ChatGPT

Have you heard of this new tool that has turned education on it head? Unless you live in an unplugged world, you probably have.

What is ChatGPT?
It is a creation of OpenAI, and as of this podcast, is currently free to explore. In fancy terms, it is a chatbot that uses a language model called GPT-3 which means Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 to simulate conversations with users. It was released in November 2022.

In plain English, it’s a very, very cool tool to have in your pocket.

When I found it, it was full on panic mode, I mean, this was going to change writing education forever! But, after I got over my panic and fear, I started settling into reality, meaning ChatGPT and tools similar to it will be filling our future. What feels unreal now will be an everyday experience in the “then.”

zIt is true. ChatGPT is unreal in the sense that it uses AI to write essays, short stories, plays, you name it. Everyone I’ve spoken to instantly thought of those college essays required with most applications and were speechless when they learned of this bot.

The scary part is that it does a really good job of composing what you ask of it, and because it uses AI, it’s technically not plagiarism, and therefore is not traceable by the standard plagiarism checkers. This brings up the ethical question of cheating… since it’s technically not copying… and is creating original work… does this mean students would have to disclose that they used ChatGPT?

Once I switched into problem solving mode and went looking for ways this tool can be useful to educators, I found some really phenomenal uses for the bot. Even further, speaking with colleagues and perusing social media brought about a plethora of positive uses, which made me feel so much better about this crazy tool.

A colleague said that while she wouldn’t want her son using ChatGPT, she herself could use it to learn about what her son was studying, and therefore be better equipped to help him with his homework.

We also talked about how if we were at a meeting and the presenter shared something we hadn’t heard of, (which never happens!) we could again go to the bot and ask it to teach us about that topic.

Another teacher decided to have the bot write a play on the Golem, a topic his class had just wrapped. The bot wrote the play and the class read it. They then had it write a second play, and compared the two. Finally, he had the class add missing details to the play to make it a richer read.

On the socials you’ll find countless ways teachers have found to use ChatGPT. In fact, here is an infographic that shows eight ways teachers can use ChatGPT in the classroom.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve asked the bot to do countless things for us at school - write essays, yes, but we’ve also used it as an Alexa, just asking it questions. A really neat try was when we asked it to write a decodable short story using a specific vowel pattern to use with 2nd grade and it did it!

ChatGPT has taken the educational world by storm. If we focus on the fear it’s raised, we’ll be in trouble. As long as we keep looking for productive, positive uses, it could really have a positive impact on education.

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Wednesday Wit

 It's the beginning of a new year... that calls for a new invention...

C&H Source

Fun with Writing

My students used to say "Ms. Diem, you think everything is fun!  Well, I think this writing prompt tool is a fun way to do quick writes.  (At least I think you could call it a writing prompt tool?  Dunno.)

One of my amazing colleagues found this site and uses it as a random writing prompt.  Only it's technically not a prompt.  It's a picture.

Click the link here to play with it.  You never know what child-friendly image you will get, or what creative thoughts it will invite!

The Expansion of Westward Expansion

As a student, history was never a subject I enjoyed.  In fact, I think I barely passed most of my middle school and high school history classes. (Shocking, I know!)  What I know now is that had I been taught history the way we teach history now (at least at my school) I would have been way more engaged!

Take, for example, the fourth grade Westward Expansion unit.  These kids have spent a solid month digging into all they can find about the topic.  (And they're enjoying it, too!)  Rather than write a final essay on the topic, they are turning their learning into BrainPop movies.

The opening element of all BrainPop movies is the same - a letter from "a friend" to Tim and Moby.  When you make your own BrainPop, it's no different.  Because the students have spent so much time researching, they wrote their own letters, instead of answering one of the pre-written letters supplied.  Their letters probe into the topic they wrote about:

After they completed their letters, we used the computer voice (hey, BrainPop, when are we getting Tim and Annie's voices as options to use?!) to read the letter.  By using the computer voice, the kids writing has to be free from errors - that means capital letters and punctuation must be in proper place.

The same holds true for the rest of their movie.  They copy and paste the text from their typed essay into each scene in BrainPop.  Without proper capital letters and punctuation, the computer voice reads it very, very strangely.  By using the computer voice teachers can tell who used proper writing conventions and who still needs reviewing of those concepts.  All without writing a final draft, but publishing it as a BrainPop instead!

Authors in Action

Wow can those third graders write!  And thanks to Book Creator, their writing is looking very professional in the books on which they are working!

