Well, hi there. Welcome to the Hillbrook Center for Teaching Excellence. Podcast. My name is Bill Selik. I am your host for Today. I'm our Director of Technology. And this episode, I am so, so excited. We have three amazing guests. We have Joe, Marysol, and we have Annie talking about AI artificial intelligence in education. And my goodness, this podcast has changed so many times over the last month. I was ready just to talk with a couple of people, share it out. The next day, there are some news. All right. Got to kind of rethink what this is going to look like. Next day, there's more news. Next day, there's more news. So you're going to hear from Annie towards the end of the podcast about how we get Hillbrook had been using Dolly that's a text to image say it one more time. Text to image generator. She was doing that with students a year ago. So this is not like, oh, my goodness, AI is taking over the world. But in the last month, there's been a significant shift from like, oh, yeah, that's this cool website, to, oh, my goodness, the things that generative text that AI bots can create. So Joe is going to give us an amazing overview of all these tools. Mary Saul is going to give us some ideas about how we can use this. As a teacher, it's kind of her first person and also looking at things from a dei lens. And then Annie is going to talk about her journey kind of over the last year and then looking ahead with what we've got. So we have some amazing interviews. If you've been listening to this podcast regularly, most of the episodes are 20 minutes ish long. This one's going to be much longer. You're probably looking right now and you're like, yes, yes, this is longer. This is the edited down version. But there are just too many, too many amazing conversations to shorten the second 20 minutes episode. So I wanted to give it all to you in one long form podcast. So we're going to jump right in and hear Joe Marquez talk with you about AI. Enjoy this episode, everybody. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. First, give us an introduction. Who are you? Where are you from?
Bill, thank you for having me. I'm Joe Marquez. I am currently the director of Academic Innovation for Q. But as I always tell people, I'm an educator through and through. I taught 8th grade science for ten years. Loved it. And the only reason I would ever consider leaving the classroom was to work more closely with Q. And here I am. And now I get to speak with you and your Hilbert teachers. It's fantastic.
Awesome. So you have been my goodness, I've learned so much from you. And so I had to get you on this episode, education and AI. Give us the overview. What are you excited about?
Yes. So I would say that this is the biggest grenade to be thrown into education since the Internet. And whenever something like this is placed in education, you always have this initial fear, oh no, what is this going to do? What is this going to do, right? And I always go back to when the Internet first started coming out. I'd been with the Internet since like 93, 94, right? When it was only like little chat.
Rooms or American on the AOL. I've talked with a lot of educators about it and this feels like at least an equally disruptive moment for education.
Well, it is, because as an educator, you now have to take this a very different pedagogical approach to teaching and learning, right? I mean, I bring up the Internet because by the time I was in college in 1999, I'd been using the Internet for like five years. I mean, first in a small ecosystem like AOL, but then it broadened up to the World Wide Web. But I've been using it for years. But I was told by my college professors, you may not use the Internet for doing your research. You must go to the library. You must use the Dewey Decimal System to find the books. You must write down the page and the version of the book and where you look, all of these things. And to me, it was because they didn't understand the Internet number one, or they were so mad that I had this tool now that we all had.
This tool now that they could use.
So you're going to do it the way that we did it.
This is what research looks like, exactly what school looks like.
But that changed because the Internet didn't go away and we have found a way to incorporate it not only into our educational system, but in the world, right? I mean, it created new jobs, it created new economies. I mean, it blew up the world. This Internet made us connected and closer. We we learned to live and and, you know, create a symbiotic relationship with the Internet and ourselves, right? We will learn to live with AI. We have to learn to live with AI. It is not going away, Bill. In fact, I tell people all the time, you don't have to go to the open AI, which is the company that created chat GPT. You don't have to go to their website to use it, right? You can go into some of your favorite ed tech tools right now and use it. You can go into Canva under canva. New feature called Canva Docs. There's a magic right feature that is a GPT based magic right tool. You can do text to Image, which is a dolly D-A-L-L-E image generation tool. It's already there. We initially think, wow, this thing can do all these things that students are going to initially use it to cheat. Why do we initially think that students are going to use it to cheat, right? But just with anything, you have to train the students how to use it properly. I was talking to one of my buddies, he lives up in Canada, and he was saying how he has been using it to help his son come up with ideas for projects. He's in a biodiversity class, and one of the questions he was supposed to answer is, how does biodiversity affect the medical field or this field or that field? And they went in and said to Chat GPT, how is biodiversity connected to the medical fields, the sciences? And it brought up some ideas, oh, I like this idea, I want to dive deeper into this idea. And he was off to the races. Now, could you imagine if you didn't have that? And you're like, I don't even know where to start. And you just start going on Bing search or Google search and you're going to all these different websites. You saved yourself over an hour easily by getting this recommendation. So you're not using it to cheat, you're choosing it to really save your time. And it's almost like an at home tutor, kind of like, hey, why try this, try that. Now my buddy is a teacher and he's helping his son. Imagine the students who don't have a teacher as a parent, right? Imagine the families where maybe the parents not even at home because they work two jobs, and the students sitting at home going, I don't even know where to start, right? Chat GPT can help level the playing field or at the bare minimum, understand the material that they may not have understood in class and come into class with an ability to speak to the topic instead of sitting in the background. I don't even know what I'm doing.
