an episode that highlights all of our collective wisdom. It's like creating an educational gumbo and your wisdom is the secret ingredient. - Gumbo. (chuckles) So after you listen today, head over to edu.tape.com that's edu.ducttap.com/padlet or edu.tape.com/speakpipe to share your voice. Both links are right there in the show notes. Now, I've got to say I'm partial to Padlet because it lets you engage with other listeners too. It's like a mini forum where the conversation keeps growing, but if you'd rather just chat with me directly, speakpipe is the way to go. Either way, I can't wait to hear what you have to say. And here's the other chance to win a free book thing that I just mentioned. For this week only, I'll be selecting three random contributors from those submissions to win a free signed copy of my book. That's right, share your thoughts, hear yourself on the podcast, and possibly win a free book too. So here's what I'd recommend. As you listen to Dan and I today, take time to think, did they miss anything? Do I agree with what they said? Is there something that I'd add or change? Reflect on what you're hearing and then after you listen, hop into the show notes and click the link to the speakpipe or the Padlet and share for your chance to be on the show and to win a free copy of my book. (upbeat music) Oh, sorry, hold on. Let me just grab my soapbox from over here. There we go. That's perfect. Climb up on there. I am back up here on my soapbox to talk about one of our favorite topics. Now I know what you're thinking. Jake, you better not be talking about the buffalo again. And don't worry, nope, no buffalo. Well, you're a little buffalo. But wait, wait, don't stop listening. It's just slightly related to the buffalo. I promise it's something new. The buffalo metaphor tells us to face the storm, but it doesn't tell us how to address the complexities that we see when we face it. So today we're going to explore how we could take control of the ever evolving landscape of AI and education. So we're not just facing the storm. We're learning how to navigate the river of water that this storm creates. Speaking of rivers, in the movie Dr. Strange, there's this character named the ancient one, which is also what I call my dad. Getting, getting, sorry, dad. You've probably seen the movie Dr. Strange, right? Then the very first one of the series of Dr. Strange movies, the ancient one is, of course, this super wise and super mysterious character that advises and teaches Dr. Strange and Dr. Strange feels slightly conflicted about the ancient one at first, but he learns a lot from the ancient one. Anyhow, at one point, she gives Dr. Strange a piece of advice that feels incredibly relevant to us today. She says, you cannot beat a river into submission. You have to surrender to its current and use its power as your own. And you know what? That's exactly how we need to think about AI. We can't fight the current of technological change. Instead, we need to learn how to ride it, how to harness its power, and how to use it to benefit our students and ourselves. But how do we do that without feeling like we're being swept away by class six rapids in an inflatable raft? I'd like to propose that we consider using the CIA coaching model here. No, no, no, I'm not saying we need to be spies and undercover agents in the CIA. I'm telling you we need to use the CIA coaching model that was introduced by Neil and Sue Thompson. You see, it gives us a framework for responding to challenges, and it's a perfect fit for how we can handle the AI wave. So let's break down with the C, I, and A are in this model. First up, C, control. We want to look at the issue that we've been presented with and ask what elements of this can we control? Well, we have the power to choose the AI tools and technologies that we use and that we allow in our classrooms. We can assess what aligns with our teaching goals, what truly benefits our students, and what's safe to use. So we can do that to pick which AI tools we use and which ones we allow our learners to use. We also control how and when AI is used. Maybe you decide that AI is perfect for helping students brainstorm ideas, but not for completing assignments. That's within your control, at least while the students are in your room, or perhaps you use it to streamline administrative tasks, giving you more time to focus on direct interactions with your learners. You set the boundaries, you create the guidelines. This is your learning environment and you're in control of how AI fits into it.
So first in the CIA model is control. And while we'd love to have control over everything in our classrooms and everything in our schools, we don't. And that's where the next two letters come in. Next up, I is for influence. Some elements fall outside our direct control, but we still have the power to influence them. For example, while we might not be the ones writing district-wide policies on AI, we can use our voices in these conversations. Whether it's sharing our thoughts with administrators, joining committees, or collaborating with colleagues, we can influence those policies, as well as how AI is perceived and implemented in our schools. Again, we can't control policies, perception, and implementation, but if we want to, we can influence it. Now, what about our students? We might have the ability to control their AI usage in the classroom, but beyond that, it's out of our hands. However, we can still influence their attitudes and their behaviors. We may not be social media influencers with all the bus and riz. Honestly, it took me a few tries to even figure out what that means. Anyhow, I'm clearly not a hip social media influencer and no offense, neither are you, but we are still student influencers. We can guide them to see AI as a tool for learning, rather than just a shortcut. By modeling a growth mindset, giving them insights into how we think about AI and by encouraging ethical use, we can help them develop a healthy relationship with this technology that will serve them well beyond our classroom. When this AI river first made waves in education, some educators responded by trying to lock it down, ban it, use AI detectors, tell students they'd fail if they'd use it. In short, they tried to control it. They wanted to beat the river into submission. I'll show you, chat GPT. But the truth is, AI is beyond our control in many ways. Instead, we should focus on what we can influence. Imagine a vent diagram. Control is that small circle in the center. What happens in your classroom? You can control that. Influence is the larger circle around it. While it may be out of our control, how our students use AI outside of our classroom, and it may be outside of our control how they think about AI, and it may be outside of our control, how they feel like it should be implemented and what they think is appropriate. It is within our capacity to influence those things. It is within our capacity to guide how students use AI outside of school. Finally, we come to the A, and that is for accept and adapt. This is the hardest part because it means recognizing that some things are simply out of our control and outside of our influence. This is the outer level of that vent diagram. Those things that we can neither control nor influence. We have to start by accepting them. AI is here to stay, and it's transforming the way we think about education and pretty much everything. And that's outside of our control. One of the biggest challenges we'll face is how AI impacts assessment. With AI capable of completing many traditional tasks, the risk of academic dishonesty is higher than ever. We must accept these realities as part of our new educational landscape. Now, accepting them doesn't mean waving the white flag and just giving up. When we accept these things, we need to avoid slipping into the lizard brain response we talked about on a recent episode, the instinct to fight or flee. Instead of fighting these changes or running from them, we need to adapt, right? Fortunately, accept isn't the only A word in the CIA model. It's paired with adapt. So while we're accepting these new realities, we can also adapt to them. This might mean rethinking our assessment strategies, focusing on tasks that emphasize creative thinking, creativity, and personal reflection. Areas where AI struggles to replicate human insight. When we accept the reality, we can adapt in these ways. It might also mean fostering student agency and intrinsic motivation, encouraging students to value learning for its own sake, rather than just for grades. After all, cheating often happens when the ends become more important than the means. If we adapt and prioritize the means, the learning, AI can be a tool