Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 159: Using AI to Turn Professional Development into Classroom Gold

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Ep 159: Using AI to Turn Professional Development into Classroom Gold · New Teacher Talk

My name is Josh Amstutz,
and I'm a high school math teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Today,
I'm going to talk to you about how to take advantage of
opportunities presented to you to promote leadership and
growth within the field of education.
Let me just start by saying that I understand this is the
time of year that is so difficult for teachers.
I myself have five children of my own,
and it is almost impossible to think about the schedules of
organizing dinners in the evening time while getting kids
off to practice,
while taking advantage of the leadership roles that I
currently have within my district,
in addition to actually planning and implementing these
plans for the classes that I teach.
So at this point of the year, I know for many people,
it is so difficult to be able to think about anything other
than survival.
It's that time of year when classroom management is really
at the most paramount place where you want to make sure
that you get your kids in line so that you're good to go by
the end of the first quarter.
And I know that there are just so many things that just
keep piling and piling and piling.
So many times,
the last thing that people think about is how to promote
leadership and growth within the classroom.
Well,
I'm here today to talk to you about some strategies and
solutions that, quite honestly,
I want to share countrywide. Things that have been so just
beneficial in helping me to be able to organize my thoughts
and organize my efficiency level in the school while still
promoting that idea of leadership in the classroom.
So after the podcast today,
I will be sharing some resources out for you.
One of them is super great because it is a compilation of
opportunities for teachers that I have met on many
different fellowships and conferences over the past five
years.
There are opportunities for ELA teachers,
for math teachers, for science teachers,
opportunities for elementary teachers, for librarians,
for media specialists, opportunities for everybody.
And the great thing is that all of these opportunities are
free to teachers.
They are supported by either government agencies or other
agencies or nonprofits that have a vested interest in just
improving education.
The second tool that I hope to be able to share with you is
a strategy to be able to use artificial intelligence to
your advantage.
And I know that right now there are many different people
with many different feelings about artificial intelligence.
Some people are the early adopters,
some people use it but aren't really necessarily sure how
to use it.
And there's other people who say, hey,
I'm gonna stay away from this, I'm not ready for it.
And that's completely fine.
So let me start first with a story that just happened this
year on how I've been able to promote leadership and growth
using some of these tools.
So this past summer,
I had the amazing opportunity to be able to study for two
weeks in Germany through something called the Transatlantic
Outreach Program.
Now this program has two different sections to it.
One of the pieces of the program is for STEM teachers and
me being a math teacher, that was my tract.
And the other program was for history teachers.
But the cool thing about this program is that the itinerary
for this program and fellowship is centered around first
American culture,
understanding German culture and what it means to be a part
of contemporary Germany.
But also how can we learn from what Germany is doing and
implement those strategies and items into the American
education system?
So for two weeks,
I got a chance to travel around to multiple different
cities, Bremen, Germany, Braunschweig, Germany, Berlin,
Germany, meeting with professors, meeting with teachers,
meeting with community members and business partners,
learning about the education system.
And I cannot think of any one other fellowship that did
more for me in my educational career than this fellowship
did this past summer.
From visiting wind turbines and being able to incorporate
the stats and data around it into my math classes,
to being able to go to UREF,
which is a campus with innovative think tanks,
trying to reimagine what energy looks like in the world.
The opportunities that were presented to me via this
fellowship were unbelievable.
So much so that I had notebooks full of information that I
did not know what to do with them.
And I think all of us can kind of relate to these kinds of
situations too, where you have these experiences,
whether planned or not, where the ideas are flowing.
I mean, maybe sometimes for you,
it might be in the car ride from one place to another on
vacation.
Maybe you just have some think time to yourself.
Maybe you're on a walk or you're on a run and these ideas
come into your head.
And I am one who,
when I have the ideas that I like to keep in mind,
I like to write them down.
And then what happens is I lose track of them.
Or, you know, I forget to look back at those notes.
I forget to look back at that notebook because of the time
of year I'm in, I'm always saying, hey,
it's gonna be next week.
It's gonna be, you know, next month.
I'll finally get to it and I never do.
So with that being said,
I felt very scared after this fellowship that I was gonna
lose all that amazing content.
And so I thought to myself, well,
what can I do to be able to not only just help myself,
but help all of my colleagues,
all of my friends that I teach with be able to take this
information and learn from it and help them to be able to
incorporate into their classrooms as well as me in my
classroom.
So what I decided to do was use some knowledge that I have
around artificial intelligence to be able to create my own
chatbot in just a free AI space like Gemini.
And so what I did is I said, okay, well,
I'm gonna follow these four rules to prompting AI to
hopefully set up a chatbot for myself so that not only can
I input all the information immediately now that I have
time, right before the school year starts,
But I can also hopefully use it as a continuing
conversation where everything that I learn about these
concepts in the context of my own classroom,
I can actually add into the chat.
And then I thought to myself, well,
hopefully I can actually be able to use this then not only
to create projects for myself and give myself ideas,
but be able to share them out to the rest of the staff
members at my high school.
So what I ended up doing is I sat down and I said, okay,
well what's the first piece in prompting?
Well, that first piece is explaining who you are.
So in my prompt,
and I will share all of this via the podcast as well,
but in my prompt, I said, all right, you know, I'm,
I'm a high school math teacher.
