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.
• 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.

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!

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.

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.

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 Settings Insert Emoji in Google Docs - Insert >> Emoji

There are a few of our favorite new tools: GirlJams Revision 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 #226291 Two Dates: January 19, 2024 or February 23, 2024.  AI in Education (Course or two stand alone workshops) - Dates: February 13th and March 5th.  Full Course for recertification #226303 Day 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

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
• Eric Curts Figjam for Schools Webinar.

Miro

• Miro education templates
• Miro for Teachers (Video)

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
• MTSS: What Is a Multi-Tiered System of Supports? | Understood

• Lesson Planning with UDL
• CAST UDL Guidelines
• Katie Novak’s website
• Zooming in on MTSS (Katie Novak) - learning session at GWAEA
• GWAEA “Foundations of Universal Design for Learning (UDL)” microcredential

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
• Pricing - 30 days all features free, free level, and $120 for a single teacher for a year. Department/Grade level pricing. 
• Sutori Video

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!