Book Creator makes it very simple to take a piece of writing (or pieces of writing!) and turn them into polished, easily accessible, and engaging (read: you can make them interactive with links and audio!) products.

The third graders have been working hard polishing their writing in Google.  Over the past few weeks they've reviewed adding backgrounds and images and textboxes in Book Creator.  This week we learned how to copy and paste their edited writing from Google into Book Creator.  It never gets old, watching their eyes light up as they see their writing magically appear in a new place!

Through these Book Creator experiences, we also get to talk about the aesthetics of publishing.  We all know how easy it is to get lost in fonts, so we talk about how you want consistency of font style, chapter titles one font across the book, body style consistent, and how readability is key.  Those are some tough choices to make when you're in the heat of your publishing!

The kids add a table of contents, and thanks to the beauty of Book Creator, they can make each chapter in the table of contents linkable to the specific page in the book!

Book Creator offers a completely free option, completely, free!  You get one library with up to 40 books in it!  Great to play around with before you dive into the give-me-more-space-for-more-books-it's-so-much-fun world!

Poppin' with BrainPop!

Fourth grade studies Westward Expansion as part of their Social Studies curriculum.  It's a very interesting topic, especially when you do a lot of learning about it with BrainPop!

The kids start off by watching a few different BrainPop movies, made even easier because the kids each have their own BrainPop accounts, so teachers can assign the movies to the kids that way.  From there, they do a ton of research, note taking, brainstorming, and organizing.

Next comes the writing.  This is one of their first formal essays of the grade, and they can choose any topic from the subject area - Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark, Louisiana Purchase, etc.  This part takes a lot of thought, as the kids learn to turn their notes into sentences and the sentences into well-crafted paragraphs.

Typically, at this point, you'd think that the last step would be to type or write a final copy of the completed essay.

But you'd be wrong.

Enter BrainPop!  It's Make-a-Movie Time! 

How does it work, you ask, when you are looking at a final draft of writing?  That, my friends, is for another post.

This post came to be because this week the kids got to explore Make-a-Movie for the first time.  And it was a lot of fun!  The features in Make-a-Movie (once again, assigned thanks to individual BrainPop Accounts,) allow kids to create their very own BrainPop, from letter to labels, backgrounds to images.  

And they are very, very cool!

Book Creator: Let's Get Writing!

The 3rd grade tech journey has been pretty basic thus far: Typing and Google Slides.

It's time to kick things up a notch (remember Emeril?) in the tech game!  It's time for Book Creator!

A huge writing unit in 3rd grade is Informational Text.  They review elements of non-fiction, explore supporting details, and develop writing skills in general.  The kids get to choose their own topic, which the kids love.

The writing starts in January.  The tech practice starts now!

To kick things off, we practiced typing in a website - yikes!  Thankfully, GoGuardian makes it easy to send websites to kids computers!  Once they got to the website, the kids had to make sure to click on student login and login with Google.  Then, they're in!

It was fun exploring cover design, learning to add text boxes and import pictures, and yes, change fonts.  The drawing tool in Book Creator is amazing!  You can add little details to enhance your pages, create custom backgrounds, and so much more!  It's all so intuitive, to, so after a little practice, the kids are good to go!

Podcasting: Part 2

When I went to MiGoogle this past fall, I didn't realize that I'd *finally* become a member of the Podcast Party.  Two and a half months later... yeah....

For our fourth graders, turning their narratives into podcasts was quite the experience.  And the simplicity of Soundtrap led to podcast exploration at home, too!  We even had a premier party, complete with a red carpet and step and repeat (a new term I learned!) for the kids, and it was adorable!

The sixth graders took their first podcast creation experience to a whole new level.  For their podcasts, idiom origins, it was the summative assessment of a writing unit.  They took things to the next level by editing their own podcasts and adding a plethora of sound effects to enhance the listening experience.  Additionally, we introduce the sixth grade podcast with a contest for both the cover art and the audio intro/outro.  The winning entries were marvelous!

Now that we've gotten our feet wet as a member of the Podcast Party, I'm excited about our next endeavor, which is a larger scale podcast featuring the leadership at school.  Plans are in place, hosts are ready, guests are lined up, software is situated, and we're almost ready to roll...  My goal is that our first episode goes live by February 1st - stay tuned for the link!

Who knew that a simple session at a conference would spark such change, eh?  Next conference is MACUL... can't wait to see what that sparks!

