What I have Learned about Artificial Intelligence this Semester

One of my goals this semester was to figure out ways to use AI as a helpful tool for teaching. As a result, my students have experimented with AI in both the Technology for STEM Educators course and the Assessment in STEM Education course.

When it comes to lesson planning as a teacher, we need to be realistic. Teachers aren’t going to create detailed multi-page lesson plans for each course every day. And there will be some days that they will be stressed because they don’t have a plan for the next class period.  During these stressful times as a teacher, I think that it would be good to use AI to come up with a basic lesson plan. After exploring some AI tools, one of our favorites was Gemini. It isn’t one of the AI tools designed specifically for teachers, but it does a very good job when given explicit directions. We used it to create a detailed lesson plan and also discovered that it is great for creating rubrics for summative assessments, such as projects, presentations, or other non-exam assessments.

However, it should be noted that there are a lot of specific AI tools designed for teachers, such as MagicSchool, Eduaide, and Brisk Teaching, which has a Chrome extension. Since these are designed specifically for teachers, they offer a lot of tools that could be used besides lesson plans and rubrics. These include but are not limited to presentation makers, quiz makers, state practice tests, newsletter generators, and letters of recommendation generators. We didn’t explore all of these tools as we focused on lesson plans and rubrics. If you do experiment with any of them, let me know what you think and the pros and cons of the tool.

One tool that an alumna, Sydney Stapleton, pointed me to was Formative. She uses it a lot for creating assessments in her classes. I created a Formative account and decided to have it create a quiz for my Technology students on mean, median, and mode. It has a lot of options to choose from, such as low, medium, and high difficulty or short, medium, or long quizzes. If you want it to grade the questions, then you would select multiple choice, true/false, or multiple selection problems. You can also have short answer questions, but you need to grade those by hand. After students have completed the assessment, the teacher can see a lot of details on which problems were missed and their scores on the assessment. If you like the questions, you can publish the quiz to a library for future use. I was very impressed with it until I asked it to create a quiz on similar triangles and I noticed that one of the True/False questions had the wrong answer. I was able to fix it, but be sure that all answers are correct before using one as an assessment in your class.

This past week I wanted to do something different in my History of Math class. I had already created a PowerPoint but that sounded boring so I thought it would be fun if I could take the PowerPoint and have AI create a Kahoot. I started exploring that option, but wasn’t sure it would work with my free account so I went to Quizizz. After logging in, in the middle of the page, there is a banner that says “Create with Quizizz” and below it are various options. You can upload a file with the content and it will create a quiz. You can even create from YouTube or a link. So I uploaded a PDF version of my PowerPoint slides and within 5 minutes, Quizizz had created 60 multiple-choice questions covering the material on the slides. I didn’t want that many so I deleted several until I had 36 questions. Quizizz lets you use various ways to engage the students—they can do the questions at their own pace during class or you could assign them as homework or you can play a game, similar to Kahoot. I elected for the last option. At the beginning of class, I told the students what I had done and after playing the game, we determined that 2 of the 36 questions were not good, but the rest seemed reasonable. They all agreed it was more fun than just going through PowerPoint slides. I suspect that I will use this AI tool again.

One thing that I haven’t explored with AI is to have it write questions for an exam. I think that the best use of this tool could be creating another version of a test with similar questions. For example, you could upload your test and then ask it to create free-response questions. Hopefully, it would make ones of similar difficulty, but one would have to go over them thoroughly. I think I may encourage colleagues to try this for classes where they have to have 2 versions of an exam.

While I am not an expert in AI, I have learned a lot more about it this semester. It is here to stay and I want to learn how to use it for productive purposes and share that with my future math teachers.

Building Thinking Classrooms

Definition: A building thinking classroom helps change the way students are learning. Students are encouraged to learn and explore new techniques while being guided by a teacher. Students learn vertically on a whiteboard where they can erase problems and learn by proving definitions. This is mostly done in group work while changing groups frequently to work with different perspectives. The biggest kicker of this type of classroom is NO NOTES; there are barely any notes for students to take because they learn by doing or struggling through questions. 

Pros: This approach to learning math presents a lot of positive areas of growth for students. For one, it encourages students to problem-solve and critically think as they work through unfamiliar problems with little initial direction. It also gives students many opportunities to collaborate with classmates, and not just their friends. Switching up the learning groups allows students to see and share different methods for solving a problem and helps them create a network of classmates who they can work alongside. This method is also very hands on. It gives the classroom to the students and allows them to directly do the work to learn the material. Finally, students get to work through questions at their own pace and ask questions as they arise.  