The ability for these tools to actually increase equity is massive. I think that's one thing that I think a lot of the conversation stalls out on. This is new and scary and I don't have to use it, and how do we stop students from using it? But I think if we can approach it through that lens of actually, if we're going to give homework to students, and it seems like schools are continuing to do this right, this is actually a way that we can make schooling and education more equitable.
Absolutely. And that's the thing. And then going on that equity talk track, keep going. My worry is we have access to this chat GPT right now, right? They've already talked about the chat GPT. Plus, if you give us this amount of money, you get to jump the line in the generation queue and you get a little bit more power, you get a little bit more this or that. Okay, right, well now then, Microsoft talked about, oh, we're going to add this feature into teams premium, right? Where does it stop? Is this going to be implemented in Microsoft for education premium. And if so, are some schools going to be like, we don't have the funds to go premium, we have to keep the regular. Now those students aren't going to have access to this. So now you're going to be creating this situation where this school, who has the funding, is going to be able to learn and coexist with this generative AI platform. And then this school over here who can't afford it, are not going to learn to coexist with it. And when they jump up to this next education level, like a college, a university, or even a business, what is that going to do when those institutions start relying heavily on the assistance of the AI? If you don't even know how to form a prompt, I think that's going to be almost a new language. How do you ask the GPT engine a prompt to kind of narrow down a response? And if you don't know how to do that, you're going to be left behind. Right.
You know what that reminds me of is like, with wordle, like, what's your first word that became a thing? And I never got deep enough into that where I had my first word. But you know, it's the like, where do you start? It's this whole new way of engaging with a tool. And it seems like that's going to become the skills and less of, here's what a hamburger paragraph looks like, here's what a five paragraph essay looks like. That's going to have its place, but I think it's going to change and shift towards actually, how do you leverage this tool that we now have exactly?
And how do you help it benefit your writing? Not overtake your writing, but benefit your writing. And how can teachers utilize it to give them the greatest gift of all? Right. The gift of time. That's the greatest gift of all. How are you going to use this to save hours of work leaving feedback when a machine can give effective feedback in a matter of seconds?
And that's also not I know this is not what you're saying, but just to explicitly say it. It's not to say that AI is replacing teachers by any stretch of the imagination.
Correct.
To say that this becomes another tool that teachers can use. They can actually personalize feedback. And I think more importantly, give either immediate or near immediate feedback in a way that even if you're one on one, you would struggle to give that quantity of feedback using data in that way.
Well, I would even say have the students do it the first passive feedback themselves through Chat GPT. Right. Run their paper through it, ask for some constructive feedback. Have them make those changes before you turn it in. Right. And then the teacher gives their personal feedback in that way. Right. So now you've had two runs, almost like if a class would have get some peer feedback first, right? And then send it to the teacher. Now, you're get some AI feedback first.
And then submit it.
But another point that I'm trying to make is one of the reasons I hear a lot of teachers say, I'm not learning. How do you incorporate more technology because or I'm not learning to do this because it's because I don't have the time. So the saving of time is not replacing the teacher. The saving of time is giving the teacher more opportunities to start incorporating new pedagogical approaches to the classroom. For example, I've asked an English teacher this question. I want to pretend you're an English teacher right now. I want to ask it for you. So you're an English teacher. Bill, what is your purpose? What is the whole purpose of your.
Class as an English teacher? I really want to give the bill answered to help students be literate in all types of literacy.
Correct. And what is the point of being literate? What is the point of being able to read literature or create literature? What is the point of that?
So I think it's to be able to consume what others are giving at you be able to actually understand the meaning behind that, whether it's visual literacy or alphanumeric literacy. Just text, but then also to create that content. To create the visual content, to create the text, the alphanumeric content, to create all types of content and have that meaning that is in your head and in your heart expressed in a meaningful, communicative way.
That's perfect. Right? Because English class actually shows us how humanity is different from almost every other creature on this planet. The ability to take something internal and be able to transfer it to another individual in one way, shape, or form. Now, throughout history, the number one way to transfer information of cross long distances from one person to the next is the written word. Throughout history, thousands of years since writing was invented, right? English class takes that history and tries to teach people about how to take their information, convey it to another person in an effective way, right? But I would say in the last 15 years, humans have learned a more effective way of transferring information. Now, I didn't say with better content. That's not what I'm getting at, but a more effective way, meaning quicker and easier way to transfer information. And that's through media, whether it's through podcasts like this or through one of the largest archives of human creativity and information, YouTube, right? You are passing along the human condition in a different way. So if the English class is meant to showcase how to transfer information from one human to the next in creative and effective ways, why do we end at the written word? Why do we not move towards more vocalizations or visualizations in conjunction with writing? I'll tell you why most English teachers don't know how to do that. They're not podcasters, they're not YouTubers, they're not video creators. They are writers. And they know how to teach writing and look at writing and critique writing. But if English class is meant to pass along information, we need to start allowing English teachers to try. And one of the best ways to give them the opportunity to try is to give them time to do that. And if Chat GPT can give them the gift of time by making a computer do some of the remedial stuff that you would normally do now, you do have time to try these new things. Take what you've written now, turn it into a script. Take what you've written now, turn it into a podcast. Right? Let's extend English class into a true form of media that our students are living with, and that is a multimedia life. And I think that's what Chat GPT can do for us. It'll kind of give us the chance of exploring how humans now communicate and how our students consume that communication.
