Voices of EDTC300

I will be honest, one part of looking for new resources that I really dislike is that every website wants you to create an account. I find it frustrating because often you cannot even test out the resource to see if it is what you are looking for until you make an account. Once you create an account, they want to send you a thousand emails which is overwhelming especially when they are from a site that you have decided you do not even like. So, to speed up the process and save myself from having to create 10 new accounts I decided to look at websites that have already compiled a list of helpful artificial intelligence tools. The best part is that these websites will give you a little description of what the tool does so you know if it is capable of doing what you need it to. I first looked at Edutopia because they always have super helpful resources to share. I read through an found there were some that I would definitely like to look into more, however these sites were more focused on helping lighten an educator’s workload. These could be useful, but they were not really what I was looking for. I wanted to find an AI that students can interact with and utilize skills they are learning in class. So, I opened another website and found a list of AI tools categorized by function (I know I was excited about it too!). From this site I was able to find a very interesting tool called Antimatter Sorcerer. The Antimatter site itself has two capabilities. It was first designed as a program in which students can create memes based on content learned in class. There is even a way to play games with the memes that students or the educator has created. I am not totally sure what that looks like, but I imagine a sort of Kahoot/Blooket like question-and-answer game. I have already texted my teacher friends about this capability because I think it could be a really fun way to engage students and assess their ability to incorporate what they have learned. The second function and the one that I played around with was the AI Antimatter Sorcerer. I did have to create a free account for this, but it was worth it. I registered as a student because I wanted to see what they would be able to get out of this resource. As a student I was able to create my own sorcerers which is essentially like creating different tabs based on the different topics that you wish to study. Educators can do the same and assign the sorcerer to students so that students are not purposefully leaving out material that they do not wish to study. They can even link it to their Google Classroom! In order to create my sorcerer, I had to input my desired difficulty level and the material that I wanted to practice. There are five different difficulty levels to choose from ranging from middle school to PhD. You can input a whole list of topics; however, I would assume the more that you add the longer it will take you to complete the session. I said that I wanted to work on my addition and subtraction and indicated that I wanted it to strictly adhere to the topics that I inputted. This prevents it from adding any questions pertaining to irrelevant topics. From there it was time to study. The goal is to reach sorcerer level of mastery by reaching 100 points. You can gain points by answering correctly, although you can also lose points for answering incorrectly or replying with “I don’t know”. Once you are awarded points you can click on it to expand the explanation for your score. It will say you were correct, incorrect, or that you were correct, but did not completely answer the question resulting in a lower score. I got curious what would happen if a student did not understand a question so I asked it if it could reword the question for me. It did so happily! I was able to better understand the question and maintain my current score. Overall, I really enjoyed exploring this website and will likely be using it in the future! With that being said there are some limitations as it is heavily reliant on the participants ability to read and does not lend itself well to students that are kinesthetic learners. If it does not work to be used with your classroom as a whole it could certainly be used to support gifted and high achieving students. I believe that as time goes on our dependency on technology is only going to become stronger. I feel that it is unrealistic for us to educate students without the incorporation of technology. Whether we like it or not artificial intelligence is a part of this continual evolution of technology. There are definite possible downfalls of increased access to and capabilities of AI. Especially, when we begin to think of it in terms of education. There is the obvious possibility that students will lose their ability to critically think and will choose to use AI to avoid learning and utilizing concepts learned in class. However, I think that this will become a part of the typical digital literacy education that we are providing students. They will need to learn that while AI has many possible applications that can make our lives easier it is still important that we perform some tasks for ourselves. They can learn that there are AI platforms that can help them to complete some tasks to free up time and mental energy for other things. Frankly, I think that we are just going to have to learn to embrace AI. I do not think that it is going anywhere so why not use it to our advantage. I used it during my internship to help my students that were struggling to read conduct research for their project alongside their peers. I have also used it when making worksheets so rather than struggling to come up with 20+ questions for a worksheet I could ask the AI to come up with them for me. This gave me more time and creative mental energy to then adapt it multiple times to meet the needs of my students. I cannot say that I see a problem with using it responsibly. We just have to be able to recognize what tasks we must be completing for ourselves and what can be done by technology. As an educator if I can save some time here and there: I will. I know that the more time I have to work on other projects for the classroom or even to practice self-care the better I will be able to meet the needs of my students. In my search for resources, I also came across a helpful YouTube channel that was linked to the Antimatter webpage. I recommend checking it out!  

I have created a video for my summary of personal learning. Enjoy 🙂