Authentic Lessons for 21st Century Learning

Meet Your New AI Assistant

Jared Whaley, Matthew McDonald, Erin Finley | Published: March 1st, 2024 by K20 Center

Summary

The Meet Your New AI Assistant session focuses on the use of AI technology to enhance teaching practices that increase student engagement and academic performance. In addition, participants will explore ways to use AI technology to streamline administrative tasks and increase their capacity to focus on student learning. Participants will experience authentic activities integrating AI technology in the creation of a classroom activity.

Essential Question

How can educators effectively integrate AI technology to enhance teaching practices and streamline administrative tasks?

Learning Goals

  • Explore AI education tools to assist in lesson planning

  • Incorporate AI technology to assist with classroom administration tasks and increase student engagement

Snapshot

Engage

Use the Collective Brain Strategy Dump with menti.com to determine how teachers spend their work time outside of teaching.

Explore

Use the Why-lighting strategy to analyze the best practices for safely and ethically incorporating AI technology.

Explain

Play Choice Board Bingo using magicschool.ai to examine and discuss the various classroom applications for AI technology.

Extend

Lesson Plan Race using diffit.com to demonstrate AI technology’s ability to help with lesson plans and to differentiate reading levels for students.

Evaluate

Participate in a Critique the Bot strategy, where AI outputs are evaluated for mistakes and concerns.

Materials List

  • Session Slides (attached)

  • Best Practices handout (attached; one per participant)

  • AI Glossary handout (attached; one per participant)

  • Choice Board Bingo handout (attached; one per small group)

  • Critique the Bot handout (attached; one per participant)

  • Pen/pencil

  • Highlighters

  • Personal Devices

Engage

5 Minute(s)

Use the attached Session Slides and display slide 2. Introduce yourself and welcome participants to the session. Transition to slide 3 and introduce participants to the Collective Brain Dump Strategy.

Once participants have had time to review how to participate, direct them to menti.com via the QR code, or they can navigate to the site and enter the number code on the slide. Ask participants to answer the prompt, Outside of teaching, what takes up most of your work time? Give participants a few minutes to answer the question, then facilitate a group discussion about the most common answers. Share the session objectives on slide 4 and essential question on slide 5.

Explore

7 Minute(s)

Display slide 6. Introduce participants to the Why-lighting strategy. Ask participants to read the Best Practices and AI Glossary handouts. Use the strategy to analyze the best practices for safely and ethically incorporating AI technology by highlighting the parts of the document they find most important or surprising.  Ask them to explain their highlights in the margins of the document.  Allow participants 5–7 minutes to complete the task. Once completed, ask participants to share their work with an elbow partner or small group, then move to slide 7 and encourage participants to share with the whole group.

Explain

15 Minute(s)

Distribute the Choice Board Bingo handout.

Transition to slide 8 and introduce the Choice Board strategy. Let participants know they will be using magicschool.ai. Have participants navigate to the website and create an account or sign up with their Google or Microsoft account. Participants should now pick one option from their Choice Board Bingo card to try out. After allowing some time for participants to try a task from the Choice Board alone, in small groups, or at their table, have participants try to get a group bingo. Allow 10–15 minutes for groups to work toward completing a bingo on their Choice Board. Have participants share the output of the AI tools they used for each bingo square with their table or small group. 

Extend

10 Minute(s)

Move to slide 9. Let participants know they will be participating in a lesson creation race using diffit.me. First, participants will need to find an article or YouTube video related to their current curriculum content. Participants should then navigate to diffit.me and select “An Article or Video (URL).” They can now paste the link to their article or video and select the reading level they would like it to output. Select “Generate Resources'' to see the created resources.

Once participants have had a chance to create their lesson resources, have participants share about some of the resources that were created.

Evaluate

8 Minute(s)

Distribute the Critique the Bot handout.

Display slide 10. Explain the instructional strategy Critique the Bot to the participants by asking them to read the prompt on the handout and then analyze and critique the AI generated feedback written below the prompt. Ask participants to mark any mistakes, concerns, or thoughts and whether they agree or disagree with the feedback. Allow participants 5 minutes to read and analyze, then ask them to share their thoughts.

Finally, navigate to slide 11 and give an opportunity for participants to review the instructional strategies used in this session.

Research Rationale

A literature review on teacher burnout and ChatGPT found lesson planning and content development as the most time-consuming and challenging aspects which lead to teacher burnout (Hashem et al., 2024). Assessing the impact of AI on education, Chen at al. (2020) found that educators who utilize AI or harness its capabilities can enhance their efficiency and efficacy across various responsibilities, including handling administrative duties like assessment, grading, and offering feedback on student assignments. Furthermore, by engaging with AI technologies, teachers can enhance the quality of their instruction. By leveraging these AI tools, instructors can focus less time on lesson planning and content development and more time on teaching.

Resources