Yeah, well, and let's just make it much, much simpler. I love that you brought that all the way back. Lesson plans, lesson plan writing. Give us an example. What can a teacher do? 8th grade science teacher. What do they do in Chat GPT?
One of the biggest things that I would say Chat GPT can do is you can ask it to write you a lesson plan, but also connect it to the standard you're trying to hit, next generation science standards, anything like that. But also you can ask it to have a fun and inventive way to teach that. It will give you some ideas on labs you can do that you maybe never thought of before. You can put in the materials you have. I want to teach a lab on acceleration and all I have is rubber bands, some popsicle sticks, some glue and some wheels. What can I do to teach acceleration? It'll come up with an idea with.
Just those materials and include the NGSS.
Standards, and include the standards and include the directions that you would give the students everything. And you may be like, I never thought of that.
And if you run it more than once, you're going to need a completely different lesson plan.
Yeah, you hit the show me another one and it'll bring up another one with a new idea. Or you can say, I like what you did here, but can you change step two and three to include more blah, blah, blank, blank, blank, and it will rewrite it to focus on that. I have a friend that is a PE teacher up in Wyoming and I told him, watch this. I go, Tell me some of the PE equipment you have. We have hula hoops, we have some traffic cones, we have a soccer ball. I said, okay, let's watch this. I go, create me a PE activity which incorporates collaboration and running, utilizing hula hoops, traffic cones and soccer balls and it creates a whole lesson and a brand new game. It names the game, it gives the purpose of the game. It tells you exactly how the students get to groups and what each member is supposed to do. It creates it for you. I think this could be fantastic because a lot of times PE teachers get stuck in, these are our units, these are the things we do. But now you can come up with new games and new activities every single year with the help of your super friendly neighborhood AI generator.
There it is. So in a pinch, this actually sounds like a really cool lesson plan idea, but I think in its more robust way, it actually becomes a way where the classroom teacher is the expert, knows their content, knows the age level, knows their students, which I think of all those is the most important. Can just show me another one, show me another one, show me another one. Pick and choose and actually curate their lesson plan, their activities. So it's less about, I have my lessons, I'm actually able to engage with this tool, get new ideas and then make it mine.
Exactly. And that's the idea. As teachers, we love to remix things to begin with, right? I don't think we've ever taken anything that we've been given by somebody else and used it at face value. We've always taken it and have adjusted it to meet the needs of the students who are in our class this year at this moment. So we're not going to take what a computer puts out and use it at face value. We're going to put our own spin on it. Right? That's just the way the world works. I don't know anybody who has taken a direct thing from Chat GPT and have only used the direct thing. They've always taken it as a first kind of draft and then add their own creative spin into it. And I think that's still good, right? For a variety of different things.
So, Joe, as we wrap up, do you have a favorite either tool, favorite place where teachers or educators can get started, or like a favorite current thing that is like your jam right now?
I want your teachers to try this out because it is so fun and so just creative, a creative process. I want you to try out Mid Journey. Mid Journey is an image creator, but it is so amazing. You do have to have a Discord account and that's free. And then you go to Mid Journey and you just join their Discord channel. But you can instantly create images from just the text prompt and they look phenomenal. You can even upload an image of yourself and ask it to put you in a spacesuit or ask you to put you in a fire uniform or anything like that, and they come out looking really good. I took my daughter's picture and I asked him to turn them into a Disney princess style, but with Pixar art formation. And it came out with these amazing pictures. It's just so fun. It's just so fun. So that's my jam right now, playing around with that image creation, because there's so many things I would love to draw, but I'm not a good drawer. Now I can have the computer do it for me.
You can find Joe Marquez on all the socials he has. Joe Marquez 70. I wonder what that number means. Maybe he asked GPT to give him a number. It's much funny in my head. So right after I recorded this with Joe, I got an email from the California Student Media Festival in its 57th year. Amazing festival, mostly around movie making. But there is a new category this year, and I want to just read this paragraph for you. I love what this festival is doing. New to this festival. And I'm just reading this for you. New to the Festival is an award for the best student use of generative artificial intelligence in school, including Chat, GPT, Dolly and others. Festival organizers believe AI is a tool that students must master as they've mastered calculators and cameras and are looking forward to seeing how this innovative technology is used by entrance. Are you getting, like what are those called? Bumps. Goose bumps. Are you getting goose bumps? That's so exciting. There's now an award that K twelve students can receive for how they interact with and use generative AI. It's already here. This is an award students will win this spring in California. So this is not some kind of future thing. This is really happening. And so, just as Joe is saying, those skills of being able to know what to type in, to generate a movie script, to generate a powerful image, these are the skills that our students need to be practicing. So, so exciting. All right, let's jump right into it. Up next, Minersall is walking through how she has been thinking about generative AI. We met outside on the Hillbrook outdoor stage area. So you're going to hear some birds and make sure some students walk around. It's a great time. So, Marisol, welcome. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. Who are you? Give us an introduction.
Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. I am the upper school director of Diversity Equity. Inclusion. I've also been traditionally a Stem teacher, so I'm pretty excited to be on this new expansion team and in downtown San Jose, which I'm also native to. So I'm really personally invested a lot of the projects that we're going to be doing this next year.
So exciting. And we actually were talking in the mailroom here on our Marchmont campus, and we have to distinguish which campuses we're talking about, which is also super exciting. AI in education, AI in the classroom. What does it mean for teachers, for students, for curriculum, for, like, for all the things. And as we were briefly talking, you immediately went to kind of, here's what I would do, here's what I was thinking, which is a different take. I hear a lot of people talk about school in general, learning, education, the platforms themselves. So walk us through kind of what your thoughts are, where your brains going with all of this?
Yeah, you know, like, I've seen a lot of different, like, forums of teachers on and forum boards and whatnot of like, how to, how to use GPT, chat GPT in your classroom and how to learn about it and whatnot and how to utilize it right. In the stage one phase of just understanding it and just learning how to access it as a tool. And I figured, yeah, that's probably stage one. And I think back to history, the time in history where there's been different technological inflection points in history.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And I think about the time that I was a teacher in the early I started teaching in the early two thousands, but there must have been a time like in the mid 1990s the 19 hundreds. Yeah, the 19 hundreds when, you know, we had AOL 1.0 and we had asked Jeeves, and basically the, the new thing was having access to search engines. And I can imagine the anxiety behind that of, oh, no, the students are going to have all this access, immediate access to facts and data. Right. And so I think a little bit about that. And we did a really good job pivoting that point. Like, okay, well, we started developing ideas of more creative inquiry and students centered learning and whatnot. And so I actually don't feel very anxious right now because I'm thinking, hey, let's embrace this technology. Now this technology is going to give us opportunity to not have to do this, you know, tedious type of learning where we're just the behold, teachers are the beholders of all knowledge. You know, we get to even remove ourselves even more. And students now don't have to can utilize this to do a lot of the things that we don't even want them to do and have and free up all this amazing space to do even more creative things. And so all the facts, all the OK, making sure that we have content written perfectly and grammatically correct and this and that, now some of that can clean it up for us. And students can be like, wait a minute, how do I insert my voice, my passion, who I am, into the greater picture of what we're doing in curriculum? And I don't know if I had mentioned to you in the lunchroom when I saw you, but I think I had mentioned to you that I'm like, oh, let me play with GPT chat, chat GPT. And I said something like, the school asked me to write a bio for the website, and I had all these bullet points and whatnot? And I had them write a bio for this person who has a Stem background, has a diversity inclusion nonprofit, this and that. And it did. It wrote me a really amazing bio with all these data points and details that and language. The way the language was phrased was too perfect. Right.
Interesting.
Yeah. And probably way better than I would have written it grammatically. I would have had to gone over a couple of times and make sure and dot all my eyes and cross on my T's. But the thing that was missing here was I couldn't see Muddy Soul reflected in this doc in the paragraph voice. Yeah, man. I was like, yeah, this sounds perfect, but it actually sounds like a computer wrote it. And I'm like, this doesn't give my vibe, my livelihood. Like, it was missing. And I thought about this. I'm like, you know what? I am going to write this bio. I don't think I mentioned this to you. I'm going to write this bio with my voice, and then I'm going to have Chat GPT clean it up a little bit.
Oh, nice. So you like you answered draft one.
Yes. And I said check for grammatical errors or certain sensing structures. And then I did that, but I wrote it with my voice first. And I didn't ask Chat GPT to actually construct it, just to kind of help me correct it and refine it. And that's when it hit me, and I said, here, these are how we can integrate it. Let's use it as a tool to actually do things that are going to save us a lot of time. Like an efficiency tool. I'm like, this is awesome. So I'm actually really excited about it. Honestly. Very excited.
Yeah. Well, and I love the pivot, how it started off as, here's some bullet points. Put this into a paragraph form check. Done. That's great, but not a great outcome. And then you actually pivoted. And it was let's actually use it as a way for revisions.
Exactly.
I'm seeing my goodness. When I was in the classroom right before we started recording, was talking about when I was teaching second grade, trying to give feedback to 2025 students. That's a lot. Even if you have the time, it takes time. And this actually you just have students type it out or even voice dictate, dump it in. You're getting feedback almost immediately to those students.