I happened to run something called the academy of global
studies.
I have this experience in Germany called the transatlantic
outreach program.
And I really want to create a chat bot to be able to house
all this information.
So that first piece of using AI is truly setting up the
stage.
Who are you as a person and what is your purpose for
creating the AI chat bot or for the prompt?
The next piece, then it goes into the, the what,
like what information are you going to be giving the AI
chat bot?
The interesting thing about AI in education is that you can
use it to be able to help you to your advantage and be able
to get information from online resources that normally
would take a really long time to search.
If you're just using something like a Google search bar.
So I said, okay, listen,
I have all this information that I have from Germany,
and I would like this to be a continuing conversation where
the AI chat bot learns everything that I'm putting in,
but also has the ability to search all of the interwebs on
all this other information that might connect the
information I input.
So in my what section, I put in that,
I put in all my experiences that I had in Germany for two
weeks.
I went through all my notebooks and I typed them into this
chat bot.
The next piece though,
is after you define who you are in the,
what you needed to find what it is you're,
you're looking for.
So what I decided to do was tell the chat bot and I said,
listen, my goals here are actually very simple.
I want to be able to have this as a resource so that I can
remember what I was so excited about.
And I also want to be able to connect that to things that I
and my friends are doing in the classroom.
So please, please, please, can you chat bot,
give me some ideas using all the information I input from
my experience as a basis.
And then the last piece is your target audience.
Like who is the AI chat bot writing for?
So I said, okay, AI chat bot,
I want you to write this in a way that's going to make
sense to teachers.
That's going to use your teacher pedagogy.
That's going to incorporate different types of strategies
in the classroom,
but also something that's going to be interesting and
readable for not just me as the creator of the chat bot,
but for other teachers.
So I can get them excited about these opportunities and
hopefully encourage them to be able to take advantage of
some fellowships themselves.
So I create this AI chat bot,
I put in all my information and I cannot tell you how
amazing it has been from the start of the year,
which for me was mid August to now mid September.
I am able to prompt this chat bot now with ideas that I
have in my classroom.
And it can then create projects for me and story problems,
applications and activities based upon these experiences in
Germany.
So finally I have found a way to take all of those ideas
that I have had in my mind and be able to put them in a
place that is usable that can help me be a better teacher.
And more importantly, saves me so much time.
So I hope everyone listening can kind of realize the impact
that this kind of model can have on education.
So now I actually have chat bots for everything.
I created a chat bot for that.
I created a chat bot for mindfulness activities in the
classroom,
created a chat bot for conference ideas to be able to
present at different conferences.
And how can I share out the good news to everybody else and
help them in their classrooms?
And it has saved me literally hours of time on a weekly
basis, simply because it houses all the information.
So I am here today to talk to you about this new innovative
technology, and how it can help you to be able to innovate,
to be able to lead and to be able to be that go to person
in your district.
All it takes is a person with an idea,
a person with an experience.
And if you are that person listening, you're like, listen,
I feel like I have a lot of good ideas,
or I feel like I am a leader,
but I just don't know what next steps to take.
I encourage you, I implore you, you know,
start with putting things down.
In improvement science,
one of the best ways to be able to improve a system is by
making the data visible.
So all of those notebooks that you have,
all of those ideas that have been sifting around in your
head, put them in a chat bot, put them onto an AI system,
so it can help orchestrate and construct ideas for you
based upon all of the information that is input.
And not only that,
but actively seek out opportunities to grow as an educator.
The reason why I am still just as passionate now in
education as I was in year one is simply because I have not
stopped trying to progress.
Every year I am looking for the next thing to do or the
next thing to improve or the next thing to follow and some
people who might be in the same year of education as myself
might have that same kind of passion others like you know
my older brother might be a little bit later in the
education career where they have maybe about 10 years left
and they just need something new to be able to innovate and
to make them passionate even more so than they already are
about education,
and I will be honest with you the fellowships and
opportunities for teachers that exist are unparalleled
never did I think that I could travel to multiple different
countries and get it paid for as a teacher to be able to
benefit my students and my community.
So closing out the podcast today here's kind of the point
of everything I'm going to be sharing with you a Padlet and
on this Padlet are 40 to 50 opportunities for teachers for
educators to learn to grow and to lead but it's not enough
to just do the fellowships you have to be able to take what
you learn and be able to implement it and impact your own
system and your own community so I highly suggest that you
also use the second resource that I'm going to provide
which is how do you prompt AI how do you create an AI
chatbot and the great thing is that I've tried this own
process with teachers in my own building and it makes sense
it doesn't have to be hard this is not like you learning a
computer programming language simply people don't know what
they don't know,
and I feel like this process of creating these chatbots is
so basic and easy that once you do it you'll almost get
addicted to it in a positive way because it makes your life
so much easier it helps you to grow as a leader and helps
you to grow as an educator.
So in closing I would like to say thank you thank you for
listening thank you for what you do I know that this time
of the year is a struggle and these skills and these
opportunities are what get me through that struggle point
of the year and I highly suggest and highly encourage you
to check out the resources and please know that my contact
information is going to be shared out from this podcast I
am happy to help anyone who is in need anybody who wants to
learn more who wants to grow who maybe wants to find some
opportunities based upon a small conversation hit me up
that would be amazing I appreciate you thank you for what
you do keep on educating keep on innovating
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