that helps learners learn, rather than helps students cheat. And yes, I chose the words learners and students intentionally there. Again, accept and more importantly, adapt. And remember that Dr. Strange quote, you cannot beat a river into submission. That's exactly what we need to do with AI. Instead of fighting against its flow, we should figure out how to ride it and how to use its current to reach our educational goals. So as we navigate this AI river together, let's keep the CIA model in mind, control what we can, influence what we must, and accept and adapt to where needed. AI isn't just a storm to fear or a river to be swept away by. It's a powerful current. And when harnessed correctly, it can help us achieve amazing things in our classrooms. Let's face this challenge head on with the wisdom of the ancient one, the courage of a buffalo, and the forward momentum of a river. I'd love it if you paused the podcast right now to reflect on these questions. What aspects of AI and education can you control? And which will you choose to control? What is within your means to influence? And which will you choose to influence? And finally, what must you accept where you could stop trying to beat the river into submission? And how will you adapt to these new realities? [MUSIC PLAYING] OK, folks. So here's what I need you to do. Before I start the interview with Dan, I'm going to tell you the question that I'm going to ask him. I'd like you to press pause and formulate your answer. Then when you resume listening, you could look for spots where Dan and I echo your thoughts or places where you have ideas that we didn't share. And then, of course, head over to the duct tape or space on Padlet or Speakpipe to share. So here's the question. What tool or strategy would you use to complete teacher tasks more efficiently? Take a moment. Think about your answer and then join me to hear Dan's wisdom on this topic. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today's guest. Today's guest is Dan Fitzpatrick. Dan wrote the best-selling book, The AI Classroom. He has helped countless educators worldwide navigate AI. His purpose is simple to help keep educational systems relevant so that all learners are prepared for success and rapidly changing world. I don't know about you guys, but that's a purpose. I can get behind right there. He also writes weekly for Forbes on educational transformation for educators, parents, and entrepreneurs. You could find Dan on his website, which is d-a-i-educator.io, or find him on x, formerly known, and known to me as Twitter, at d-a-i-educator-x. You could find all of that contact information in the show notes, but not just in the show notes here in the actual educational duct tape podcast is Dan himself. What's up, Dan? How you doing? Very good, thank you. I was at a festival on Friday, so a few days before recording this. And I spent a lot of the day outside in the sun. Now, you can probably tell if anyone's watching the video of this as well, that I don't do too well in the sun. So my nose is all burnt. My head's all burnt. It's the iris jeans and the ginger hair just doesn't do well. So yeah, I'm doing well, but I'm still kind of struggling with my head and my nose at the world. But yeah, all good. I didn't notice it, your filter or whatever's working. Your head didn't even notice. I was noticing that, noticing in the video, we're in the awesome beard club here, I think. You've got the ginger and I've got the gray. I'm getting a bit of gray on the side. But yeah, I'm not far behind you. I've got a bit of black hair. So it feels like we went right back into previous experience. Like we just finished the conversation, because we have done this before, except never educational duct tape. I got to be on your old podcast, the edgy futurist, I think two times back in like 2019, 2020. I had a blast doing that with you and Ben Whitaker and Stephen Hope on the edgy futurist. Is that show still on the air? It is. They're still going next step back last year to work on other projects. But those guys are still going strong. And yeah, bringing out an episode every week. I remember we talked about somewhere here in Ohio. There is a duct tape festival. I've never been to it. But we talked about it. And you guys were one of you, I don't even remember who it was. Maybe it was Stephen was talking about coming to Ohio and visiting and me and him. We're going to go to the duct tape festival. The festival over the weekend, I was starting to wonder was it the duct tape festival? Is that where you got that sunburn? I wish it had been. I wish I had been in Ohio for the duct tape festival. We already did. But we're going to dive into the official silliness of educational duct tape, which is a little game. And the game we're going to play is two truths and one lie. So you are going to read to me three statements.
And I'm gonna try to guess which ones to lie. As listeners to this podcast know, whether it's from the first few years or the most recent episode that aired with Molly Cloder recently, I really struggle at this game and always get it wrong and then forget to find out what the correct answer actually is and then try to move on without finishing the game. So I'm prepared to botch this game, but we're gonna learn a little more about Dan in the process. So Dan, what are your three statements for me? - Yeah, here we go. So my three statements are, number one, I was once a standup comedian. Number two, I was once an Olympic athlete, and number three, I was once a priest. - Wow. I could see, I, wow. I could see any of the three being a lie. Let me look at each of them, standup comedian, you are a pretty funny guy. I've, I, I'd still be rather impressed by that. Although you did say one standup comedian, so maybe that's true. An Olympic athlete, you'd be the first to get ever met, so that would be, that would be amazing there. And a priest, I've never seen you as a sinner, Dan. But I've also, I've also never noticed, like, wow, that's a really holy guy right there. He was probably a priest at some point in time. So I'm, oh my goodness, is it the priest or the athlete? I'm guessing you were not once a priest. That's, I think your lie is that you were once a priest. - Unfortunately, you got a run. - You really were once a priest? - Yeah, well, I was, yeah, before I was a teacher, I trained to be a Catholic priest, and I was a priest for a few years, and then I left a completely different life than I went into teaching. In fact, before I went into teaching, I was a standup comedian for a few years. - A goodness. And then, yeah, so I've never been a Olympic athlete. - What sport would it have been if you were in a Olympic athlete? It doesn't have to be realistic. - There's nothing kind of athletic about me. So I'd probably have to be a boxer, I think. - You're not swimming the butterfly. - Yeah, I probably have to do boxing. Or the shooting, they don't have to move around for the shooting, do you just stand there and shoot a gun? - Yeah, do that. - You could do that one. - Well, this is officially, I believe, unless somebody didn't tell me, this is the first priest, former priest, ever having been on the show. So I believe the educational duct tape podcast is officially blessed now. - Yeah, there we go. It's all done. I'll just get some holy water. - Oh, that's amazing. - We'll have a few things. I've got a hydroflask over here. I don't know if it's holy, but it will be when I'm finished with a giant. - Oh, wow, look at that. - That's a different life. - Right, yeah. And then stand up comedian. How long did you do that for? - Yeah, I did that for about two or three years. So I was, when I left the priesthood, I thought, 'cause I love my job, I love doing it. But I wanted to go a new direction. I wanted to have a family and all of that. And I thought, what's the thing I love about the job? And it was making people laugh and feel good. So when I would do Sunday sermons, I would always try and make people laugh. And so I was like, you know, I might actually give standard comedy a go. So, wow. - Yeah, I tried, I did it for a few years and got to the final of a few competitions. And then I was, and then I started to train to be a teacher and it was kind of, there was a bit of attention between, because I would get back home late and then go do my studies to be a teacher. So I had to give up one and it was, I wanted a stable income. So I went for the teaching. - Yeah. - It's amazing. Like I think your bio, we just need to rewrite it to be like, (laughing) priest, comedian, teacher, podcaster, author, period. Like that's it. Like that's all it says. No, then the AI educator. - But this, yeah, it's cool. - Yeah, it's cool. - What a story. - Okay, now our