Yeah. And you know what's cool is you can do all the report pieces of information and at the end, add your voice, like, hey, great job, John. Great job. This I'm so excited for you. And so I feel like, yes, let's have this. Help me save some time. And then I can sprinkle Muddy Soul into it just to make sure that I see myself reflected in it. I'm actually really excited about this technology.
Nice. What else are you excited about? Or else have you played with. What else are you thinking about?
Yeah, so from my perspective, in terms of dei, I've been thinking a lot about belonging, and so I was thinking a little bit about how two sides right. So we're going to have to see some of the biases in the algorithm right. And how it can actually benefit us and how we have to be mindful and intentional about noticing things. Right. Because there could be some issues with all right. Like, is it making assumptions? Right?
Yes, it is.
Right?
It is. Right? Is there assumptions that we have to be intentional about? And there's blind spots, and also is it also able to catch some of my own blind spots and my implicit biases? Right. So I don't know the answers to this question yet because I haven't played with it enough, but I love just thinking about these things on both sides, like, okay, what are the biases it's going to have? And then on this side, wait, can it actually catch some things that I wouldn't normally see? So I'm thinking of this in the area of belonging, equity, inclusion, and how we do all this implicit bias training, how this is actually going to work for us, and also things that we have to think about before we actually use it.
Yeah. Well. I learned so much from Dr. Sophia Noble's book, algorithms of Oppression. She's a professor at UCLA, and her book focuses mostly on commercial search, Google Search engine, and how that algorithm has so much bias built into it. And Google has done a good job of addressing it after it comes up. One of the earlier examples was you type in beautiful women, and it was almost all thin, white, blonde women. And so now I think they've manually actually created that result, but they're having to go through and actually catch where all of their biases are because most of the people that built Google Search can you guess?
Yes, probably white men.
Yeah.
And what's crazy is thinking about that process with Google, there's a transformative part of doing that kind of work. Like the reactive part. Yes, we can talk about, okay, there's biases in that. And then also the noticing of those biases and then the retroactively, okay, let's do this manual piece. I'm wondering how we can use that model of recursive thinking design. Thinking of, okay, there's a new technology that's going to be widely used. There's probably going to be a lot of biases involved. How can we actually have students being constantly noticing those things and bringing them to our attention and using them in curriculum? Isn't that cool?
That actually needs to become part of how we use it with students. It's explicitly naming the bias. And Chat GPT, amongst all the AI generative platforms out there, it seems like there's dozens of more every day. Chat GPT pretty explicitly says there's going to be bias in this. We'll work on it. This is new, just so you know, get mad at us. We don't quite know how it works and how it generates stuff, but they'll be biased.
Yeah. And I love the fact that I'm really big on the noticing piece. Right. We can't address something unless we start noticing. Right.
Yeah.
And so naming it, noticing it, analyzing this, teaching the students to analyze it through a critical lens without demonizing, oh, this company is horrible, because let's actually unpack some of this, and let's see and understand what bias means and all these different things, like you said, the algorithms and the oppression and whatnot. And let's not use it to demonize any group or company. Let's use it to continue to educate ourselves and to notice those things. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for learning and embedding it into our curriculum and finally just using it as a tool.
And what I love about that, the connection I just made, is that I think a lot of teachers, as they're going through their own dei learning, are thinking, this is great. This is powerful. I don't have time to do this with students. And so what you actually just described shifts, how we spend time. It's less about actually knocking out the traditional five paragraph essay, and it becomes more about unpacking the bias of the content you've been given.
Sounds like you're doing SEL and deja work embedded completely into the curriculum.
Yeah. Which has always been our goal. And I feel like the educators I know have always felt stuck with that. In the earlier days of technology, if we go back to kind of the beginning of the Internet and using that, joe, who we just heard from, was sharing that when he was in his undergrad, he was not allowed to use the Internet. That was not a resource. You could not use that for some time.
Oh, yeah, right.
And I feel like a lot of people in some schools have already come out saying, you can't do that here. But this feels like an opportunity where we're like, how do we actually incorporate all of these things that we've been trying to incorporate? And this feels like it's been a very quick shift in that direction.
Yeah. I'm just really piggybacking on what you said. I'm really excited about being able to start analyzing things like this with a critical lens and modeling what it looks like to say, hey, you know what? There are some things wrong with something and not feel like we have to be perfect, but that there's a vulnerability in acknowledging that this technology is not perfect and there's things that need to be modified and how that translates into our own personal growth. Right. We make mistakes. Right. We take accountability. We analyze our own behaviors, and we give grace. You know, it's like that piece of how we do things with technology really relates to how we interact with others and our relationship to ourselves.
What are you looking forward to next on this artificial intelligence education train that's hurtling so quickly? So quickly?
What I'm looking forward to is I'm looking forward to more teachers being excited about this and maybe collaborating in ways that we can utilize this technology effectively and intentionally and being able to share that with other teachers that may be a little bit anxious about that. Like, oh, what is this going to do to my curriculum and this and that, and not in a way of saying, this is a new way and that's the old way. More so, like, hey, guess what? There's a few teachers doing this. Would you like to learn? So I'm excited about more of us getting familiar and getting our feet wet in this and being able to then engage other educators and how to utilize it. And I keep going back to that inflection point, maybe in the 90s. Very similar. Right. I wasn't a teacher at that time, and I'm thinking there was very similar conversations and anxieties and the teachers at that time, they jumped that hurdle. Right. So I'm excited about getting to that point.
