For educators looking to get started with learning more about artificial intelligence to use in the classroom with students or parents interested in providing opportunities for children to learn about AI, I recommend exploring what is available through AI World School. There are a variety of courses available that provide engaging learning experiences about artificial intelligence and machine learning for students. Each module include challenges that are great for getting students to think about becoming creators with AI.

Getting Started

There are three flagship AI courses offered by AIWS based on age group. AI Novus is for ages 7 to 10 and provides a step-by-step introduction to AI. AI Primus is for ages 11 to 13 and in this course, it focuses on how everyone can learn AI and explores machine learning and ethics in AI. AI Meritus is for children ages 14 and above, and this course helps students to not only understand AI but also begin building AI and challenging themselves to build a portfolio that demonstrates their knowledge. In each of these flagship courses, there are multiple video lessons that focused on an overarching theme and that include modules.

Here are the components of the AI Primus course:

For example in AI Novus, it begins with covering the questions such as: What is AI? Can AI recognize human emotions? Do machines understand human emotions? What is machine learning? Each module includes videos and challenges and a quiz at the end of each module to check for understanding. With each of the courses, you can get started by trying a free lesson to better experience the types of learning activities that are included.

AIWS Micro Courses and Resources

In addition to these three flagship courses, there are other micro courses available that are divided into the three age groups and with topics ranging from the Five Big Ideas of AI, to creating with Scratch, to building an Android or iOS app, and more advanced for older students with JavaScript and Python.

Why learn about AI?

Many people wonder about the benefits of learning about AI and why bring it into our classrooms? We are interacting with AI everyday and our students need to understand what it is, how it works, the impact that it has on our lives and what AI might mean for the future of work and education. We are able to create the right learning opportunities that spark some curiosity and build skills in these emerging technologies.

By exploring some of the courses and the free play activities that are available through AI World School, we can help students and ourselves to develop a better understanding of AI and also enjoy learning together.

There are many resources available through their site for educators and for parents, articles and information and even a free to tutorial is available for parents to get started

For anyone looking for an all-in-one space to get started right away with AI and to have access to videos, rich content, additional articles and links for use in our schools, explore AI World School. Start by having students explore the free play activities or try one of the demo lessons yourself.

AI World School is a great space to find the right resources to begin adding AI into your curriculum regardless of what grade level and content area that you teach!

For more information check out AI World School here.

**Interested in writing a guest blog for my site? Would love to share your ideas! Submit your post here.

Looking for a new book to read? Many stories from educators, two student chapters, and a student-designed cover for In Other Words.

Find these available at bit.ly/Pothbooks  

In today’s world, we need to bring STEM into our curriculum and our classrooms. Regardless of whether we are in the physical classroom or virtual space, there are many options available. The benefits of embedding STEM activities into the content that we teach is that we help our students to develop the essential skills needed now and in the future, regardless of their next steps after high school. According to the World Economic Forum, the job outlook for 2022 focuses on skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and emotional intelligence. There will be an increasing need for STEM skills, as it has been reported that the United States will need to fill 3.5 million STEM jobs by 2025.

As many schools may have to transition throughout the year, We need to have some options available that will work well during these times. Bringing in new ideas and innovating is something that will help to keep students engaged during what might continue to be a challenging year.

In implementing a STEM curriculum, many options require specific equipment or access to certain websites, but there are a lot that are available free to educators and students that can be used regardless of where learning is happening. Just taking a strategy like genius hour provided my eighth-grade students with an opportunity to explore a topic of interest and engage in designing something. The benefits are that the topics covered and ideas shared in class will go far beyond simply just the curriculum. It will also help students to collaborate more and build their knowledge in more meaningful ways because they are learning from and with their peers.

Helping students to understand concepts like coding or computational thinking, artificial intelligence, or augmented and virtual reality, are STEM/STEAM-related topics. As a language teacher, I never thought that I could bring these topics into my classroom until I began teaching my eighth-grade emerging technology course and connected it with the language arts. Once I did that, I realized that I needed to create more opportunities that will help students to be prepared for whatever their next steps may be. To do so, I must be willing to try new ideas, to innovate, to take risks, and be open to learning from the students and letting them lead more.

Here are seven resources that I plan to bring into my STEAM course and Spanish classes this year.

