Portfolio Item 21

 

Blog Journal 10

One skill I better learned to use was the sound effect feature in PowerPoint. I knew how to use it before due to a class that I took where they made me prove I knew how to use it however before this I hadn't really needed to use it practically. Also, having to use a computer file sound in my PowerPoint was new to my knowledge. Maybe I did use it in the class but from what I remember we only used the prepackaged sounds so doing the whole process was a nice touch of knowledge. That combined with everything else helped me brush up on my PowerPoint and even practice some of my shortcuts again even if I'm not done with the assignment yet. 

If I had to use surveys I would use them as student feedback each quarter in the school year. My father was a professor for a class a while back where he taught and he got some good feedback from time to time. It's better than a Rate my Professor because it is directed towards me. I hope to do the same thing on my end getting decent feedback to improve my class and even see which students are maybe stressed, angry, or bitter at me so I can iron that out before it explodes into something much worse. Beyond that I think making too many surveys take off their weight and get less honest questions so it would be best for me to not use them too often.

One thing I would like to learn how to use is to make those AI chatbots for specific things. I remember in freshman year my philosophy professor had made this AI tool that answered philosophy and reading questions better than the regular internet or AI. As in what this chatbot might be I was thinking a geometry tool that answers questions in a way that gives the technically correct answer along with an easy to understand answer right under it to help both sides of students. As for how I did see that my professor was able to make it with not a lot of help so I'm assuming it isn't a scary amount of coding or technology needed to be made for it. All in all I think this goal is feasible and nice to have both for my understanding of technology and students understanding of geometry.

Blog Journal 9

 So back during COVID I experienced two setups. There was the quickly cobbled together work made during 8th grade for online websites that was mostly homework and weekly zoom calls or skype calls or teams calls with the teacher. Then there was also the more set up year online during 2020-2021 school year where work was done exclusively through Canvas and every week I had Teams calls that were done every week. I do not blame the first solution all that much because it was a strange time but it was clearly not the best strategy. The second strategy was better, yet many teachers were careless and many days simply did not make a teams call leaving me to just not attend class.

When it comes to the PowerPoint assignment I learned not much but still something. That something was making my own slide layout. I knew how to do it before this however because I had no practical reason to use it, this became my first time really using it as a resource and seeing how useful it is I might want to use it more in the future. One of my frustrations however is my computer PowerPoint video audio thing that refuses to transfer with the assignment on Canvas because it refuses to change from this odd not accepted file type so I'm just left with this piece of work I can't turn in.

I don't really have many questions. The only question I might have is how to send the aforementioned video because I cant send it through Canvas or even through Canvas comments. The only thing that works is email so if that is okay I'm more than happy to send it. For the course overall I have no questions everything seems pretty straight forward. Though I do want to say thank you for understanding the technical difficulties and allowing me to work through them as I learn to use technology, I feel you really do above all else want to teach us something which I at least feel has been lost in some classes.

Blog Post 8

 A new skill that I acquired during the web creation assignment was how to make a URL. Before then I wasn’t really big into how computers or the internet work. Mostly because I had (and still do) a burning hatred for anything that required coding so I thought it would all be behind a paywall or complicated coding. Turns out I was completely wrong on that assumption and creating a URL was one of the easier things. I suppose learning that skill will help in the future both navigating making a website and all showing me computers are not as scary as they appear.

When it comes to QR codes I think they have some really interesting uses. Of course there are the obvious ones of putting them on posters or boards or stickers but they can be more. I think they can be used to wow people and keep them engaged with the content that is being presented. One example I have of this is that in my last case for the Business Case Club trials I had done this whole non profit organization and in the middle I suggested having an AI assistant for the website then gave them a QR code that the judges scanned that brought them to a custom AI I made. That was the thing that got them engaged again after however many cases before ours and they praised the idea and roped them back into the case.

AI Made Ethical Case:

"At Atlantic High School, Ms. Ramirez teaches 11th-grade English. Each semester she assigns multiple essays, and with nearly 150 students across five class periods, grading had become overwhelming. To improve productivity, the school district encouraged teachers to use GradeScope, which groups similar responses together and suggests scores based on patterns in previous grading.

At first, the system seemed like a lifesaver. Instead of spending entire weekends buried in essays, Ms. Ramirez could review clusters of responses and approve suggested scores in a fraction of the time. She still skimmed essays to make sure the scores seemed reasonable, but the software did much of the initial evaluation.

After the first major essay assignment, however, a student named Jordan asked why he received a much lower score than expected. He showed Ms. Ramirez that his essay followed the prompt carefully and contained strong analysis, but the writing style was informal and included conversational phrasing. When Ms. Ramirez looked closer, she realized the AI had grouped Jordan’s essay with weaker submissions that also used less formal language, which led to a lower suggested score that she had approved quickly during grading.

This raised several ethical concerns. First, the automated grouping system appeared to disadvantage students who used nontraditional writing styles, raising fairness issues. Second, Ms. Ramirez realized she had relied too heavily on the automated recommendations because she was trying to keep up with her workload. Finally, students had never been told that an AI system was helping evaluate their essays, which created a transparency issue."