real question, the real reason I have the AI educator on the podcast today is to talk about AI, of course. Not specifically, as we do with everything in an educational duct tape plan, we're talking about what the teacher is trying to do. And then the answer often is edtech and in this situation, I have a hunch that Dan Fitzpatrick, the AI educator, is going to mention something that is AI related and is answered to this. So Dan, my question to you is, what tool or strategy or tip or something like that, would you use to complete teacher tasks more efficiently? So thinking about the things that a teacher does on a day-to-day basis, whether it's the lesson plans, the grading, the emailing, the activity, preparing it, anything that a teacher has to do regularly, what is a tool or strategy that you would suggest to help them be a little more efficient and effective at that? - Yeah, it's a huge question. Although it's the type of question that should help anybody doesn't really know about AI, it was just getting started, just to kind of start dipping their toes into it and start playing around. It's also a huge question because a lot of these tools, first of all, so many of them, and secondly, how we use them is quite subjective. I often say to teachers, this is the first time ever that we have had computers that talk our language. We've had to learn their language for decades, whether that be coding, literally learning new languages to speak to the computer or learning how to use the app or the sequence of things together to do what you needed to do and so on. We're literally now in an era where the computer speaks human languages. Now that's amazing in one sense, however, in another sense, it's really difficult because our language is so subjective. Like I'm over here in Newcastle in the Northeast of England, you're in Ohio and the United States, we both speak English, however, I bet there's so many things I say that you just wouldn't understand. There's so many things you would say I wouldn't understand. And also language is a two way thing. So I might think I'm being completely articulate when I'm saying, but depending on the person I'm talking to you, so you might understand what I'm saying, but somebody else who also speaks English might not clearly understand. And I sometimes say like, think of your class. So let's say you've got 20, 30 students in your class, how many times have you given them some instructions to do a task in all 30 of them straight away have understood and then do the task? It's impossible, it never happens. So it's amazing, we've got computers that speak our language. However, it brings with it so many more complications, which are basically communication issues. And so how do we get good at using these tools? It's communication. So I think first and foremost, I think a strategy that I want to talk about is don't think of this as a technical tool. And let's bring up chat GPT is kind of a starting tool. Anybody can go create an account for free and you can start talking to chat GPT which was trained on 300 billion words worth of information, which is by the way, that amount of information if you try to read it. And we read apparently on average 100 words every 30 seconds, it would take you 2800 years to read all of that information. That pays without taking a break. Yeah, so it's done its homework in terms of the human language. But still we need to learn how to communicate whether we need to be able to employ communication techniques, not technical techniques. Getting onto the website is where your technical skills end when it comes to chat GPT, what now has to happen as communication. And I suppose if you've got a new faculty member coming into your department, it takes a few months to get used to them. It takes a few months to kind of understand how they communicate, what their work rate like, what you can trust them with. If they've understood what you're saying to them. And very similar, we've got to kind of build a relationship. It's not a real relationship in that sense. But I suppose I'm using relationship as a metaphor and analogy for getting to know how it communicates. And so using it to a chat GPT, I think should be the number one tool at the moment for any teacher who wants to use AI. Simply because it's what's known as a frontier AI tool so it's always at the cutting edge of this technology. And if you go onto it, which I'm sure most people listen to this have, it looks a bit like a WhatsApp conversation or Facebook Messenger conversation, it's just a blank chat box really, except you're not talking to another human being, you're talking to one of the most advanced generative AI systems ever built. And therefore, you're not limited by kind of different buttons to press to do this. And maybe what, or somebody else's idea of how to use AI is, you just get to talk to it and ask it to do something. So let's take the very basic example of getting it to do a lesson plan. You literally just have to say to it, write a lesson plan on, I don't know, the ancient Egyptians for me, and then have a conversation with it because I think as you've said,
you know Jake that when you ask it a question like that, there's no way it's going to be perfect. It's going to be far from it. It's going to be impressive, but it's not going to be perfect because I think as teachers, we're professionals. Even if you've been teaching for two years or 20 years, you bring a professionalism with you. And I think for me, it revolves around three main pillars, although I'm sure there's a lot more, as a teacher, and that is your knowledge of your subject content, your knowledge of pedagogy, how to teach it effectively. And number three, the actual students in front of you who are going to be learning with you. And I think we still need to bring that knowledge to the AI because the AI doesn't know that. The AI hasn't got any experience of your students. It doesn't know pedagogy and what works like you know, and it doesn't know specifically the type of content you need to teach like you do. So we need to work with it and we need to bring our expertise into it. And I think that's a good thing because if you could just ask it to do something in a sentence and it did it perfectly, that's what we get into scary territory. And we get into kind of that whole people talking about replacement and AI replacing us, which I think is kind of a, it's a media, the media love to write headlines about AI personas. Talk to anybody who uses AI regularly, talk to anybody who create AI. And it's not about replacement, it's about integrating human intelligence and artificial intelligence to get the best results. And I think as a teacher and what we do because our human intelligence when it comes to teacher isn't just human intelligence, it's emotional intelligence. It's the intelligence to be able to communicate with a group of young people. It's the intelligence to be able to take them on a journey and all of that that goes on. But then with this, it's like having an AI assistant that can help us be a bit more efficient. So I think always start with a tool like chat to you PT is kind of your main go to because you've got ultimate customization of it because you can literally just type in. No, I don't want that. I want this or yes, that good, but can you go into more detail on this point or can you self-reflect on that answer and give yourself a rating and then try to do better or and I've got a whole framework on how to talk these tools called the prepared framework and it's based on evidence as well and it's all communication methods. That's all it is. Yeah. Yeah. I actually love the prepared framework. I've seen you share it online. So I think we should mention it here in a moment. But first, I want to point out, I think it's really interesting how you talked about how this is the first time technology is essentially spoken are language, which is more of an adjustment than you think that would be intuitively. You think like, wouldn't it be great if the computer just spoke my language? And a reality it then kind of opens up all of the possibilities in a way that could be a little bit overwhelming to somebody who's never done it. So I think the downside to chat, GPT or cloud or co-pilot or any of those basic generative AI tools is that when you come to this blank screen and it's a blank chat with you and the generative AI, a lot of people are kind of like, what do I do? Right? I do. And I think you kind of alluded to this. You talk to it like you will talk to another human that you're learning how they operate and you're trying to get them to learn what you want from them. And so you really have to have this conversation with it. It never does the task the right way