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
All right, our final guest, Annie Maclaff. Before we go much more forward, let's actually take a step back. Annie's going to walk us through how our journey at Hillbrook started with artificial intelligence just about a year ago. It's definitely not a new thing here at Hillbrook, and things have changed so, so much in the last year, let alone the last week. Take it away, Annie.
I'm Annie Macula. Ms. Mac to students. And I run our Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship.
So what I am so excited about, and what actually got me most excited was what you were doing with our students. Was that a full year ago around Dolly?
It was. It was a full year ago. It's hard to believe, right?
Yeah. So you've been actually working with AI with students for a year, which puts you right on the very edge of, I think, students actually using AI in the school space. So can you walk us through what you did with them and then we'll run from there?
Absolutely, yes. I'll say upfront. I think there are always moments when you can sense a shift happening in education. And in my moments of overwhelm, my way of managing overwhelm fear, wonderings is to try to find an opportunity to dive head first into the thing that is making me pause or making me wonder or making me curious. And I think this is a perfect example of that presenting itself, which is that I didn't know much about AI a year and a half ago, other than just kind of the more generic ways that we were talking about it as a future technology and as a tool. And I hadn't really spent much time thinking about what the impact of AI would be in classrooms and on the education sector itself until I had an opportunity to spend some time with folks from Microsoft and other tech companies where I was mostly just a listener and getting to hear how they were talking about the new technology, specifically this AI platform. Dolly Too. And I was sharing a little bit about some of the projects my students were working on. And then about a week later got an email from Kevin Scott to invite me to be part of helping students use the technology to unlock their creativity. And anytime someone says anything about unlocking creativity and supporting students imagination, you are in. Pretty much I'm in. It's my favorite thing about teaching, and I think kids have so much to offer the world and they're ingenious brains and just finding ways, I think, to amplify that. And that's absolutely what happened. So we spent about 48 hours almost consecutively. It was a total deep dive. We took over my classroom space on campus, turned it into an almost movie studio set, and worked with children from kindergarten all the way to 8th grade to use the technology to help them unlock a creative idea that didn't currently exist. So the prompt was what's, something that you could imagine would be good for the world that doesn't currently exist? And some of this was rooted in projects that students were working on already, in Social Impact and Leadership Class or in Reach Beyond Block. But a lot of it was rooted in just kind of conversations with kindergarteners, second graders, fifth graders about their ideas for the world, really bold, big, aspirational, silly, fun, magical ideas. And the Dolly Two technology that we were working with people at Microsoft and other tech companies to explore.
It was.
A partner in our learning. It didn't drive the learning, it didn't curate the learning. It was simply a tool to unlock some visuals and really kind of validate what some of the students were saying. And I think there's moments in my teaching Bill, maybe you've experienced this, too, where a kid is trying to explain something to you and you're trying really hard to join them in excitement. But either it's connected to something that they've done previously that you weren't privy to, or the image that they're conjuring up in their mind is very different than what the image that you're conjuring up in your mind is. And so there's this disconnect and both sides, like student and teacher, student and parent, kid and parent, feel kind of disconnected or frustrated and I want to understand what you're saying by an underwater school, but I'm not sure I'm getting it. Totally. And so that's what I loved about this Dolly Two platform and the ability to see it really just amplify creativity and unlock the imagination and again serve as a tool alongside of learning, not as a replacement for learning.
Yeah, so I was describing this to another friend that runs a couple of schools up in Sacramento. And the example John gave to me and it's stuck in my head because I ended up using the supplementation printer. We have to make a T shirt for him based on this, and I think I still remember it. He typed this into Dolly as the prompt, give me an image in the Renaissance style of painting of two dogs eating hot dogs sipping on champagne in soft leather chairs. And sure enough, he got that visual. There's this random thing. I think he actually said hot dogs sipping on champagne. But the way he typed it in, it gave you dogs eating hot dogs. And so it was like, okay, so if I were to do this again, I need to actually work on my language. Right? So I think for language arts teachers, instead of being like, oh, all these AI things are going to kind of destroy our curriculum. And like the five paragraph essay with Chat GPT, it actually is going to force students to be more descriptive and really look at what they put into it, what they get out of it, and then how they actually revise it so that what's in their head actually shows up as an image in Dolly.
Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think people's questions and wonderings are real and I want to validate that. There's still a lot we're exploring and making sense of. And so as schools and educators dive into this topic of the future of AI, my encouragement is like, be part of the conversation that's shaping it. Right. Like that's I think the opportunity, which is that we don't want this technology to exist separate from curriculum, separate from learning, separate from best practices of teaching. And so there's a moment to really embrace our entrepreneurial instincts. And to your point, what are some creative assignments? I love my friend Aaron, who's our entrepreneur in residence, he runs on Ruler, did a really cool experiment with AI recently with Chat GPT that he essentially asked what the dangers of using Chat GPT would be for school and then read the essay that was created by the technology. And I love that. Like, what a creative way to analyze through writing and through assessment the dangers and the worries of the technology itself.