1. Ashtrix.Provide students with the opportunity to learn about robotics, coding, artificial intelligence, and more. Available to more than 4,000 students in over 20 countries. The resources are available to students in elementary through high school and even for college-level students. Through Astrix, students can explore these different topics and engage in more interactive and hands-on learning. Astrix offers an Android app developer program for younger students.

2. Code Wizards HQ. Online coding classes available for students ages 8 through 18. With Code Wizards, students can enroll in three week accelerated courses or a twelve-week regular schedule coding class. There are three different grade bands with multiple levels within each that end in a Capstone project for students. Code Wizards also offers an AP Computer Science preparatory course and a high school internship program.

3. Cubit. Provides hands-on learning opportunities for students regardless of grade level or content area. Cubit is focused on project-based learning and provides teachers with resources including sample projects and curriculum to get started with STEAM concepts in the classroom. It offers a drag and drop programming system that makes it easy for anyone to get started right away.

4. Daily STEM. A platform created by Chris Woods where educators and families can find many ideas for exploring STEM activities. One of the features is a “STEM everyday” post where educators share their ideas for STEM activities, a quick way to find ideas in this new school year. Daily STEM also has a podcast that features how educators are bringing STEM into their classrooms.

5. Microsoft. There are several resources available for free for educators to choose to bring the STEM curriculum into the classroom. The options include Minecraft education, Make Code, and Hacking STEM. Educators can find guest speakers, engage in free training online through courses offered, and explore Microsoft partners such as Micro:bit, Kano, and NASA for additional STEM resources.

6. Spinndle. Educators can explore the resources available for implementing project-based learning (PBL), design thinking, social-emotional learning (SEL), and STEAM-related activities into the classroom. Spinndle provides free downloads for student-led learning experiences related to passion projects, STEAM activities, and inquiry-based learning. Choose any of the topics available and have an outline, activities, and materials to get started.

7. Tinkercad. A free online web-based resource for use by educators, students, or anyone looking to get started with some coding, 3D design, and more. Tinkercad is a great option for beginners or anyone looking to build their design skills using 3D objects, even circuits, and additional choices. It is also good for promoting collaboration between students when educators create their classroom space for students to join. There are eight different categories of lesson plans available for areas such as art, design, engineering, language arts, and technology. Lessons come with rubrics, overviews, standards, and a list of materials needed for completion.

As we start the new school year and try to embrace the challenges that may come with it, I think it is important to take some risks with trying new ideas and bringing new learning experiences in for our students and ourselves. When we give students opportunities to engage in more student-driven, independent, hands-on learning, it attaches more meaning and authenticity to the work that they’re doing. It sparks curiosity for their own personal interests and of course, their specific needs can be better met. It also gives students a chance to engage in something different and helps them to build the types of skills that they will need moving forward.

**Interested in writing a guest blog for my site? Would love to share your ideas! Submit your post here.

Looking for a new book to read? Many stories from educators, two student chapters, and a student-designed cover for In Other Words.

Find these available at bit.ly/Pothbooks  

Digital tools, especially in remote learning environments, have enabled teachers to provide more authentic and timely feedback to students and engage them more in learning. Texthelp offers a variety of tools for helping students to improve their reading writing and math skills. Texthelp recently announced their global launch of WriQ, a cloud-based writing assessment and achievement tool. WriQ can be used across grade levels, from fourth grade and in graduate programs, and across the core subjects.

I spoke with Martin McKay, Co-Founder, and CEO of Texthelp, about the launch of WriQ and its benefits for students and educators. WriQ, which started in beta in 2019, is a free extension for Google Documents or a Microsoft Word add-in. It can also be upgraded to Premium for the district and school administrators, who can see overall student progress that can be used to support instructional decision-making for a district or school’s entire curriculum or compare their schools and districts against national norms.

McKay wanted to prove that these learning tools worked. McKay said that WriQ was created because of teachers’ need for tools to help students build their literacy skills. Through learning analytics, teachers can see how much time students spend reading and better understand student maturity in reading, which helps to optimize learning.

The Texthelp team spent two and a half years working on WriQ by collecting data from over 85,000 teacher-graded documents, which then made it possible to create standardized norms for each grade in areas including accuracy (and text maturity for example. With WriQ, teachers can see how students are performing in comparison with peers across the United States.