the first time and you realize the flaw in your prompt based on what it does. You're like, oh, I should have told it this. I should have told it. Oh, I didn't realize it would do this and I should tell it this. And yeah, I find when I use the tools that I'm not actually performing tasks any faster. A lot of the time, I'm just performing them more effectively, which is what efficiently means, right? To be as quick as possible, but also as effective as possible. And so I find that a task might take me the same exact amount of time when I do it with AI, but I do it so much better because I'm able to go like, this sentence right here, I need you to tweak that or I noticed you did it this way. Change this. And I like, I have these long conversations with AI now, getting to the thing that I probably didn't have the bandwidth to do independently myself. I could do it just with the AI. And so I think, I guess all of that is to say that I agree that it's amazing to have one of these frontier AI tools but it could be a little bit overwhelming to people who are new to it because you really are like, I miss just hitting menu buttons. Every other technology tool I've ever used, I just click the things and it does it. It's clear. You have a menu. When you go into most technology tools, you have a menu of what's possible when you go into chat GPT. You don't have a menu because it's pretty much everything. It could do just about everything you wanted to do if you prompt it well enough. There's no menu. We're literally ordering off of the menu. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you use a tech tool that has the menu of the list of functions and it's the tech company saying to you, this is what we think you need. Here you go. And if they've done their research and it's a good tool, the chances are it is what you need and it's really good. However, there's still limitations there, but like you say with chat GPT, it's not a tech company saying this is what we think you need. It's them going right. What do you think you need? It's the autonomy has put straight onto the user. And I sometimes compared to, let's say we got the most intelligent person in the world and you hired them to come and stand in your office for the day. What would you ask them? And I think for me it would be really difficult because it's actually would probably take me a few days preparation to think, well, what should I ask them? What might I ask that person so it's kind of destructive so that I can take it away and it can help me? And I think that's what we've got here. And I speak to countless teachers who will open a tool like chat GPT and just think, don't know what to do here. I don't know what to ask. I don't know. And I think that's where community comes into this, the importance of being around people and other teachers who are using these tools so you can get ideas from each other so you can suddenly share ideas and think, oh, I never actually thought about using it like that. I never thought about getting it to become a literary character in the first person so I could have a conversation with them. And then that's going to spark off a lot more ideas for you to go out. Well, maybe I could go down this route. And I think some of the people who are sharing the best content online when it comes to these tools and not necessarily people in education are just people who are experimented and pushing the boundaries of what we can ask it to do and then sharing it. And so I think when I talk about community, it might not necessarily be the people in your school or your district, but it might just be a group of people you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever it is, where you can just see what are they asking it to do and what are the content of these sharing and let it spark off some ideas? Yeah, I know I look at so many of those posts I see online and I'm like, whoa, I never thought of doing that, especially in the early days of Chatchee BT coming out. That's a really cool idea. And it's not that I'm not capable of that kind of idea or that kind of thinking we just really need to kind of crowdsource these kinds of ideas. It's the idea of the adjacent possible, which I first heard of in George Coros's book, The Innovator's Mindset, but he talks about how possibilities for how something evolves are impacted by the things that are adjacent to it. And so we really have to expose ourselves to other people's ideas. I think you get me a really cool idea, which is I think a staff leader, whether they're a tech coach or a principal or a head of school or whatever, a good tactic I think would be to have maybe a weekly email or something like that where they share one way, one of the staff members have used AI because they need to be hearing what they're doing. So your idea of using AI to be a person from literature talking to you in the first person, some people wouldn't have thought of that. And so somebody shares that and you go, "Oh, wow, that's neat." And the science teacher goes like, "Oh, wow, I could have it be a plant doing photosynthesis in the social study teachers thinking of, I could have it be a historical character." And the math teacher is like, "Whoa, that's a really neat idea. I could have it be an equation and all kinds of stuff." And so their ideas expand outward from the other people's ideas. And that's happening with me right now. So when I was thinking of that, I was thinking of getting it to be actual humans and whether they'd be fictional or non-fictional. But when you said there, actually getting it to be a plant, and like a spark went off on my head and I was like, "Oh, man, why didn't I thought about that before? You could have a plant that explains what's going on inside of itself during photosynthesis." And then I suddenly, while you were speaking, I was listening, by the way, but at the same time, I was thinking, "Why not? You could get it to be a fly in the wall within a historical scenario." So yeah, even just having this conversation has sparked off things for me, which is making me feel like I can't wait to jump on a chat to you PT and see what it comes up with. I love the idea of a fly on the wall. That's an amazing idea, but I think this is case in point that we have to share, we have to talk about it, we have to think about it because it's a blank page because it could do essentially anything we wanted to do, but we have to first think of the thing. Yeah. We need to spread those ideas in here from other people. And that builds the excitement around it too. I was thinking earlier when you were talking about how the other tech tools, they pick what the tool could do for you, right? They're predicting what you're going to use it for an AI. Really doesn't do that. It allows you to do that or reminding me that Steve Jobs quote back in the day and it was a little slightly longer quote but the key part was he said our job is
figure out what they're going to want before they do. And so he'd said when they were making the iPhone, when they were making the iPod, they were trying to predict what humans would like and would want before we actually were asking for it. And that's the model that tech companies are normally going with, right? But now AI has kind of flipped that script where open AI didn't need to figure this out before us. Google didn't need to figure this out before us. They don't need to predict what we want. They've built a tool that can essentially just do it and learn and conversation from us. Yeah, absolutely. And it's tough. I mean, it really is difficult. Just sitting down in front of chat GPT doesn't automatically mean you're going to come across gold. You're going to have amazing ideas. And it's going to do some amazing things for you. And I sense that frustration in a lot of schools, I visit. I do sense a bit of frustration that some people are doing some amazing things with it. And some people just don't know what to do, even though they've tried it, even though they've played around with it. And I think, although technology is fantastic in that, it's not telling you how to use it. That agency of that is now on us to know how to use it requires skill. And it's going to require something more of what we teach our students as well in terms of lifelong learning skills and how to question and how to evaluate and how to critically analyze and how to use maybe something like design thinking ideas to work with an AI to get the best results possible. Because we can't just sit in front of it and expect magic to happen. We've got to bring skill to the table as well. Yeah. And those conversations, I think, are really key. I think it's interesting as you say that because I do a lot of work in personalized learning. And in