Issue 13 • September 18, 2024

Last week I started a exciting new role. I’m my local school district’s AI Consultant. Council Bluffs Community School District’s has put together a workgroup of K-12 educators who are helping guide district artificial intelligence policy and usage, and I’m working part time to coach the workgroup and to develop resources.

It’s already been rewarding to give teachers fresh ideas for their lessons. You can look forward to reading about some of my AI consulting adventures in this issue and future issues of this newsletter.

Word Wizardry 🤖

The focus of my AI workgroup right now is how teachers can use chatbots to help them plan lessons and create resources. One of my favorite things to share is using a chatbot to generate ways to get students discussing and interacting with their vocabulary words.

Below are clever example prompts for making vocabulary review a little more fun.

🤔 Would You Rather: Get questions you can pose to the class.

“Write 10 Would You Rather questions for 4th graders. Make sure each choice contains one of these words: accelerate, advantage, capabilities, friction, gravity, identity, inquiry, thrilling.”

😎 Emojification: Display an emoji representation and invite students to guess the vocabulary word.

“Symbolically represent each vocabulary word for 4th graders using only emojis: accelerate, advantage, capabilities, friction, gravity, identity, inquiry, thrilling. Explain why you chose each emoji.”

🤪 Crazy Combos: Show students a generated image and ask them to come up with the sentence that it’s illustrating (including the 3 vocabulary words they are studying).

“Use three of these words in a silly sentence and then illustrate it with a cartoon for 4th graders: accelerate, advantage, capabilities, friction, gravity, identity, inquiry, thrilling.”

AI-Assisted Activities ✨

Teachers can make quizzes, polls, and lessons and deliver them to students with Quizizz. It’s been a favorite of mine for years. Last year Quizizz added AI. The AI can generate a draft quiz from documents, text, links, or videos.

For existing activities, Quizizz AI actions help you improve the activity by adding similar questions, generaring answer explanations, translating, and more. In fact, the “More options” include converting questions to real-world scenarios, simplifying questions, adding a thematic narrative, and adding student names into the questions.

Slick Slides Solution 🛝

Exit tickets are a quick way to check if students understood the lesson or how they felt about their learning. Teachers can use this information to adjust their teaching and provide extra help to students who might need it.

Ditch That Textbook cleverly uses the theme builder in Google Slides to make an exit ticket generator. Make a copy of the Google Slides document.

Choose one of the 20 exit tickets before assigning to students by going to Slide menu and choosing Edit Theme (or by using the dropdown menu

Paste Power 📋

Like you, I do a lot of copying and pasting—even more nowadays as I copy responses from AI chatbots. There are times where I want to copy multiple different items and then paste them in separate spots. That’s where a clipboard manager.

What you copy is stored on an invisible clipboard, but clipboard manager lets you see a history of items you’ve recently copied. This allows you to paste any of those items—not just the last thing you copied.

Each platform has a different way of accessing a clipboard manager.

On a Windows PC:

📋 Press the Windows Key + V

On a Chromebook:

📋 Press the Launcher key + V to see the last 5 things you copied.

P.S. The Launcher key is below Tab. It is marked with a circle or a magnifying glass. Another name for this key is the Everything button.

On a Mac:

A clipboard manager is not built into macOS, so you’ll have to install an app.

📋 Install the free CopyLess 2 Clipboard Manager app.

Alternatively, I’ve been using the Paste app for several years. It’s $30 a year, but the price is worth it to me because it syncs my clipboards across my two Macs and has a pretty interface.

Fall Fonts 🍁

It's that time of year when the fonts start to change for fall.

The fonts below are Google Fonts, and you can find them in Google Workspace or at fonts.google.com.

Sensational ShiftinEdu 🌴

I’ve written about the ShiftinEdu learning event for educators a couple times now. I absolutely adore this conference, the hosting school, and the organizers. They’ve released the full agenda, and I invite you to take a look.

There's so much to look forward to, including:

• 💄 Making over lessons with AI's help

• 🔎 Sorting fact from fiction

• 🖌️ Generating custom illustrations with AI

• 🤓 Using emojis strategically

• 🧠 Thinking in the age of AI

• 🎬 Inspiring future filmakers

• 👉 Me! I'm co-presenting with my twins!

If you are able to get yourself to Miami October 10 & 11, you’ve got to attend. Secure your spot.

Cardboard Cutter 📦

Today is National Cheeseburger Day. 🍔 Do you remember the big cheeseburger emoji controversy in 2017? Google added cheese to the burger emoji in Android 8.0, and people were offended that the emoji depicted the cheese underneath the patty. Google, to its credit, immediately fixed the emoji in Android 8.1.

Smiles from Iowa,

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