Benefits of these tools

Teachers need to be able to assess students and provide authentic and meaningful feedback while also tracking student growth over time. With WriQ,  the data is easily accessible to teachers, and with the way the platform is designed, it also leads to increased student engagement in learning. When it comes to reading, teachers are looking at the students’ words correct per minute (WCPM) score. The score involves assessing correct pronunciation, whether there were missed or repeated words, additional words inserted, or words were mixed up. The work can be quite cumbersome for teachers looking to provide feedback to students as they are reviewing student work to come up with the WCPM score.

Now through the automated process in WriQ, it measures all of this and more. It will provide word count, vocabulary age, the time on task, accuracy, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and teachers can give feedback to the students directly in the document.  Focus is on correct word order and spelling accuracy, text diversity, text maturity,  grammar, and punctuation.

How does it work

With access to their own Dashboard and WriQMeter, students are able to track their writing burst measures, along with other key analytics, in real-time to help them understand their own writing progress. Teachers are able to assess students and track their growth in writing skills in a less time-consuming way. McKay said that it also removes subjectivity and decreases the amount of time spent by teachers who are grading papers by hand through the use of rubrics. WriQ promotes consistency in assessments and can be used to measure multiple areas of writing skills. Teachers can look at accuracy, maturity, pace, and productivity. As students write, their progress is monitored and then a single WriQ score is provided. When teachers have the WriQ score, they then look at the chart to see how students compare to the national standard. The WriQ score helps educators to have a better understanding of each student’s progress as well as tracking class progress as a whole. Knowing how each student (or school, district, or even state) is performing with regards to writing is difficult. The WriQ score helps teachers to better understand student progress, at the student and class level. With this data, educators can give more meaningful, personalized feedback, with greater clarity that will help to improve student achievement as well as build their confidence in writing.

Motivating students

In order to promote engagement and the improvement of writing skills, WriQ gives “nudges” to students as they write. These positive nudge notifications and achievement badges appear when students write more and they see the real-time feedback in their own dashboard, the WriQmeter. The WriQmeter allows students to view the cumulative work they have done, their total words typed, and more. As they work, students receive badges for typing more words, increasing the length of their writing bursts, and for writing more academic words. McKay said that students benefit from this somewhat gamified writing experience and that the “nudges” are a way to reward and encourage positive behavior. He said, “we need more than measurements to get the kids to think about writing in a way that is fun.” Students can set goals to improve their writing and also work toward achievement badges, which adds fun to the writing process

It comes down to the process of how we write. When writing, we go through a period of thinking, composing, and then transcribing, pausing in our thoughts, and then repeating the process. We have “bursts of writing.” McKay said research shows that the length of these bursts is indicative of the writing skills. A longer burst of writing leads to being a better writer. With these digital tools, we empower students to develop their writing at their own pace and be more independent in tracking their progress on a daily basis as well as long term.

Benefits for teachers

For teachers, WriQ helps with evaluating student writing across a number of criteria with the goal of helping students to increase proficiency. It enables teachers to focus more on instructional planning, providing personalized instruction, support, and encouragement to students, rather than extra time on grading. It helps with providing actionable and comparative feedback to students right when they need it. Teachers can see students’ writing history and bursts of writing. The burst length can provide teachers with a more beneficial and informative way to measure writing fluency. By having access to the data for burst lengths, teachers are able to see which students may need additional support and those that are mastering the writing process. It helps teachers save time in assessments and they see each student’s progress and track scores over time. The data can be imported from Google classroom.

McKay said that WriQ keeps students motivated, engaged, and achieving in writing. It puts them in charge of their own learning and helps students to think in a meta way about writing, which leads to a habit of writing. He cited research that shows that if we do something for 19 days, it becomes a habit. The goal of WriQ is to help students become more active and interested in writing and sharing their ideas through the encouragement provided within the platform as they write.

Guest post  by laura steinbrink,

Simple. Powerful. Effective.

I’M THE MAN ON THE SILVER MOUNTAIN

Teaching during a pandemic presents a lot of problems for educators to face and solve daily, and clearly I haven’t solved the problem of posting regularly since the 2020-21 school year began. However, as we ended the week before the holiday break, I realized that there was something I could share that would benefit teachers both online and those teaching face to face. Something that wouldn’t be overwhelming because we already have it in our toolboxes, although it occasionally falls behind other tools and is temporarily forgotten. The tool is a reversal of our everyday role at school. It’s the teacher becomes the student and the student becomes the teacher tool, or the “Padawan / Master swap” for those like me who are Star Wars fans.

