Issue 10 • Date August 28, 2024

Webinar Wisdom 🪄

FETC’s Back to School EdTech Tools webinar took place August 14th. I missed it live, but I did catch the 75 minute recording. I thought I’d give you some highlights.

Four dynamic presenters each shared two favorite things.

Stephanie D. Jacobs, Coordinator of Technology Integration

Canva’s “Transform into Doc” is a time-saver. Transform a presentation into a handout or notes document. While viewing a presentation design in Canva, click Resize and Magic Switch in the top toolbar, and choose Transform into Doc. You can pick a suggestion like outline, blog post, video script, or poem. Or, you can describe the kind of document you have in mind. Canva’s AI rearranges elements and processes text to stylishly fit into an 8.5 by 11 inch document.

Google Gemini is like your personal assistant. Stephanie uses Gemini to compose or revise her email messages. She also uses Gemini for instant lesson inspiration, creating visual aids, and for multilingual support.

Kim Zajac, Speech-Language Pathologist

Adobe Express is a versatile tool for creating visual content. You can can create graphics, voiceovers, videos, and animations. The Adobe Education Exchange is a community for sharing resources and ideas. There are monthly activities in the Adobe Express Creative Challenge page.

Magic School has a set of 60+ easy to use, AI-powered tools that help lesson plan, differentiate, communicate, and more. Kim mentioned using Magic School to create instructional materials, differentiate for success, engage families and communities, and even write jokes.

Jake Miller, Personalized Learning & EdTech Specialist

Rather than juggling many different tools, Jake suggests Padlet. It can replace Flip and Jamboard (two popular tools from last year that are now discontinued). Jake talked about a Padlet board’s visitor permissions, link permissions, breakout links, moderation levels, and submission request links.

Diffit is an AI tool for differentiating instructional content. Given a topic, document, any text, or a vocabulary list, Diffit generates a reading passage, summary, vocab list, questions, and writing prompts. Jake showed a feature that aligns the generated content to specific skills or standards. He also demonstrated how you can change the sources used to generate a passage. 

Holly Clark, AI Education Strategist

Holly showcased an example of a digital book authored in Book Creator. The student used AI to help her create the book, so the title page says “by Sabrina and AI.” Canva can be accessed within Book Creator, so Holly shows how to use Canva’s Magic Media to generate an illustration to include in the book. 

Book Creator doesn’t have an AI chatbot, so Sabrina used School AI’s school-friendly chatbot as a thought partner. School AI’s “spaces” for students allow the teacher to view their students’ interactions with the chatbot.

Thanks to Jen Womble for hosting the webinar and thanks to the speakers for their presentations. My notes certainly don’t capture all the awesomeness that was shared.

🔥 Hot Tip: A nice thing about watching a recording is that you can speed up the playback by clicking the gear icon.

Cautious Considerations 🤖

Cognitive Resonance is a think tank that advises organizations about the strength and limitations of AI. They hope to see AI used “in ways that are socially beneficial and in harmony with human cognition.”

Cognitive Resonance recently published an informational PDF. Education Hazards of Generative AI provides a basic scientific overview of how Large Language Models (LLMs) work and examines the implications for educators.

The PDF features one-pagers about the education hazards posed by:

• AI’s design

• AI’s training

• AI supplanting knowledge and skills

• Speculation about AI’s future

It’s a short read, and it’s good to consider the ways AI can both help and harm learning.

Flow into FigJam 🗒️

Google’s Jamboard application is shutting down. It will go to view-only mode on October 1st. Then on December 31, 2024, everything created in Jamboard will be deleted.

FigJam can be your new Jamboard. Not only does it have “jam” in the name, FigJam is a collaborative whiteboard—similar to Jamboard.

FigJam features an enormous workspace that usually requires zooming and scrolling. In addition to pens, stickies, text boxes, and shapes, FigJam also has stamps, sections, stickers, templates, widgets, connectors, and much more.

You can import your existing Jamboard files into FigJam. Here’s how:

1. Log into FigJam.

2. Click the Import button.

3. Click Add Jamboard files.

4. Connect your Google account.

5. Hold down Shift and click to select multiple files or do a Control/Command and A to select all.

6. Click Select and wait for the import to complete.

At first I selected all of my 132 Jamboard files. The importer choked on the number of files, so I did about 30 at a time. Each batch of 30 took some time—about 30 minutes.

After the import, I noticed that each page of multi-page Jamboards were converted to sections in FigJam.

New to FigJam? Check out Michelle Emerson’s video, How to Get Started Using FigJam with Students. The video covers the basics of getting started with FigJam, as well as how to use it for collaborative learning activities.

Start students with learning FigJam basics in the own copy of First Lesson in FigJam.  

It’s good to know these FigJam keyboard shortcuts: 

• Shift + 1 → Zooms to fit the entire canvas into your window (great for getting a complete view of the whole work area)

• Shift + 2 → Zooms in on whatever is selected (great for viewing a section)

FigJam is free for teachers and students.

Prompting Productive Participation 🙋‍♂️

I recently shared a quick teaching tip on Threads:

Instead of asking students, "Does anyone have any questions?" try asking, "What questions do you have?" or "Ask me two questions."

It turns out, many teachers are grappling with the same challenge of encouraging students to ask relevant questions when prompted. Fellow educators replied with handy advice. I’ve embedded their responses in this blog post.

• Turning silence into conversation

• Shifting the focus

• Visualizing questions

• Building confidence

• Addressing the root of the problem

• Clarifying expectations

• Don’t forget wait time

Evade Embarrassing Email Error 📧

Want to avoid those oops moments when you accidentally hit send on an unfinished email?

Compose your email and do not add a recipient until you are ready to send. This makes it impossible to accidentally send an email before it’s ready.

If you are replying to a message, you could delete the recipient’s email address, compose your message, and then add the recipient back after your reply is ready to go.

TeachAid Treasures 💎

I wrote about TeachAid, the new AI lesson planning tool for teachers, in Issue 9. While I think the power of TeachAid is its ability to create a cohesive series of lessons, you can use TeachAid to generate individual resources: assessments, rubrics, content, lessons, and activities.

In case you haven’t signed up yet, I invite you to create an account. It’s free!

I receive a referral fee for each sign up. Signing up gets you access to all of TeachAid’s unit planning tools.

Smiles from Iowa,

Links to Amazon products are affiliate links, and I may get paid a commission if you make a purchase.

Subscribe at learninginhand.com