personalized learning, we want students to have agency. The problem is you can't just go to a kid like you have agency make some choices. You can have a voice. Yeah, learning. Like, pick how you want to learn this. They're not ready to. We have to build that agency and then we have to build the capacity to act with agency. And so it's kind of the same with these technology tools where we really have to build our skill at using them before we could use them. Some people, I'm sure, the first time they turned on chat, GPT, had magnificent ideas. But for me, I was like, write a song about me or write a story about a guy named Jake. And like, and the ideas were kind of stale. And I really needed to let those ideas percolate and hear from other people and see those things being shared on Twitter and see those things being shared at conferences that go like, "These things I could do." So let's focus in on those educators who maybe are new to AI, kind of understand what it is. They'd love to have it make them more efficient, but they just don't know where to start. So I think to me, there's two different pathways. Let me see what you think of these two different pathways. And then we'll go from there. The first are the tools that are more like the old school technology tools that we're familiar with that tell us what they could do. They have the menu buttons, right? So that's the first path. And those are tools like Magic School, School AI. They're wonderful tools. They do some really cool things. But the menu is already built and the frontiers not wide open on those tools, right? They could do the tasks, but it's kind of already built. So do you agree with that being the first kind of way they can go? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's probably a bit more nuanced in how I was described before as well. And it's not limited to certain function. Actually, it also might open up to new ways of using it. So I'm thinking like something like school AI. Somebody else has kind of built a product around it and so you can only use it in a certain way. For example, creating a bespoke curriculum bot that your students are going to talk to. But then that what it'll also allow you to do is share a QR code with your students. Your students can enter and you can monitor your students to safeguard them. So I think some of these tools are actually amazing in their own right and actually can do more than what actually it be. It does. Yeah, I think these are great tools. So this is one great path as a tryout tools like this. I think magic school shows you what is possible, right? It's kind of already built to do it, but it shows what's possible. The same thing. School AI has some things that it's already built to do. And it lets you see, let's you get those ideas of what you could do. It's kind of similar to you going back to your guitar and starting off by taking a guitar lesson. You didn't really have freedom over how you played the guitar. You played the guitar the way the chords of that song and the lesson were played, but it allowed you to see what was possible, right? And so these tools like it was possible. And then I do want to point out what you said there too. That both of these tools have some really great kind of teacher features where they allow you to monitor what the kid's doing with it. They allow you to build these walled gardens for the kids to use AI within. And they allow you to see. Like you said that chat bot or that curriculum bot that you could make in school AI, you can go in and see what did my students say to the bot? What did the bot say back? How did this respond? And so number one, you could police or how they're using it to make sure they're using it appropriately. But number two, you can also peek into their learning experience to be able to give them some feedback and support them. So I think there's a lot of power with these tools, not just in the fact that they already have the ideas built in for what the teacher might do with it, but they also have some really cool tools built into them. Are there any other tools that you would put in with those? Yeah, I think my school's amazing in terms of getting teachers used to using AI. I love how they've gone down the route as well of not even using the word AI. And I quite like that. And when I'm doing training with schools, it's kind of the tool I start with sometimes, especially in a workshop. And I say to them, well, this is something you can share with your colleagues who are apprehensive or just the thought of AI goes over their heads. And you can just say to them, look, you go to this website, you click this button and generate a lesson plan for you or generate some questions for you or anything. And I think it comes in really handy. And I know if someone's listening to this thing in magic school, there's a lot more than that. It does do a lot more than that. But I think also it's an entry tool for AI, which I really like. Yeah, schooling AI we've mentioned, there's a couple of other tools I tend to show a lot of. I like to show it's a tool called DIFFIT and it's diffit.mexdifit.me. And it's just a fantastic tool to forget in kind of the structure of a lesson in terms of the basic content for a lesson. So you just type in the theme of what your teacher or you can upload a resource if you've already got an existing resource. You say what grade the students are at. And then what it'll do is it'll just give you a series of contents of, for example, an adapted reading passage, which is tailored towards the reading age of the grade level that you've put in. It will give you some assessment material in terms of multiple choice questions, long form answers, short form answer questions. It'll give you some keyword definitions that correlate to the reading passage, some images, and so on. So it gives you kind of like that skeleton of a lesson, which then you have to obviously apply and use in a dynamic way. It's also got a great feature where you can apply those bits to the content to pedagogically based tasks. When it lets you download them as a workbook or as a PowerPoint or as a Google slide document as well or as a PDF, which is a really nice feature. I like that one. It's very basic. You don't have to do much, but you get a lot in return. Another one I really love, and I think is developing all the time, but it's at the moment, I think it's only available for people who are using Google workspace, is a tool called Brisk. And it's a Chrome extension just sits within your browser. And it has two main features. It has a feature where let's say you're reading an article and you think this article is going to be brilliant for my students. They're studying about this. It'll be great to give them some content or teach them about this. If you press the Brisk icon, it will take that web page and allow you to do so much with it. So from very simple, change the reading level of it. So reproduce that article at a certain reading age. To it will turn it into a Google form quiz. It will turn it into a resource. It will create a lesson planet around that article. Lots of really cool ways you can transform that content. And then, kind of the flip side of the functionality of this tool, which again is phenomenal when you see it, is let's say your students have done some work in a Google doc or Google slides. You click the Brisk icon. You select the rubric or the mark scheme or the criteria for that task. It will then mark and give feedback to the student of all their work. And it does that in a few different ways. It'll put the comments in the document or it'll put the comments in actual comment boxes on the right hand side. And it was interesting. I was shown this tool recently. It's probably the top school in Scotland. And I think one of the two teachers got a bit annoyed at me when I showed them this tool. And it probably rightfully so, but their argument was, well, this is our job. Our job is to mark, is to provide student feedback, is to understand the progress of students so that we can design the next learning experience and so on. And I agreed with them, but I don't think that's what this does. I think for me, there's two sides of given feedback. There is the side, which is very technical. It's literally where you go, is this hit in the rubric? And therefore getting the grades that's needed. And I think that's what this does really well. You still want to read over it. And I called one of the chapters in the AI class room, outsource your doing, not your thinking. Because you still want to make sure that your thinking is still at the center of this. But also, it doesn't replace that side of feedback that's personal, that shows the student you care that you're in control of their.
