Search Results for: monica burns

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WEP 152: Class Tech Tips, An Interview with Monica Burns

In this episode of The Wired Educator Podcast, I interview Monica Burns, the founder of Class Tech Tips! Monica was guest back on episode 72. It was great catching up with Monica and seeing the wonderful resources she creates for educators. You are going to love this episode.

Dr. Monica Burns is a Curriculum and EdTech Consultant, Apple Distinguished Educator and Founder of ClassTechTips.com. Monica was part of her school’s leadership team and was a vocal advocate for bringing one-to-one technology into her classroom. As a classroom teacher, Monica used iPads to create an engaging, differentiated learning experience to meet the unique needs of her students. Realizing the power of digital tools in the classroom, Monica started ClassTechTips.com to provide a resource for educators.

Since starting ClassTechTips.com, Monica has presented to teachers, administrators and tech-enthusiasts at numerous national and international conferences including SXSWedu, ISTE, FETC and EduTECH. She is a webinar host for SimpleK12 and a regular contributor to Edutopia. Monica is the author of Tasks Before Apps: Designing Rigorous Learning in a Tech-Rich Classroom (ASCD), #FormativeTech: Meaningful, Sustainable, and Scannable Formative Assessment with Technology (Corwin), Deeper Learning with QR Codes and Augmented Reality (Corwin), and co-author of 40 Ways to Inject Creativity into Your Classroom with Adobe Spark.

Monica visits schools across the country to work with PreK-20 teachers to make technology integration exciting and accessible. In addition to being named an Apple Distinguished Educator in 2013, Monica is a graduate of the University of Delaware and Hunter College, and completed a Doctorate in Global Education Leadership at Lamar University in 2016.

 

Mentioned in this episode: 

Moncia’s website: www.classtechtips.com

Monica’s podcast: https://classtechtips.com/category/podcast/

Follow Monica on these social media platforms: 

Twitter: Twitter.com/classtechtips

Facebook: Facebook.com/classtechtips

Pinterest: Pinterest.com/classtechtips

Instagram: Instagram.com/classtechtips

Monica’s Books: 

From Kelly: 

Sign-up for my free newsletter: To help you kick off the new year and to help you reach your goals and resolutions this year, I am giving away a free copy of my 64-page eBook, The Greatest Year of Your Life (2020 Edition) to everyone who signs up for my newsletter. Become more productive. Get things done. Level-up your leadership. Design a more dynamic life. All you have to do to receive the free copy is to sign-up for my free newsletter. Just click this link and enter your email. That’s it. It’s that simple. This eBook is available only until January 15, 2020.

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Wishing you much success!
May your 2020 be filled with good health and happiness, peace and prosperity, much love and laughter.
Kelly

Sign-up for Kelly’s newsletter here. Kelly Croy is an author, speaker and educator. If you’d like to learn more about Kelly, or invite him to your school or conference to speak please send him an email. • Listen to Kelly’s other podcast, The Future Focused Podcastand subscribe. • Subscribe to The Wired Educator Podcast with over 150 episodes of interviews and professional development. • Visit Kelly’s website at www.KellyCroy.com. • Looking for a dynamic speaker for your school’s opening day? • Consider Kelly Croy at www.KellyCroy.com • Order Kelly’s book, Along Came a Leaderfor a school book study or your personal library. • Follow Kelly Croy on Facebook.  • Follow Kelly Croy on Twitter.  •  Follow Kelly Croy on Instagram  

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WEP 0072: #Formative Tech, An Interview with Author, Monica Burns

Monica Burns: Class Tech Tips Blogger and Author of Three Educational Books

In this episode of The Wired Educator Podcast, Kelly interviews Monica Burns about her hot new book, #Formative Tech. This is Monica’s second book. Her first, Deeper Learning with QR Codes and Augmented Reality: A Scannable Solution for Your Classroom was also published by Corwin Publications. Monica and Kelly have a great educational discussion focusing on her new book, and as always… so much more!

About the book: #Formative Tech: Formative assessment is a must for educators, but it can be difficult to juggle with all the other demands of a busy teacher’s to-do list. Fortunately, technology tools can help you work smarter, not harder. In #FormativeTech, you’ll find:

  • Practical tips on how to use technology in formative assessment, including quick “pulse checks” for the whole class.
  • Formative assessment strategies for small groups and individual students.
  • Ideas for assessing project-based and inquiry-based approaches.
  • How to evaluate data and communicate results with families.

About Monica: Kelly interviewed Monica and her awesome website Class Tech Tips back in episode 41 of The Wired Educator Podcast. Monica Burns is an EdTech & Curriculum Consultant, Apple Distinguished Educator and Founder of ClassTechTips.com. In her role as a classroom teacher she used iPads one to one with her students to create engaging, differentiated learning experiences. Monica visits schools to work with PreK-12 teachers to make technology integration exciting and accessible and has presented to numerous national and international audiences including SXSWedu, ISTE and EduTECH. Monica is a regular contributor to Edutopia and the author of Deeper Learning with QR Codes and Augmented Reality: A Scannable Solution for Your Classroom (Corwin Press, 2016.)

