In this episode, Mindy and Jonathan review a number of online sites that are aimed at helping improve classroom communication with parents. Remind, Class Dojo, Fresh Grade, Bloomz and more were discussed. The new Google Sites is here and there is some new follow up for Skype & YouTube. This week's spicy tech nuggets include asessment apps, a book, and an educational YouTube channel for elementary kids.
Email the show, or send a voice memo to podcast@gwaea.org, and see show notes with all the links from this episode at www.dlgwaea.org/podcast. You can follow Jonathan (@jonathanwylie) and Mindy (@TeamCairney) on Twitter, and see all the tweets from the Grant Wood AEA Digital Learning Team at @DLGWAEA. If you enjoy the show and would like to leave us a review on iTunes or Google Play, we would very much appreciate that!

EP17: Parent Communication Apps

The EdTech Take Out is a podcast for teachers who are looking for innovative ways to integrate technology in their classrooms. It is hosted by Mindy Cairney and Gina Rogers from the Grant Wood AEA Digital Learning Team.

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Mindy and Gina are back with our final championship round of AI Madness. In this episode, Mindy and Gina take a deep dive into Brisk Teaching and School AI. Join them as they put these two AI tools against each other in completing similar tasks and reveal the good, the bad, and the truly amazing about both of these tools. Curious to know which tool wins? Take a listen to find out!
Brisk Teaching
Plans - Free for teachers. Paid version with additional features/tools for schools.
Become a Certified Brisk AI Professional
20-minute course for 45 days of premium Brisk feature

School AI
Free for teachers. School Plan available - book a call to learn more.

Ep 122: AI Madness - Championship Round

In the spirit of March Madness and how much we love Iowa Women’s basketball on our team, we have taken the idea of bracket play into the AI world. In the last episode, we shared eight tools within the four categories of productivity and communication, lesson planning, scaffolding, and assessment and feedback.  In this episode, we narrowed those eight tools down to four to face off in head-to-head competition. 
Ghostwrite Cost: 15 emails a month, unlimited for $10/mo
Integrations: Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk
Student Use: Age restricted to 18 and up, but you could use as exemplar emails
No additional uses besides email generation.

School AI 
Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)
Integrations: download or copy the output
Student use: sidekick, bellringer, exit ticket, historic figure chatbot: spaces
Students do not need accounts.

Additional features: rubrics, text leveler, performance tasks, syllabus
Built-in chatbot assistants for teachers: field trip planner, co-teacher, curriculum coach


 
Eduaide Cost: Freemium: 15 generations/mo, limited feedback bot Pro account: $6/mo, school and districts accounts
Integrations: download or copy output
Student use: Age restricted to 18 and up
Additional features: Different categories for instructional use: planning, information objects, independent practice, cooperative learning, gamification, questions

Brisk Cost: Freemium or District Purchase
Integrations: works with Google docs, but integration into comments is for purchase 
Student use: Students 13-18 can use Brisk teaching, however the educational institution has to reach out directly to Brisk to authorize the accounts. 
Additional Features: Creates many different types of content on the fly (quizzes, decodable texts, lesson plans. Releveling on texts. Inspect writing by using the Replay tool in Brisk to see a time-lapse video of the writing being generated.

 
Join us next week for the AI Madness Final!

EP 121: AI Madness - The Final Four

In the spirit of March Madness and how much we love Iowa Women’s basketball on our team, we have taken this idea of bracket play into the AI world and have come up with four different categories for AI tools. Within those four different categories, we have chosen two tools that we feel fall into that category to match against one another. To compare these two tools, we will share the cost, what integrations the tool has, and usability of the original output. 
 
For the next two weeks, we will advance tools through the bracket and we will share more in-depth analysis of these tools.
 
Main Course: Elite Eight 
 
Bracket 1: Productivity and Communication:
Ghostwrite (Mindy)Cost: 15 emails a month, unlimited for $10/mo
Integrations: Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk
Usability of Original Output: built into your email composer, choose tone, style, length, very little need to revise.

Goblin Tools (Gina)Cost: Free
Integrations: Download as a file, copy and paste
Usability of Original Output: Simplistic, choose tones to communicate, choose level of tone

Bracket 2: Lesson Planning
School AI (Mindy)Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)
Integrations: download or copy
Usability of Original Output: easy entry point for teachers getting started with AI, provides structures for completing a robust prompt, helps teachers get to a response that they want, sparks some ideas and provides a flow to a lesson

Cuirpod (Gina) Cost: freemium, $7.50/mo  individual account, school license or district license $4000/yr
Integrations: NA (link sharing for adding students to a lesson)
Usability of Original Output: Many of the lessons that are generated are a good “starting point” however, a teacher would want to go through and add additional information and perhaps adjust some of the questions or interactions that Curipod automatically creates with AI.

