The EdTech Take Out

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.

• 20-minute course for 45 days of premium Brisk feature

School AI

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

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

• School AI 

• Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)

• Students do not need accounts.

• 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

• Brisk 
  • Cost: Freemium or District Purchase

Join us next week for the AI Madness Final!

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

Bracket 2: Lesson Planning

• School AI (Mindy)
  • Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)

Bracket 3: Scaffolding

• Eduaide (Gina)
  • Cost: Freemium: 15 generations/mo, limited feedback bot Pro account: $6/mo, school and districts accounts

Bracket 4: Assessment and Feedback

• Brisk (Mindy)
  • Cost: Freemium or District Purchase

News and Updates:

• Google BardAI is now GeminiAI 

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. 

Tech Nuggets:

• Caffeine for Macs - Mac app to prevent your Mac from going to sleep while presenting.

These are a few of our favorite Google Updates:

GW Corner Booth:

Both courses will be held in-person at Grant Wood AEA.

Don’t forget to take care of you:

In this episode, Mindy and Gina interview their new teammate Shalyn Huber. 

News:

Kahnmingo is coming to Canvas: Kahnmingo is an AI tutor that was developed by Kahn Academy. 

Seesaw - Computer Science Activities and English Language Explorers: Newcomers

Teach AI Toolkit

Catch up with the team from ITEC: bit.ly/DLGWAEAitec2023

Nuggets:

Reader Mode in Chrome

Text FX with Google: Suite of tools to support figurative language generation. 

Twee - AI aid for teachers who use text and much more. Generate reading questions. Generate dialogue around topics. 

Searching Tabs in Chrome with @Tabs in Omnibar, search tabs with carrot

Ghostwrite: ChatGPT Email Assistant 

Office Hours for Seesaw

We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us on X @DLGWAEA or send us a message on Facebook or Instagram! You can always use our #EdtechTO and share your thoughts with us too!

Mindy and Gina explore some Jamboard replacement tools.

Figjam

• Get verified as a Figjam educator

Miro

• Miro education templates

Canva Whiteboard

• Getting started with Canva Whiteboard video series

In this episode, we are jumping back into Universal Design for Learning or UDL and brought our resident experts Lynn Kleinmeyer and Bridget Castelluccio in to share more about this topic. We’ve talked about UDL in the past, but it is such an important topic, we wanted to bring it back to the forefront again.

• 6 Myths about Universal Design for Learning - UDL

• UDL in the ESSA

• Lesson Planning with UDL

We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us on Twitter @DLGWAEA or send us a message on Facebook or Instagram! You can always use our #EdtechTO and share your thoughts with us too!

Welcome back to the Edtech Takeout–this is episode 114. This episode is a fan favorite – News and Nuggets! 

A little fun fact: This week we reached our 100,000th download!

News and Updates:

Canva: Magic Draw, Magic Eraser, Magic Write

• What’s New Wednesday Webinar - April (Canva) 

Newsela: Moving to Newsela Lite, access to four articles at a time with five different reading levels, teacher can access student quiz scorers and writing prompts

Seesaw: Add frames (in drawing template) and student responses snap into the frame so no sizing is necessary, Present to Class

5 Chromebook Updates for Students and Teachers

Voting Chip in Google Docs - watch for this in the coming months!

Tech Nuggets:

Mindy: 

How to Differentiate Texts Using ChatGPT

Convert Your Doc in Canva into a Slide Deck in One Click  (convert button)  Example  made from this

The Juice: delivers five articles a day to grades 5-12 students. Followed by vocabulary and comprehension checks, each student is assigned a specific reading level by the teacher. Teacher dashboard that shares data. 30-day free trial

Gina: 

#FilterTheNoise - News Literacy Course/Resources - Jonathan Ketchell

• Deep Fakes - Can You Spot Them? MIT Test yourself. Research project.

Sutori for Playlist

• Like Wakelet with built-in polls and checks for understanding

Beth:

Genially - Nice alternative to Thinglink

Teachflix - Teacher currated video repository

Canva - Vertical videos with background removal example

• Remove background in Canva video - tutorial

The GWAEA Corner Booth:

Student Engagement Through Classroom Discussion

One-day Workshop for Instructional Coaches

May 5, 2023 - 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM at GWAEA in CR 6th Street

Course number 205152

Tenets of Transformative Classrooms (Online)

Online course for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators

Section 315455: Starts June 19th - Ends October 6th

Section 315456: Starts August 1st - Ends November 30th

GWAEA Professional Learning Institute

June 26 - June 30, 2023

Find more information here.

Iowa AEA’s CS PD Week

June 12 - June 16, 2023

Find more information here.

We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us on Twitter @DLGWAEA or send us a message on Facebook or Instagram! You can always use our #EdtechTO and share your thoughts with us too!

Join Mindy, Gina, and Corey for a conversation with AI education expert Charlotte Dungan from AI Edu. 

Show Notes:

MarI/O - watch AI learn to play Mario. This is a great example of machine learning.

ChatGPT - Generative AI that creates written content.

Content Detector AI - Detector that used AI to recognize AI-generated content.

Kahnmingo AI Tutor - Kahn Academy AI tutor

AI Edu - Resource for educators interested in teaching more about AI. Includes AI snapshots mentioned by Corey. These are great bell ringers or discussion starters around the topic of AI.