For my general thoughts about generative AI, please see a screenshot of these tweets:

I keep my twitter account private for Professional Reasons, although the Dean of the Faculty of Education and the STF library do follow me!

I’ve long been skeptical of ChatGPT, but it wasn’t until I actually tried it that my preconceived notions were confirmed. I haven’t found anything it can do for me, personally or professionally, that I can’t do better or more quickly myself with the help of Google. It’s incredibly dark to me to see people writing about how AI can create “ no fewer than 28,349 ways … [to] help me be better at my job”.

Some tout generative AI as an alternative to search engines. And yet the free version of ChatGPT does not seem to provide direct links to the resources it draws on for responses. So in order to assess the quality of information provided by ChatGPT I would still need to Google the prompt anyways. Hmm.

Here’s an example of how ChatGPT free gave me similar answers as Google, minus links to actual useful sources, and not created by real people.

Does ChatGPT give a fuller lesson plan than the first few hits of my google search? Sure, but I know I could find what I’m looking for with five more minutes of searching. Or I could flesh out the lesson plan myself, which is part of what I’m trained to do as a teacher. I’m not trying to be mean, but using AI to create all your lesson plans feels a bit like a cop out. What’s the point of all this teacher training and going into debt if a machine can do a huge chunk of my job for me? 

I don’t have a good answer, but neither does ChatGPT.

The title says it all. Enjoy!

Link is here. Please listen to audio files!

The best preparation I received for teaching digital literacy to students was working in journalism. Before becoming a teacher, I had a previous life/career as a writer, editor, and fact-checker for a couple of news outlets. Journalism taught me how to examine bias, evaluate sources, and most importantly, to question everything (especially authority). In this post I’ll using digital literacy and media literacy interchangeably because in 2024 they’re almost nearly the same thing.

A younger Emily flexing her journalism muscles for the University of Saskatchewan student newspaper.

Just because journalist taught me to have good digital literacy skills does not mean that all journalists have good media literacy skills. There are some journalists who are bad at their jobs. Despite this, I do think educators could learn a lot from journalism about the foundations of media literacy. I also think this type of collaboration could help inspire students to pursue journlism or media work themselves.

I’m glad to see some educational resources about media literacy have been developed in collaboration with journalists and media organizations like the Media Literacy Booster Pack from the Newseum, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post Truth’ World from the New York Times, and 10 Types of Misleading News from PBS. Someday I would love to combine my two professional fields and help to develop my own resource for schools about media literacy.

As either the youngest millennial, the oldest member of Gen Z, or something called a “zillenial”, I came of age during the first decade of smartphones and social media. There was Facebook and Skype, but also flip phones; some of us had wifi and some of us still had dial-up until after Obama became President; the internet was still a place you went instead of a place you lived. Basically, it was the wild west of cyber safety education, and boy did it show.

When it came to online risks, the perpetrators were depicted as either incredibly alien or incredibly familiar: an anonymous middle-aged man lurking in a chat room pretending to be a 13 year old in order to lure in vulnerable teens or your bitter ex boyfriend or ex best friend sharing intimate photos of you with the entire school. Either way, perpetrators were almost always individuals rather than groups, companies, or societal institutions. I recall (at the time) little to no blame being levied towards tech giants and social media platform for lack of content moderation, or towards media that normalized and encouraged the sexualization of children and teens. 

The solutions offered were equally individualistic, where directed towards the victims or perpetrators of online bullying and harassment. Girls were told not to take and send intimate photos to their partners or post them online; boys were told not to share a girl’s pictures with others. We were all told to know the warning signs you might be talking to a child predator, to think twice about how our Facebook profiles might impact our future careers, and above all to “be kind online” to one another. 

This messaging felt ineffective even then. I knew at 14 that a 60 minute presentation from the police at an assembly wasn’t stop online bullying, but now as an adult I know *why* it wouldn’t stop online bullying: the problem is so much bigger than individuals, especially when many of those individuals children and teens. It’s a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution.

As far as current resources go, I like how “cyber safety” has at least been reframed as digital citizenship. This makes it clear that our online lives are not separate from the other aspects of our lives and puts it in the bigger picture. I reviewed  “A Policy Planning Guide for School Divisions and Schools to Implement Citizenship Education from Kindergarten to Grade 12″ (which Katia apparently helped write!) and I think it has some good strategies. However, I have some concerns about the age of the document and how relevant it still is for students. It was published in 2015, nearly ten years ago and the year after I graduated from high school. I’ve seen the huge changes that have occurred within technology since then, and I imagine the educational approaches need to change as well. I hope the Ministry of Education is in the process of updating this document for today’s kids.

If a teacher shouts to a classroom full of students all using their cellphones, are any of them paying enough attention to hear it? This might be the new “if tree falls in the forest”-style question of our times. Or it might just be a pithy-sounding way to begin this blog post. Either way, it’s time to talk about the role of technology in classroom!

When I say “technology in the classroom”, I should probably specify “digital technology” or “the internet”, because we’ve been using forms of technology in the classroom since classrooms have existed. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica dictionary, “technology” is defined as “the use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems” and the things created as a result. Technology is anything we’ve invented that’s useful somehow. Pencils are technology. Pants are technology. Cow tools are probably technology, although we humans are not privy to knowing their specific use.

Cow Tools, a 1982 cartoon from The Far Side by Gary Larson. Image via Wikimedia Commons under fair use.

My point is, technology is a broad category and we should probably all be on the same page about what we’re referring to when we have discussions about “technology in the classroom”.
What we’re really talking about in this class is digital technology. Digital Child defines digital technology as “tools, systems and devices that can generate, create, store or process data. The data processing and logic capabilities of digital technologies are enabled through microprocesses that are programmed to perform various functions”. This is still frustratingly kind of broad. Give me examples, internet! Oh hey – it just did! The internet is digital technology. So are computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. There we go.

Now that we’ve agreed on what we’re talking about, let’s talk about it. We’re past the point of wondering if digital technology should be present in education – what we need to be asking instead is how digital technology should be present in education. Because it’s here whether we like it or not, both its benefits and its harms.

It’s interesting how the same technology can be applied in both great and absolutely terrible ways in the classroom. Let’s take VR headsets, for example. Here’s a video from CBC showing how VR can be utilized as a tool to enhance in-person education experiences: petting woolly mammoths! Exploring space! Fun stuff!

And then there’s this article from the New Yorker talking about how a charter school in Florida that’s replaced not just a real classroom, but even face-to-face digital learning with the Metaverse. Describing a 10 year old student’s day:

“She wears the headset on and off for about three hours, removing it to read a book, eat a sandwich, and hot-glue some sort of tinfoil art. Her classmates are scattered across different towns, and her teachers live all over the country. In the video, the little girl doesn’t have a single in-person interaction.”

This sounds…not great? Maybe even kind of bad? Or really bad? I don’t know. What do you think?