Bracket 3: Scaffolding
Eduaide (Gina)Cost: Freemium: 15 generations/mo, limited feedback bot Pro account: $6/mo, school and districts accounts
Integrations: NA
Usability of Original Output: Good starting point for ideas, but doesn’t actually create differentiated artifacts. 

Diffit (Mindy)Cost: Free up to 2500 words, $15/mo or district license
Integrations: Print or Download (with free version), paid Google integrations
Usability of Original Output: generates content, paste in text for easy leveling, grade leveling of text can be challenging to decipher–its really about student level so worth a professional eye.

 
Bracket 4: Assessment and Feedback
Brisk (Mindy)Cost: Freemium or District Purchase
Integrations: works with Google docs, but integration into comments is for purchase
Usability of Original Output:, generates feedback with the click of a button: glow and grow, rubric criteria and next steps 

Class Companion (Gina)Cost: Freemium, free for teachers and students, paid school/district account integrates Class Companion into LMS (Schoology and Canvas, with additional features)
Integrations: LMS integration with school or district plan.
Usability of Original Output: Teachers have access to the content library on the free teacher plan. They cannot create a library of their own content. The AI is useful in coaching student and providing them just in time feedback and they are writing. It is transparent to all (students and teachers) they are getting feedback from AI and there is a place where students can dispute feedback they get from the AI. Geared towards an older audience so elementary teachers might not find this as useful.

Ep 120: AI Madness - Round 1

News and Updates:
Google BardAI is now GeminiAI 
Google Doodle contest
Seesaw has instructional templates: Seesaw Library=> Daily Routines => Instructional Templates
Pear Deck adds additional tools with its new name, Pear Deck Learning: Pear Assessment, Pear Deck Tutor, and Pear Practice. 
Main Course: National Educational Technology Plan
What it is: This 2024 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) examines how technologies can raise the bar for all elementary and secondary students. It offers examples of schools, districts, classrooms, and states doing the complex work of establishing systemic solutions to inequities of access, design, and use of technology in support of learning.
Why it’s important: It addresses three main components: the digital use divide, the digital design divide, and the digital access divide. It also provides actionable recommendations to advance the use of technology in teaching and learning in these three areas.
Digital Use Divide: Inequitable implementation of instructional tasks supported by technology. On one side of this divide are students who are asked to actively use technology in their learning to analyze, build, produce, and create using digital tools, and, on the other, students encountering instructional tasks where they are asked to use technology for passive assignment completion. While this divide maps to the student corner of the instructional core, it also includes the instructional tasks drawing on content and designed by teachers. 
Digital Design Divide: Inequitable access to time and support of professional learning for all teachers, educators, and practitioners to build their professional capacity to design learning experiences for all students using edtech. This divide maps to the teacher's corner of the instructional core. 
Digital Access Divide: Inequitable access to connectivity, devices, and digital content. Mapping to the content corner of the instructional core, the digital access divide also includes equitable accessibility and access to instruction in digital health, safety, and citizenship skills.
Tech Nuggets:
Caffeine for Macs - Mac app to prevent your Mac from going to sleep while presenting.
Stickity - Cool online stickers for feedback.
School AI - Create customized chatbots (Sidekicks) for students to interact with for specific assignments.

Ep 119: The National Educational Technology Plan (NETP)

These are a few of our favorite Google Updates:Gifs and stickers in slides - Insert >> Image >> Gifs and Stickers (Gina)Customize notification settings in Google Docs - Tools >> Notification SettingsInsert Emoji in Google Docs - Insert >> Emoji
There are a few of our favorite new tools:GirlJamsRevision History - Extension to see how long you have written for, copy and pastes, deletions, etc.MyLens.AI - Generate different timelines quickly. Download timeline as a PNG.You can now export YouTube questions from MagicSchool.ia into Google Forms with the new MagicSchool.ai
GW Corner Booth:Student Engagement Through Metacognition: A Instructional Coaches Workshop - course #226291Two Dates:January 19, 2024 orFebruary 23, 2024. AI in Education (Course or two stand alone workshops) - Dates: February 13th and March 5th. Full Course for recertification #226303Day one only workshop #226304 - “What is AI?” workshop Day two only workshop #226305 - “Integration of AI in Teaching and Learning”
Both courses will be held in-person at Grant Wood AEA.
Don’t forget to take care of you:https://twitter.com/TCEA/status/1733835712003186920?s=20

EP17: Parent Communication Apps

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