learn and that you're going to help them with their next steps that the kind of life change in stuff really. So it doesn't replace it. That still needs to be added in as well. But it's kind of just compare it to the rubric and given some feedback. It's fantastic. And so yes, so breast, different magic school, school AI. Another one I really like for creating presentations is a tool called Gamma, which is JMMA.A. And a bit like how I mentioned with Diffit, you either put a resource in or you just search for a theme of what you're doing and it will create a full presentation for you from scratch, which you can then download as a PowerPoint and convert to slides if you slide. And it's a great way to start. If you're like me, a presentation is quite personal, especially for a class because it has to take into account their previous learner and also where you want to put the assessment in and all of that. So again, it's not going to be 100%, but it might save you 30% or might save you 40% and really help you be a bit more efficient. So yeah, those are kind of my top tools at the moment. Yeah, that's an amazing list. Yeah, I think I like what you said there, that quote, outsource you're doing, not your thinking. I think that's so important with everything we do with AI. It can't really do the thinking as well as we can. And we shouldn't let it do the thinking. We need to let it help us with the doing part so that we can be more efficient, which is our goal. And that's why it's not going to replace teachers because it can't do the thinking the way we can. That needs to be us doing the thinking. What we need to do is help it help us be more efficient. And so I think when those teachers are talking about using brisk to do their feedback, anything that auto grades, like we've had technology tools that auto grade for years, we had those scantrons, the machines, you put the multiple choice tests through and I praise it for you. We've had those for 50 years. I don't even know how long it's been that they've been around me longer than that. And it's not bad if a machine is doing the grading. What's bad is if we take the students work, we put it through the machine, quote unquote, and then give that to the student without ever looking at it, right? We need to use the tool to do the doing of the grading or the marking. And then we need to use it to give the kid the feedback. We need to use it to understand their progress towards mastery. We needed to use it to understand where they're at in their journey. We need to help then support the kids as they grow, use the technology, use the AI to do the doing. And then us do the thinking about what does the kid need next? Where is the kid? Is the kid ready for the next phase of their learning or do they need some kind of remediation on the skill? So we need to do some thinking based around it. So we let the tools make the job easier for us. But then we still have to do the thinking that goes along with it. And I think all I think it was five different tools you named there. All five of these different tools do a really nice job of introducing teachers to what's possible with AI by still kind of having that quote unquote menu of options that they could use with it. I think I hadn't thought of this until this conversation, but it's really like cognitive load theory. We think about when we're doing something new, there are so many different elements to what our brain has to think about. So when we first use AI, a teacher, whoever it is, has to think about how do I use the AI? And the task that I'm trying to do with the AI. Whereas if we start with one of these five tools that have some prebuilt options in them, they can come in and they don't have to think about what they're going to do with it or how to use it because the tools doing that for them. They could just think about their pedagogy or their curriculum or whatever it is. And so it reduces the number of things to teach us to think about. Whereas if we're using something like chat, GPT, we have to do kind of both parts of the thinking. That's a huge power. But it also for somebody new to it can be kind of difficult. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're at the start of this process. Now often compared to the late 90s when it comes to the internet and kind of the explosion of different types of software. And so I think it's about taking that cautious approach and just going, right, well, let's just try one or two. Let's see, can we trust the tool? Can we trust the people behind it? Is it a Biden by our standards in terms of privacy and security? Is it actually having an impact on our teachers? If it's a tool that you use directly with students, is actually having an impact on learning and really going through strategically what we want it to do for us. And I suppose we all do that. Every school, every college of university does that already. And it's kind of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because the shiny new technologies come along, which let's be honest is amazing. But at the end of the day, it's still a platform. It's still a bit of software. It's still a tool to use. And let's not lose our heads over this. Let's still put it by the same standards we would any other tool. And maybe we can narrow it down just to a few tools that actually might be really, really handy. That might be really helpful and we'll stick by our standards of what we want in our school or college or university. And I've got a website called AIEducator.Tools. And that's the web address AIEducator.Tools were kind of brought together a few hundred different tools out there where you can search them, you can check their privacy policies, you can look to see if they're paid or free or free me. You can look at their functionality and what they do if you're looking for a place to start here. I think if you just start on the journey, maybe just start with the tools we've just mentioned. But if you're thinking actually let's say what's going on out there in terms of maybe some more bespoke or more niche educational AI, check out AIEducator.Tools. Yeah, great resource. I've exported a little bit before and I need to go back to it and I love that you have that out there and you're sharing that so the people can see that. I think one of the best things you mentioned there is the privacy policies being on there because that's something we really have to keep in mind. And so thank you for curating those for people on there. Okay, so I don't want to take up your whole day for this interview, Dan, but I do want to point out so we talked about there's kind of two pathways. One is try a specific tool that already has specific tasks kind of built into it and just try those out because that'll help you. Number one, it's going to be help you do things efficiently and do awesome things. Number two, it's going to help you see what's possible with AI that you might do outside of those tools with other generative AI. So let's say we go, okay, I've used magic school or I've used Diffit or I've used Brisk and now I see what I could potentially do with AI. I'm going to now go to this other thing that's not in their menu of options. So I'm going to hop in a chat GPT to do this. And so now we're ready to try out one of these frontier tools as you as you called them earlier that can kind of do anything, right? So if I'm doing that, you mentioned your prepared acronym. Again, I don't want to take up your whole day with this, but if you would give us kind of the elevator pitch, the quick summary of what prepared is because I've seen you share this online. I absolutely love this acronym. I think it's a really good way to think about how we prompt AI. Yeah, and I'll go through it, but don't think that when you're chatting with chat GPT or Google Gemini that you have to use all of this. I think this is just a set of levers that in your conversation with a tool like that, if you're not getting it to be as good as you want it to be, and it's just a few different levers that you may want to pull in order to get a better response. And I think of this as a funnel. Remember, we were talking about earlier the free version of chat GPT, 300 billion words worth of information. We need to get these things to focus for us. And that's where the quality will come from, it'll come from focus. So this some levers that we can pull in order to get that focus. So prepared to an acronym. So the first page is proposed. It's essentially telling it what you want it to do, introducing the idea to it. The next one is role. So the R is role. And sounds quite bizarre at first, but actually getting it to act in a certain role. So if you're getting it to do a lesson plan on, I don't know, the earthquakes, you might want to say to it that it's a professional with a PhD in earthquakes and also is amazing at