Cons: The biggest con of having a building-thinking classroom is no notes for the students to look back on and study. Studying for exams is a big adaptation concerning what a student needs to do and how they must be diligent and proactive to take some notes or pictures in class to study with in the future. Another downside of building thinking classrooms is how to best give exams or tests to students. Since they are not learning on pencil and paper, how do we as teachers adapt that to taking an exam on paper? This is especially challenging since they are learning and working in a group to collaborate with peers on what the best process would be; do you always do group exams? Is it possible to give an exam verbally or on a whiteboard?  

Would you use it? As a future teacher, it is important to consider different teaching methods like building thinking classrooms and whether you would use them in your classroom. There is a lot of value in trying nontraditional teaching methods and seeing how students respond to them. Personally, I would not want to exclusively use the building thinking classrooms teaching method as students often struggle to adjust to prepare for exams under this model. However, there would be great benefits in implementing this style into my classroom for certain days and lessons. This would allow students to collaborate and stretch their ability to think through concepts. Yet I would also want there to be times that students could take notes or complete work independently. Finding a way to use a mix of the building thinking classroom style and more traditional classroom styles could allow students and teachers to have the best of both worlds.  

Written by Jacie Staedtler, and Nicole Swanson

Adapting To Changes in Education

The way students learn is constantly changing, and teachers must be able to adapt to those changes. Just because your teaching style was effective last year doesn’t necessarily mean that it will carry over to the next year. As educators, we will have to continue developing our teaching skills and styles to become the best teachers we can. Thus, it’s time all teachers start looking into other options that may best help their students learn. So, we will talk about some of the options out there and explain the benefits that go with each one. 

One style of teaching that would benefit the classroom is a flipped classroom. According to Harvard University, a flipped classroom is when students cover the material by themselves before class. When the students get to class it opens lecture time for deeper intellectual discussions on the material, instead of spending most of the class in a lecture. Some of the benefits that a flipped classroom provides is that it allows students to learn at their own pace and it increases and encourages collaboration between students. Since you are not spending important class time lecturing, you can commit it to activities and projects that can increase students' understanding of important topics and subjects.

Another style of teaching that could benefit classrooms is feedback formative assessment. According to Stanford University, feedback formative assessment is an assessment you give to a student at the beginning of the semester and see where your students need to improve. Then, as a teacher, you would teach the content where your students need to improve the most. By the end of the semester, you would give them a test similar to the one at beginning of the semester to see how much your students improved. This is a great way for a teacher to know what you need to teach your students to get the most out of your class. 

The next style of teaching that is useful is active learning. Active learning is when a teacher puts students in situations where they are questioned and uses discussion to help improve their understanding of the material. This can also involve other active structures that get students involved like doing debates, group work, and other forms of discussion. Some benefits include processing new material through thinking, writing, talking, and problem-solving. It also can help create personal meaning when working on activities, which can help increase motivation in students. Also, from a teacher’s perspective, it may help them understand the student’s thought process and how they think through problems. These are just a couple of the benefits of active learning, but overall, it’s supposed to help students retain information better. This is another option that will hopefully get your students more engaged in the material. 

The last teaching style that we'll discuss is project-based learning. Project-based learning allows students to develop their creative skills and work hands-on when solving a problem. This style of teaching has students identify the problem and slowly develop their solution. Now I’m sure many teachers have heard of and even used this style of teaching, but we tend to see less project-based learning in the higher grade levels. I’m not sure why that is because it is still very beneficial. For example, in one of my college classes, I was told to create an art project in Desmos. With this, I was able to experiment with Desmos and develop a new skill. Not only did I learn how to use Desmos, but it allowed the creative side of me to come out and just have fun learning. Instead of dreading the project, I found it difficult to stop trying to add more details to my art project. So, what I’m trying to say is that project-based learning is a beneficial teaching style for all grade levels. 

Now this isn’t to say that there aren’t other teaching styles to try. The goal of this is to illustrate that there are other options if you are struggling to get your students to understand and stay engaged with the material. Students and the way they learn will continue to change, and teachers must be able to adapt to these new changes. Every class in every year will be different and students will have different ways of learning. It can be challenging to change what you're doing, but at the end of the day, remember what your purpose is as a teacher. Your purpose is to teach your students to the best of your ability and hopefully to give them a brighter future.  

Marcus Winter and Tanner Rakebrandt

References: 

https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/active-collaborative-learning/active-learning 

https://www.bu.edu/ctl/ctl_resource/project-based-learning-teaching-guide/#:~:text=in%20your%20classes.-,Introduction,problems%2C%20commonly%20in%20small%20teams.