The way I would fix this if I were Ms. Ramirez is three pronged. First, I would not become reliant on technology for grading and while I might use it for checking spelling or grammar I would go through each individual assignment. Second, I would update my syllabus and announcements to be transparent with my technology use to make sure students can think that maybe their essay was graded unfairly in cases where the GradeScope messed up. Finally, I would emphasize to the class that I will be personally reviewing every single essay and giving detailed explanations myself on their grades to make sure I keep the good will of my students. These will create a classroom that is efficient yet also fair, transparent, and respected.

Blog Journal 7

After a lot of digging I was finally able to find the classroom page of my old 7th grade teacher which is nice. I remember this guy because we had this "club" period at the end of school where you signed up for whatever where I just mostly watched 70's cartoons with him and one other student because we seemed to be the only ones who wanted to watch 70's cartoons. But yeah, besides that tangent I did see that he changed his website from what I remember as I can see it was last updated in 2020 (I left in 2018). It seems pretty basic but you can see the general stuff needed most likely just an overview for parents and students of what to expect and sign up for. https://sites.google.com/a/cvsd.net/caplan/home?authuser=0

When it comes to what I would use when it comes to tech and working professionally the first thing that comes to mind is PowerPoint. Whether I follow my current plan into consulting or switch to teaching being efficient at that application is insanely important. It's the driver of communication and can be used in so many applications even for meetings with other teacher on what to do and stuff like that. Using that and combining it with Excel perfectly cuts back on so much time because it can make perfect lessons on top of perfect work for students.

It was an interesting project. At the time I was slammed by many other things so my attention was not fully there as I would have hoped (I was working on The Global Case Competition at Harvard at the same time) but I feel like I understood the assignment and got something out of it. It taught me most importantly the constraints of AI and the strengths. I may have before written AI off as too unreliable to be used in many settings but I realized now it was more usable than I thought it was (Especially in getting the obvious stuff and birds eye information out of the way) which I suppose I have to keep in mind moving forward.

Blog Journal 6

 The So I was looking through the Florida Standards on CPALMS and I found this one that really stands out: it says students should be able to use digital tools to create and communicate information effectively and solve problems, and it talks about like coding, digital safety, and applying tech in real world situations. Basically this standard is saying kids shouldn’t just know how to open Word or Google, they should know how to use technology to think and create stuff that actually matters and solve problems with it, not just click buttons. Do I feel prepared to implement this? I guess right now I feel like I understand the general idea but I’m not fully confident, I mean I know basic tools and like the sandbox event was cool, but having to teach kids how to use a bunch of different digital tools and keep it safe and meaningful like that seems like it’ll take more practice and honestly more real world teaching experience to be comfortable doing it in a classroom.

When I went into the CPALMS Educator Toolkit and clicked on the Grade 9-12 Digital Tools stuff I saw there’s lesson plans, student tutorials, and example projects tied to the standards that like go with the digital creation standard I picked. One that stuck out to me was this lesson plan for statistics for kids in high school that I saw was tech oriented and easy to break down which is basically perfect. It finds a nice way to balance things and because the resources are so expansive you can treat like a buffet. Overall not at all bad and something I would use, probably more than any other thing I've been introduced to so far.

Honestly I still have questions about how we’re supposed to balance teaching all this new tech stuff with like the regular content we already have to teach, because it feels like if I just spend all day on lessons about digital tools then I’m not actually teaching stats or geometry or algebra, you know? I’m curious how other teachers are planning to weave these standards seamlessly into their classrooms without it just being a tech day that happens once a week and getting behind on what appears to be a tight teaching schedule. So my discussion question would be: how can we make teaching tech standards like digital creation and problem solving part of everyday learning in every subject, instead of an extra thing on top of everything else we already have to do? Like is it supposed to be threaded through every lesson or is it okay to teach it as its own thing?

Blog Journal 5

 I have liked my blogging experience buy and large. I've never really had a diary or anything similar before so this has been a new experience but it's nothing to complain about. As for the pros this more informal style of communication allows me to better think through what's actually going through my head at a given moment instead of being caught up in professional jargon. When I think about cons not much comes to mind. I might say that I was a bit confused with designing the actual page itself but I've grown to appreciate how stylistically simple my blog page is specifically. 

My thoughts on using AI in education with more specifically this role of low level poetry is mixed. On one hand it is useful for creating a lesson plan and throwing ideas at a wall and creating a list that is comprehensive to think about everything. On the other hand I don't think it could reliably produce the actual poems themselves perfect as is because it is not tailored to what you need always. This makes it okay for things like lesson plans but not great when you're looking at the actual content of a lesson plan.

So that AI test was interesting for me. For the sake of the assignment I switched over to ChatGPT which I never use as I prefer Gemini and it tends to be more reliable. So I used GPT and it generated me something that I saw as good enough. But then the two kind of pushbacks I have is that it was very general with what it said to the point of not really being useful and the second thing is that it dropped the f bomb for no clear reason. I told it then to not swear and thankfully it fixed itself.

If I were to ever use AI in my classroom its use would be intentionally limited. When we look at in my example geometry AI can give you test questions but they will always be general and not tailor made and that will always be something you can't look past as an educator when you are trying to get kids to care. Also, if students see a teacher using AI they will think it's okay to use to and the way they use it is to put it bluntly mostly not okay. So if I had to use AI it would at most be used for lesson planning if I really needed to just throw ideas at a wall.