designing good learning experiences. And like we said before, you might even want to go to the extent of getting it to actually be a certain person. Now, why give it a role quite simply? We're just trying to get it to focus on some contextual knowledge so that it can be more specific. And tools like chat GPT are trained to please. So if you ask it to be a person, it will use that knowledge to give you answers that you need. So it's just kind of another angle to get it to focus on some specific content. The next bit is a bit of an umbrella term, which is just explicit instructions and it's just a way to say, tell it everything it needs to know. The amount of times I work in workshops with teachers and they say, well, it didn't do this. It didn't, it didn't do this the way I wanted it to do and so on. And I think the cell, the most simple reply in it, yeah, exactly is, did you tell it that you wanted it to do it? It can't read your mind. You need to be really explicit with it. And I think, for me, that category comes into four different parts. The first bit is just general instructions. So for example, if it's a lesson plan, you need to tell it things like how long is the lesson, how many students do they have access to iPads and any general information that it needs to know. And then it comes down to the three pillars that I mentioned before. So subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and knowledge of the actual students. So tell it what you need to focus on in terms of content. Tell her if you get into the pedagogical
task or something like a lectin plan, tell it what pedagogy is you use and you might have to go into detail with it. And number three, give it some information about the actual students you're going to be teaching if it's going to be something for students. Now obviously we don't give a personal information about students but let's say you've got three students who are dyslexic, you might want to say three my students are dyslexic, could you make this more accessible to them as well? So given that that specific information that has those explicit instructions and then the next P is presentations or how do you want the information presented to you? So that could be format and there's not with these tools, especially chat you retain, there's not much format options but you could ask for headings to write in a table to write in paragraphs, chat you can waffle on quite a bit, it can say in a paragraph what it just needs to say in a few words. So get sent to it right in a concise way and concise bullet points for example, you can also give it a toner voice if you want it to be like Uber professional and how it speaks or familiar. And also things like if it's a resource you might want to tell it the region age too. So that's prep, the thing with prep is and that's how this model started really this framework. It's very transactional, you're essentially saying to the AI do this, be this person, include this, present it like this, do it for me, it's a transactional approach but actually most of the research suggests that it's conversational, it's collaboration that gets the best results. So I extended it to the prepared framework based on this bit of research that would come out at the end of November last year. And so the AI is essentially asked so you get your response and then you say to it ask me some questions that will help you write a better response, write a better resource, write a better lesson plan whatever it is. So you're putting the agency back onto the AI and saying right, self-reflect, look through what you've created and figure out what more information you need in order for this to be an amazing resource and then ask me those questions. And what I like to do is I like to just very quickly say right, write these in concise bullet points, these questions and order them from which questions are going to have the most impact to the least and I might answer a few of those questions and some of them are kind of moments where you go, why didn't I tell it that already? It's like, you get it to write a lesson plan and then it says well what are the objectives, what are you trying to achieve, you're like actually yeah I should have told you that, that's a really obvious one. So it's just a nice way to get it to reflect the next one is an R which is for rate and you want to just say to it when you're coming towards the end just say to it something like what would you rate this response or this resource or this lesson plan on a scale of 1 to 10 and that's not the important bit. Chaturgy T likes to give itself 7, 8 or 9 out of 10, always does it loves at home work but you that's not the important bit. The important bit is what you say to it next and what you do is you say something like in a table, present to me the criteria or the rubric or the mark scheme that you have used to come up with this rating and it will give you the rubric that it's used and then you can look at that and as a teacher for example you could say well actually that doesn't match my standard, I've got a much higher standard than that and then you edit it and they say to it actually for this criteria this is what a top rate answer or a top rate resource would look like for me and when you've had that conversation then you simply just say to it now I've updated the rubric, try for a 10 out of 10 this time and it causes design to please it will then take on that on board and go again and it will match more of your standard. Now sometimes when I say that people get worried and think oh my goodness am I going to do this every time I use Chaturgy T not at all. Once you put the work in just put the work in once and I think especially if you've got to produce a really nice rubric table for a lesson plan, it's copy and paste that into I like to use a Google doc and I just keep a bank of things that work with Chaturgy T so I'll copy and paste that table in and then next time I'm getting it to do that specific task from the very get go copy and paste that table back in and say use this as your rubric and so you're not reinventing the wheel every time so the e so now work to the e is emotions now this research paper found that if you use this phrase specifically my job depends on this so you're appealing to its emotions even though it doesn't have emotions you get a 10% on average better quality answer and I think it's just because it is it sounds bizarre but I think all that's happening there is your rays and the sticks and because they're designed to to want to please you it'll try even harder and the last one is D which is diversity which is one I've added recently which is we all know AI can be biased it's really easy to look for the bias that we're conscious of and eliminated however what about the bias we're not conscious of so I suggest saying something to Chaturgy T at the end of the process like are there any underrepresented voices in this resource or in this lesson planner whatever you've created with it and then see what it says and then you could work with it and get it to integrate those voices back into the resource yeah so like I say don't think every time you sit down with Chaturgy T or Google Gemini that you have to go through that whole process start just by having a chat because that's what they're designed for but then if you think to yourself actually this is not as good as it could be maybe pull on a few of those levers and not necessarily in that order you might want to go straight for the ask bit you might want to go straight for the rate bit how whatever works for you it's it's some techniques that you can just pepper in there to to try and get a more specific response I could see myself using the prep portion every time always doing PR EMP and then deciding the AR E and D which parts I'm going to use to get me to the level that I need to be and I kind of do use PR E P like before before I saw your acronym I was like that's kind of what I was starting to do with some of those things and then I was like oh yeah there it is yeah and it's because that's what you do isn't it I go back to what we was talking about earlier like let's say you've got an intern working with you in your school and you're asking them to do something you do propose what you're asking them to do you expect that person to take on a role because you're in this professional environment you be explicit with your instructions because you need to tell them what to do and then you might also tell them whatever they're doing for you how you want it to be presented back to you and so it's a natural thing it's what we do and a lot of us won't even think about this we'll just incorporate into what we do anyway it's just a way to get us to think about it and to drive the point home that those techniques that we use with other humans in a professional situation can