I’M THE DAY, I’M THE DAY

One of my students graduated early this year, and his future plans are to go to college to become a music teacher. As my weeks with him dwindled, he suddenly became convinced that I needed to learn the 2020 slang spoken by the students, and he would teach me. While still working on his content for me, he taught me a few words a day. The fact that I took notes amused him and also convinced him that I took it seriously. He then provided opportunities for me to practice the new words in context. As an educator who teaches English and also lower level Spanish classes, I fully supported his method.

I CAN SHOW YOU THE WAY

We had a lot of fun doing this, and it also helped build that relationship that is very important in the classroom. Not only was I building it with the senior who was about to graduate, but as we practiced the slang on other students, it built or strengthened connections there. A funny thing also began to happen. Other students wanted to teach me slang words. I dutifully wrote them down, had the student spell them for me and define each term. My senior then approved, or not, each new word by the other students.

AND LOOK I’M RIGHT BESIDE YOU

My son, a freshman, soon became aware of my slang lessons, and he is alternately embarrassed and amused when I use any slang words. When my daughter finally journeyed home from college to spend Christmas with us, my son made her aware of my slang lessons. I shared some of the terms I was learning, and she was very skeptical that any of these were used outside of our small community. You too might be thinking that learning slang is not a worthy endeavor or applicable outside your community, but you, like my daughter, have missed the mark. Allowing a student to share a passion with you is a great way to build a relationship, but learning that passion yourself with the student as the teacher holds even more power.

I’M THE NIGHT, I’M THE NIGHT

Show students that you care and are truly interested in them by having them, your students become the teacher. Your teacher. Invest your time into learning what they want to teach you. Learn from as many students as possible, and practice so that you truly learn from them. The power of this is simple. It does not take much time. Consider how you can use this tool as the 2021 school year begins. Building the relationship you have with your students is the tool that provides a solid foundation for student learning, autonomy, voice, and also the desire and inspiration to learn. Such a simple tool, yes, but one that we can all wield.

WITH EYES THAT SEE INSIDE YOU

Now, for fun, here are the slang words my students have taught me so far. Keep in mind that the meanings may not exactly correspond with the Urban Dictionary or how your students may be using them. This is merely how my students, here in rural Missouri, are using them. Also, my Master (student) said that many of these can be combined, so mix and match to your hearts content.

• cap–false, lies, fake
• no cap–truth, for real
• minty–perfect, awesome (like mint condition)
• drip–cool stuff like your outfit, swag, etc.
• sweaty–(from video gaming) over the top, too much, working too hard; a person who is way into something with intensity. Whatever the person is doing they are in the thick of it, pedal to the metal.
• That’s a flex–bragging openly, not subtle
• That’s highkey a flex–straight up and outright a brag
• That’s lowkey not a flex–when one thinks they are flexing, but totally aren’t.
• Weird flex but okay–a brag about something unusual, like a dog with 7 toes.
• G.O.A.T./G.O.A.T.ed–Greatest of All Time (the best)
• cash nasty–a good deed, someone did something nice for you
• uncash nasty–Opposite of cash nasty. Someone did something not nice to or for you.
• on jah–similar to cap, meaning truth, but stronger, like swearing it’s true.
• hate to see it–used when a negative happens, or used sarcastically when a positive happens
• love to see it–used when a positive happens, or used sarcastically when a negative happens.
• aight bet–okay
• aight g–in response to see you later, meaning okay, homie (friend, bestie)
• g–homie, friend, bestie (use with those closest to you)
• yeet–excited exclamation
• cuh–dude or cuz (cousin)
• Icy–super good or super cool
• Fire fit–awesome drip or super good drip
• spill the tea–Tell me the scoop or gossip
• Go off–Kind of like “you be you” or knock yourself out, with a slightly negative connotation like you’re talking nonsense. Basically, “what you’re saying is wrong or crazy, but if you want to keep going I guess I won’t stop you.”
• check the fit–look at my (the) outfit
• slaps–super good (That pizza slaps!)
• hit different–super good (That pizza hit different!)

HEADINGS ARE PARTIAL LYRICS FROM RAINBOW’S MAN ON THE SILVER MOUNTAIN.

**Interested in writing a guest blog for my site? Would love to share your ideas! Submit your post here.

Looking for a new book to read? Many stories from educators, two student chapters, and a student-designed cover for In Other Words.

Find these available at bit.ly/Pothbooks