Mentioned in this podcast: 

Connect with Monica: 

 

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Generative AI in Education: An Overview

by Julie Willcott

AI (artifical intelligence) is here – well, everywhere actually.

With the launch of ChatGPT just under a year ago, AI made its presence more known in classrooms. ChatGPT is not the only AI in town, but it currently it is one of the better known generative AI applications. 

ChatGPT, a project of OpenAI,  is financed by Microsoft. Google Bard is a competitor – financed by, you guessed it, Google.  

New applications – including many based on OpenAPI – are being released daily.

What is generative AI anyway?

Generative AI is not taking information “in its entirety” and giving it to you the way Siri or Alexa would.  It is generating, or creating, the content it gives you. This content can include text but it can also include visual works such as images.

Generative AI is based on a large language model (LLM) – meaning it is based on large amounts of text data, mostly taken from the Internet in mid-2020. This text has been scrubbed – in other words, cleaned up to remove irrelevant and inappropriate content. The LLM has also been tested and trained to provide accurate, coherent, and contextually appropriate responses.

ChatGPT as well as Google Bard and other generative AI applications are chatbots – meaning you ask questions and it answers. In other words, it is conversational.

What are important things to consider with generative AI?

With chatbots, it is important how and what you ask in your question – or prompt. The art of writing good prompts, prompts that give you accurate, coherent, and contextually appropriate responses is known as prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is a skill that must be learned and taught to our students.

Even with well-trained LLMs and good prompts, generative AI can create content that is wrong.  These are referred to as hallucinations. Unless the persons creating content with AI has an understanding of the content, these hallucinations can go undetected – or worse, be considered to be “the truth”.

With the release of ChatGPT, red flags immediately went up in the education world about the use of generative AI to complete classroom assignments. Cheating, is, of course, possible.  However, how well a student can use generative AI includes how well they can write prompts and how well they review the content that is created. It is also impacted by the specific assignment given. A number of products have been released that claim they can detect whether or not text was written by AI. But they don’t always work. They can fail to recognize AI output, especially if it is edited, and they can misidentify human-written text as AI-generated.

How can generative AI help you?

Generative AI can be used to save you as an educator time, particularly for grading  and creating instructional materials.

A good source of information about this is “Using AI Chatbots to Enhance Planning and Instruction (Quick Reference Guide)” by Monica Burns.

What do you do next?

Learn more

  • I found “The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education (The Hitchhiker’s Guide for Educators Series)” by Dan Fitzpatrick, Amanda Fox, and Brad Weinstein to be a great source of information
  • The challenge here can be to learn more without being consumed by the vast amount of information out there.

Test it out yourself

  • Get an account – there are free accounts available for both ChatGPT (openai.com/chatgpt) and Google Bard (bard.google.com)
  • Ask questions, even (and maybe especially) ones you know the answer to

Set goals and expectations

  • Set goals for how you will learn about and use generative AI
  • Set expectations for how your students can – and can not – use generative AI

Prepare for all this to change – fast!

  • Just last month, it was announced that Google Bard can interact with real time flight and hotel information and be enabled to interact with information from your gmail, google docs and google drive.
  • What’s next?



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Resolutions I Want Every Educator to Make in 2019

Educators are my favorite species. They not only work incredibly hard all hours of the day to make an impact in the lives of those they teach, they are also constantly working to improve themselves as well.

Each year I taught, I wanted to make my classroom, lessons, and engagement better. I was always trying to level-up. I still am. I made resolutions each school year and again at the start of the new year. I love those imaginary reset buttons! I shared my resolutions each year with my students and hung them on the classroom wall. Why? Because I knew my students would hold me accountable. And boy did they! I didn’t hit them all, but I hit more than I would have if I didn’t share them.

Which of the following resolutions are you nailing? Scared of? Challenged by?

Here are 19 resolutions I believe every educator should make:

  1. Help to Build a Positive School Culture: Your words and actions contribute to the culture of your building and school district. You are a leader and influencer even if you don’t think you are. You are. Are your words and actions improving the culture of your school district? Are you waiting for someone else to fix the problems? Are you better at pointing out the problems or leading solutions?
  2. Make Your Class Open 24 Hours a Day from Anywhere in the World: Turn your class in to a 7-Eleven. Use Google Classroom or other Learning Management Systems to help students who are absent, traveling, or need to see things for a second or third time. Kids can learn anytime from anywhere. They can even do work on snow days.
  3. Build a New Community in Your School: Look at the students in your school. Which groups of students don’t have a place to share their talents and feel like a contributor? Find them and build that community. You don’t need to be the expert. Just identify what is missing, talk to your administrator, throw a poster on the wall, make an announcement and get going. Maybe it is a group of video gamers, lego builders, robot drivers, or a book or food club. Ask your students and help them feel a contributor to their school.
  4. Add a Portion of Challenge Based Learning to Your Year: Call it what you want, Project Based Learning, SOLE, Problem Based Learning or CBL, but add a little to your school year. Students need to be making and thinking and collaborating and solving. Check out startSOLE or Apple’s Challenge Based Learning: A Classroom Guide. You don’t need to change everything, just add a little. It goes a long way. You will love it, and it is the future.
  5. Collaborate with Your Colleagues to Build Dynamic Lessons and Units: Work with the other teachers in your building to collaborate on lesson plans to increase engagement and design interdisciplinary thematic units. It’s fun for you and the students. The most memorable lessons I ever experienced were working with my colleagues. You can even plan remotely using PlanBook.com, Apple Numbers or Google Sheets.
  6. Take Less Home: Living in constant overwhelm and frustration is not normal nor admirable. Everyone is busy. Teaching is fun and noble. It’s time to get efficient, take less home, and have more pride and joy being a teacher. Design a curriculum plan for your class and change just a small percentage each year rather than constantly trying to redo everything. Take less work home. Really. What are you taking home anyway? What are you trying to assess and measure?Try to do more in class with the students in the form of labs, workshops, presentations and SOLE projects and less 19th century grading of tests and quizzes.
  7. Rethink Homework: “But students need the practice!” Really? I’m not telling you not to give homework, but I am asking you to rethink what you are sending home. Check out the book Ditch That Homework by Alice Keeler and Matt Miller for ideas. Talk with fellow teachers and admins. Rethink homework. Please.
  8. Transform the Use of Technology in Your Classroom: Technology does not need to be used the majority of the time. What a misconception, but when it is used, it should be sued to create content, and only briefly to consume. Examine how you are using tech in your classroom. Offer your students amazing ways to create and publish what they know. Create digital textbooks, videos, presentations, animations, and more! Get going. If your students are mostly on websites clicking answers, well… you’re using it poorly. Try the book 50 Things You Can Do with Google Classroom.
  9. Share Your Story: Take all of the great things you and your students are doing and share them with the world on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, a blog, YouTube or write a book. Everyone benefits. Start this, this year!
  10. Attend a Conference: It is always awesome to get out of your classroom and learn something new, get inspired, and apply it. I recommend returning and giving a presentation to your building and maybe even your board. If you don’t return and apply it, then maybe you should let someone else go in your place. Apply.
  11. Apply to Speak at a Conference: Share what you know! Don’t have anything special enough to share? Then it’s time to level-up and get after it. I’m serious.
  12. Nominate a Colleague: Yes, find someone in your district you admire and nominate them for some recognition. Why? Because they deserve it, and when one educator is looked upon positively, all educators are looked upon positively.
  13. Collaborate with a Colleague: Open the door to your classroom both figuratively and literally and find ways to collaborate with other teachers. I suggest creating an interdisciplinary thematic unit with a culminating activity with other teachers at your grade level. It’s fun, memorable, and good for students.
  14. Lead: Rather than complain about something you don’t like, create a solution and begin implementing it. That’s called leading. We are all educational leaders. Need help? Read my book Along Came a Leader, or one of my favorites, Start. Right. Now.
  15. Start a YouTube Channel for Your Classroom: Hey, it’s all about video. I found myself watching someone cook a fish dinner the other day on Facebook. I watched the whole thing. I don’t like to cook, and I hate fish. My point is… video done well can be engaging, and your class could be open to students 24/7. Do this now.
  16. Get Connected with Other Educators: Build Your Personal Learning Network (PLN) either online by using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or reach out to educators in your building, district, or state. Share what you know. Learn from them. Show other educators how to do this.
  17. Publish Student Work: Find unique and powerful ways to share and publish the work your students do in your classroom. Give them authentic audiences and genuine purposes to create. Build a website, start a podcast, host a “fair”, publish them on a blog, YouTube, or SeeSaw. Have them create digital books as published authors using Book Creator or Apple’s Pages. Publish their work.
  18. Contact Every Family You Teach: Seriously, forget the email. Pick up the phone or send a postcard home to every family you teach. Find something positive to say about every student and offer them a personal challenge in your class. Let them know you care about them. When you do have to contact home for something less than positive it will be easier because you have already talked with them about something positive.
  19. Read an Educational Book: There are so many great educational books out there that will change your career. Grab one and see what a difference it makes. Looking for suggestions? Try Teach Like a Pirate, Lead Like a Pirate, or Empower. Also check out my podcast for links to fantastic educational books. How about my book, Along Came a Leader? It will challenge you in many ways.

Bonus: Subscribe and listen to an educational podcast. Here is a great list from Monica Burns the creator of Class Tech Tips. >>> Click here for Monica’s list. <<<

What did I miss? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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Kelly Croy is an author, speaker and educator. If you’d like to learn more about Kelly, or invite him to your school or conference to speak please send him an email. • Listen to Kelly’s other podcast, The Future Focused Podcast and subscribe. • Subscribe to The Wired Educator Podcast with over 115 episodes of interviews and professional development. • Visit Kelly’s website at www.KellyCroy.com. • Looking for a dynamic speaker for your school’s opening day? • Consider Kelly Croy at www.KellyCroy.com • Order Kelly’s book, Along Came a Leader for a school book study or your personal library. • Follow Kelly Croy on Facebook.  • Follow Kelly Croy on Twitter.  •  Follow Kelly Croy on Instagram