also be used with chat you be able to use it for professional situations yeah yeah that's great stuff I so I think you've kind of nailed the two different paths that people need to go on as teachers to leverage AI to be more efficient and those paths are using one of those five tools that you mentioned that have a menu of options for what they could do to get exposure to some different possibilities the other is using one of those frontier AI tools you mentioned like chat GPT keeping those three pillars you mentioned that we have in mind in perspective our knowledge or subject or knowledge of pedagogy or knowledge of our students to use those tools and then using that prepared framework to prompt it really effectively and we talk about prompting a lot but you're reminding them to have a conversation with it to converse with it not just prompt but converse to ask to you know communicate with it with the bot to really get the result we result that I want out of it so some really good tips for folks looking to get more efficient through using AI tools um Dan I wish I could have you talk for like three more hours about this I appreciate so much that you've taken so much time for this because we've gone way beyond we said we're going to use for this but it was just such good stuff I just want to keep talking about it so I apologize and I think people are going to feel like they want to keep hearing more we can't do that so what they're going to want to do for sure is check out your website the a i educator dot i o check you out on social media on on x at the a i educator x but also check out the book so give us a real quick to there's one out already which is the a i classroom and there's one coming soon correct yes the a i classroom is out there and still very much relevant to year old but we try to make it something that would be still relevant for a few years and it's still very much as goes through the the prep framework has chapters on what skills are we going to need as teachers as educators as students as leaders and i try we called it the ultimate guide because if you're a school it covers a lot of what you need to know right now so it's quite a big book it has a lot in there that's done really well it's been a bestseller it's used by people all over the world which is amazing and I'm also in the next few months or maybe by the time this comes out it shouldn't be too far off going to be bringing the book out called infinite education the four methods to create a future with a i in education so it's quite a practical book i've been working with schools colleges universities over the last 12 to 18 months helping them strategically integrate a i and build a five year plan for their organization around this technology so it's taken the learning from that and i've put it into a nice four method approach and it sort of addresses the why why do we need to strategically think about this and that's essentially because for me stress
strategy is essentially leadership in the future. So if we want to continue to lead in education, or we want to start leading in education, then we need a strategy to deal with what's coming because we're still in the early days of this technology. So it goes through how you can start that process and how you can start to scope your organization and what's going on out there, how to shape what you want to do, how to influence your organization and how to align your organization on a future ready strategy. And yeah, trophy will be out soon. - That sounds amazing. So folks, definitely check out the website, check out Dan on social media, check out the book, the AI classroom, and check out that new book when it comes out. And also check out Dan has a course, the AI Premium Strategy Accelerator. I'll make sure links to all of the things are on the show notes that you guys can get access to them. Dan, thanks so much for being here with us today. We really, really appreciate it. Funks today, it's been a pleasure. (upbeat music) And that wraps our chat with Dan Fitzpatrick. Wasn't he incredible? So much good wisdom, so much cool stuff. The prepared acronym alone, I'm going to use that and then it's recommendations of five specific tools. And just a blast to talk to, he was great. But I'm curious, do you have any alternative strategies or tools for completing teacher tasks more efficiently? So we talked about magic school, brisk, Diffit, school AI, and gamma.app. So those were five tools that we talked about that we thought were nice easy tools for educators who were new to AI, especially, to start off with, to start using AI to benefit from the power of AI and maybe to see the possibilities of going a little bit deeper. So do you have any other ones? Do you disagree with any of those? Do you have any recommendations like a glowing recommendation of one of those five? And then we talked about using what he called Frontier apps, chat, GPT, Gemini, Claude, things like that. And he talked about some strategies like the prepared framework and like those three different lenses that he talked about. Do you have any additional recommendations to go with that? If you do, or if you just have some thoughts of what Dan and I discussed, here's your chance to share them. Here's your chance to share them with me, to share them with Dan, to share them with the other people who are listening right now. You just need to head over to the padlet at eduducttap.com/padlet, or you can leave me a voice message on SpeakPipe at eduducttap.com/speakpipe. You can find both of those links in the show notes. All you do is go there and record a message with your feedback. The thing we missed, the thing you agree with, the thing you'd add on, the thing from this episode that really helps you whatever. This is your chance to share your voice with the other duct tapers who are listening. And I would really love to hear what you're thinking. And don't forget, next week, if I edit the podcast fast enough, I'll be featuring some of your insights right here on the podcast. So make sure to tune in. I hope it's a week from now. If not, it'll be two weeks from now. Whenever it is, make sure you're subscribed to the show. So when that next episode drops with all of those insights, yours and other listeners, you'll get to hear them. And as we talked about earlier, some of you will be winning a free copy of my book for sharing on that duct tape or share space. But before we sign off for today, let's take a quick look at some EdTech news that's caught my attention. First off, Canva recently got a glow up with a new homepage and the new editing experience. You can now streamline your workflow, customize your workspace, and collaborate more effectively with your team. Also, Canva just launched courses, making it easy to create learning materials from your designs. I'm wondering if this could be a new way to present informational learners. I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm just wondering, like if we could create learning materials on Canva courses, using our designs, can we use those with students? Could they be a tool to use in a blended learning kind of environment? Because now with Canva courses, you could turn presentations and videos and more in the self-paced lessons the students can follow and track. I think this has some promise, folks. I haven't tried it yet, but if you do, I'd love to hear what you think. And finally, I alluded to this recently, but I wanted to make it clear, Padlet now lets you add videos in comments. So previously, you could record a video on a Padlet and then people could comment on it with text. Now they can add a video or whatever, as a post on Padlet and you could respond back to it with videos. I think this new feature could be a game changer in your classroom, especially if you're looking for a replacement for Flip. I've tried it and it's easy, easy. By the way, those three stories that we just talked about, links will be in the show notes, so that you can go get some more information. And if you're trying to do those things out, I'd love to hear about it, reach out and tell me about it. (upbeat music) Well, just like how Mr. Belvedere ends his cleaning cycle when his dustbin is full, it's time for me to end this episode. I sure do love that Rumba Automation Magic, and I also love the Automation Magic from today's sponsor, Pfizer, which makes managing school devices a breeze. From sending out repair updates to reminding students to return their Chromebooks, Pfizer handles it all. Just like Mr. Belvedere handles those potato chip proms that I've dropped on the floor. For special pricing and some awesome swag, head over to visor.cloud/jink. That's vi-z-o-r.cloud/jake. Trust me, Pfizer will keep your devices as clean and organized, as Mr. Belvedere keeps my floors.
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