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.