Listen to 44 Stories

Listen to the Exposition of Idioms

The kids (and teachers) are very proud of their podcasts - we hope you enjoy listening to them!

2020 Blogging Challenge

I love to write.  A lot.

And yet, I've done a sucky terrible horrendous lousy job at keeping up with this blog.  Which means I need a little more structure.

A challenge.

My 2020 Blogging Challenge.

The challenge is to post at least once a week for the rest of the school year, which I think *should* be an attainable goal.  To help get things going, at least for me, here are the prompts (yep, same for each week.)  Feel free to vary them however you'd like!

• A goal and how you aim to accomplish said goal
• A picture of something that inspired you (and an optional caption!)
• Something that made you think - could be a quote, an article, something a student or colleague said... anything that made you go "hmmmmm"

While this *is* an education blog, I'm intentionally keeping the prompts open enough for anyone who wants to join, privately or publically.

If you'd like to join me in this challenge, please feel free to do so!  Leave your blog in the comments so we can support each other in this challenge!

Podcasting - Part 1

Over the past two weeks, both fourth and sixth graders began preparation for creating their own podcast.

It.  Has.  Been.  AWESOME.

We've been using Soundtrap for Education and the process has been fairly straightforward.  I love that the kids can log-in with their Google accounts, which always makes things easier.  It also has the option to recall previous versions of the recording - which is a must with students!

A few notes - 

Microphones make a HUGE difference.  We tried without them, and the sound was only ok, I mean, after all, we're in a school environment, there is no such thing as silence!  I found a few old, gaming-style microphones and that made a huge difference, even with the loud-ish background noise!

The transcript feature is awesome, when it works.  And editing is very simple, i-Movie-esque, even.

The sound effects ROCK.  The kids had a blast adding them, and even created some of their own in the process!  Soundtrap has something like 5000 available sound clips to use!

One of the best parts is that podcasting provides a natural formative assessment.  I mean, what better way to assess fluency (among other things,) than listening to kids creat podcasts, amIright?

We wrap up the fourth grade podcasts, their narrative stories, this week.  Next week starts sixth grade podcasts on idioms.  I'll share links when they're ready!

New Resource: Ourboox

While this might not be a new resource to you, I was stoked to find Ourboox!  I was perusing Pernille Ripp's site and someone had commented about Ourboox, so I had to go and look.

The first thing that caught my eye was that on the main page of books, there were books published in Hebrew!  Five years ago I might have noticed that, but moved on. Now that I'm working in a Jewish Day School, finding resources that support Hebrew is a key priority.  And, not only does it support Hebrew writing, the Hebrew books also open from right to left!  (It also supports 27 other languages! Books can even be written in multiple languages!)

Of course I created an account right off, and started exploring.

I found Ourboox VERY easy to use.  You can even upload PDF files that may have been created in Google Docs or a different platform.  An important feature for educators, books can be shared publicly, in the OurBoox library of over 100,000 books, or privately, via links.

You can also include links, QR Codes, Videos - basically, anything you can think of can be added to a page.  Oh, and if you want to create a class book?  You can actually order printed copies of your books!

There are two things that I don't *love* right now, but I know they're always making updates.

1.  Pictures and text can not be on the same page.  Not likely a big deal for most.  For an "asthetics" junkie like me, it's eh.

2.  There is no way (yet!) to create bulk student accounts.  Right now, students would need to create their own account.  In upper grades, this is probably a non-issue.  For lowers?  Eh.

Even with those to "eh's," I still think Ourboox is worth checking out - it's a great FREE option for publishing books!

Check out their How-to for Educators!

BrainPop: Make-a-Movie

Our fourth graders are exploring Westward Expansion right now.  They've been working on a non-fiction piece about what they're learning.  The usual, right?

Or not.

Super excited when the team asked if there was a way to turn this into a BrainPop video!  So that's exactly what we did!

The teachers assigned the Westward Expansion video and Make-a-Movie to their students.  From there, we walked through, step by step, turning their writing into a BrainPop video!  Students took their thesis statement and turned it into a question for the traditional BrainPop letter.  Then they created a slide for background information, before adding supporting slides to elaborate on their thesis.  They typed in their content, added graphics, and worked the BrainPop magic!

Let me tell you... 50 fourth graders, four teachers, plus me, the techie.... despite the noise level?  It went really well!  The kids got way more done in the period than I anticipated, and I swear I saw ideas bubbling up over the teachers heads as they helped the kids with their project.  Look for a link to their videos soon!

Thanks for another win, BrainPop!