I love that so much. Also, if we just backtrack and put a little bow on the end of that story. That movie studio that was your classroom was actually featured in Microsoft build in a video that Kevin did that's the Microsoft Developer Conference. And I love that one. It ended up coming out so, so well.
We had so much fun. It will forever be a highlight of what learning alongside kids can look like. For me, I was still learning the technology and they were learning it and we were kind of just in a total state of flow. These are ideas we want to help make them happen. We're on a movie set, so it kind of feels like there's high stakes, but we're also just like at school, having lunch outside at the normal hours. So it wasn't the stakes were high enough that I think it felt real and they knew they were being part of they got to be part of something really special, but it really was just rooted in, like, what if this was an extension of our social entrepreneurship learning toolkit? And what if this was an extension of our social impact and leadership class, not a test out, this technology that no one knows anything about and it's really scary, right?
So let's run down that rabbit hole and all those what ifs. So you think deeply and have many deep conversations around social impact, social entrepreneurship. What does school look like with Dolly being able to go text to image or chat, GPT being able to generate paragraphs and essays and letters and stuff? How do you see school changing? How do you see social impact work being amplified with all these new tools? What are you excited about?
I'm so excited about so many things. I'll start with, like, the idea of assessment has been on my mind a lot. We have this amazing new upper school head. We have a really visionary program and leadership team that is instead of kind of sitting back and watching the future of education be shaped by others, is really actively involved in what that can look like. And we're really lucky and fortunate to have parents and kids of the school that are creative and curious and eager to share what they're experiencing in their world. So one of the things I've been thinking a lot of is how might students show mastery and outcomes of non writing communication? We've done this with podcasts. We've done it with various forms of visual writing exercises. But if this was technology used alongside of traditional essay writing, then you're not replacing the importance of just being a really great communicator. Instead, you're amplifying what it means to be a great communicator and you're amplifying the ability to influence and shape arguments. And I've been using this language for a little while now, which is like, it's important to know how to make an argument, and then it's important to challenge yourself to make a better argument that when we write an essay, it's often like, okay, I wrote it, I turned it in. I got a grade back, I got feedback. I made one or two iterations. But the beauty of doing writing and having writing live on virtual platforms, whether it's Google Docs or something else, is that it's an iterative ongoing learning experience. So what if teachers assigned fewer writing assignments and instead really ramped up the revision and feedback side of things? Professor from University of Kentucky, John Nash has been pushing on this for a while, which is the ability to get video feedback on your essays and then have an iterative ongoing conversation with AI about the topic that you're writing. I think there's also a moment where we could look at engaging students in conversations about how and why they write and that AI can't replace the how and whys of this. So really getting at the core of intellectual rigor and having AI facilitate that conversation could be super interesting. Again, not replacing the act of writing, but offering it as a tool and offering it as an amplification for the skill of communication and influencing.
Right. And this is also actually right in line with what NCTE is sharing. I was so excited when the National Council of Teachers in English shared actually, I have the tab open in front of me shared that alphanumeric print is no longer able to serve solely as the key focus for literary composition in a modern era.
That's super interesting. I have so many questions, and I hear that right. What if we asked Chat Gbt those exact questions that are popping up when we read prompts like that or statements like that? I'm even looking at Aaron's article and his first five questions. Hey, Chat GPT, why are you dangerous for education? Can you expand on your answer in more detail and provide additional examples? Okay, now, can you create an outline for an article about why you are dangerous for education? How about some additional points to each section? Okay, now remove any parts about the potential benefits. I only want to hear the dangers. So you can quickly see how learning is amplified, learning is deepened, and the question then becomes, how do we help kids fall in love with being collaborators? Discussion based learners, comfortable with feedback and really interrogators of why things are the way they are and imagineers of why they can't be different, or imagineers, I guess, of the way they could be.
I love that. If there's not another reason for what education is or what it could be, I don't know what that would be.
And I think about this a little bit in how I engage with Siri in my own just day to day life, which is Siri for now, is like a tool that is sometimes helpful and sometimes not helpful. And my ability to differentiate between that is like my own learning in this. Of course, people have made mistakes. They've used Siri or used technology, used Google Maps in a way that was super unhelpful. I really can't imagine my life before Google Maps. The number of places I need to go and need support and need it quickly to be able to get to the thing that's next is. It's just become such an important tool to have available to me. It doesn't mean that it has fundamentally made me a better or worse driver. That's still a skill set that I need to know how to do on my own. Drive a car.
Yeah.
It's a tool, though. Right. It's a way of helping us be better at our skills and at our craft. And there will be moments where it really is not the right tool and we mess up in using it or it does something problematic in our learning. And that in and of itself, to me is just such a moment of reflection and an opportunity to again apply that entrepreneurial mindset and say, how do we make this better?
Absolutely. And those are the conversations that are actually probably the most valuable with students. We thought I was going to do this, it did that. It's problematic in these ways or it's actually incorrect in these ways. Let's talk about that. Right. So it's not a very straight, like, point A to point B. Check that off the list. It becomes this really messy, interesting thing.
Absolutely. And I can't tell you how often, even though I carry a laptop around, even though I love the ease and wonder of doing everything on Google Docs and on technology, I still have a blank notebook and a pencil and a pen at all times with me. I still write handwritten notes of thank you letters. I still doodle and draw when I'm in meetings because it helps my brain focus. So I think the fear of replacement has always been in existence around new innovations.
Sure.
And I wonder, like, how do we, instead of feeling like it's replacing something, we can reframe it to be rooted in helping students see the value in writing and communicating and how important we feel their ideas are and that they're just learning a new tool to amplify their ideas at a deeper level.
I love that so much. You wrap that up so well for us. Any last thoughts about this topic? Anything that you're focused on? Any people you're learning from? What's next for you? Kind of on this topic.
I am so lucky to be surrounded by really thoughtful, curious, smart people who come from all different sides of this. From Kevin Scott to Aaron to John Nash, christian Talbot folks that I really love kind of being pushed in my own thinking and really be able to have a safe space to share like oh, I'm not sure about that or I think I'm going to messed up. That's been amazing. I've also spent time with people that are pointing out some of the major challenges with the technology and then we've gotten a brainstorm around what it would look like for us to advocate for changes and really live through defining a technology that is still evolving.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think I'm eager. I'm going to spend a couple of days at south by Southwest.edu and get to be a learner and really hear from people that are using AI in lots of really great ways. I'm going to hopefully get to spend some time at Aspen Ideas Festival this summer doing the same thing. And I would just invite and encourage people that are feeling like there's unknowns, to join someone that is looking at it through a unique lens and help kind of shape our own thinking based less in like the extremes and more in the opportunities and the tools.
I love that so much. Well, Danny, thanks for joining us, for showing us your lens and the way you're thinking about it. You are amazing. So I'm going to leave you with a joke here. I took a photo of some colored pencils. Yes, I take photos of colored pencils, posted it on Instagram, on the gram as kids call it, and the caption was like, give me a dad joke because I know there's a dad joke sitting somewhere in there. And so Sam, one of our parents here at Hillbrook Chat, GPT colon. So clearly this was a prompt. So here's a joke from GPT, from Sam. Why did the dad sharpen all the colored pencils in the house? I don't know. Why? Because he wanted to make sure his kids were drawn to their homework. That's great. So for jokes? Yes. For using with students. Depends who you're talking with. We hear from the people in this episode then. Yeah, this is for sure something to be playing with, something to be keeping an eye on, for sure something to be interested in, something to be excited about, something to be weary of, something to be maybe a little bit scared about. Depending on when you're listening to this, the latest news around AI bots is that Microsoft and Bing Search had a very limited release. And a few people, most notably Kevin Ruse from the New York Times, has spent quite a bit of time on it, seeing just how far they can push it. And depending on which headline and which article you're reading, the being AI bot, which again is very limited release, was belligerent, would fall in love with him, all sorts of things. And keeping in mind, as Joe told us earlier in the episode, it's just what these bots are doing is skimming billions of words that humans have written and trying its best to kind of guess at, based on what it's been given, what an appropriate response would be. We're very much in the early age, but the last thing I'm thinking about before Google Docs was Google Docs Q, who Joe works with, cuee.org Q. Mike Lawrence, who was their executive director for a long time, put out an episode when YouTube was really early on. He called it the infinite thinking machine. So before it was Google Docs, it was called rightly. And Mike was a high school English teacher and he was like, oh my gosh, there's this website that's sort of like Microsoft Word and like your students can type at the same time, like on a website, but it looks like like a document, it's called rightly. And then pretty cool, quickly Google picked it up and now we use Google Docs all the time. I think this is the early, earlier version of that, where a few teachers are going to be like, there's something here, I don't know what it is. But I think, as Annie shared, the more we start to engage with it, the more we ask students to be creative with it, the more we start to reimagine with what's possible in education and how these tools, these brand new tools, these tools that we are just beginning to understand how we might use in our own lives, let alone in education. At some point, we're going to laugh at episodes like this where we're like, I don't know what's going to happen. We will figure it out. And I think the most we can do is just read a lot about it, talk a lot about it and try it out with students. If you're willing to keep in mind this feels like a little disclaimer, keep in mind the terms of use must be 18 years older to participate. This is the type of thing where particular chat, GPT, you do need to be 18 to have your own account. And so our students should not be doing this on their own, but as a whole class activity. Yes. Oh, yes, very much. Yes. There's so much to learn, to think about, to try out, to discuss. It's really exciting times. So with that, a big thank you to our three guests, to Joe Tomarisol, to Annie for joining us. My name is Bill Selic. Thanks for listening.