In January 2023 I was asked to speak at UCTE, Utah’s English language teacher conference. They wanted me to explore how we can develop curiosity about working with technology in our classrooms. I was elated; creativity, curiosity, and technology are three areas where I love to explore intersections.

One of the most difficult things for educators, particularly with more tools available than ever, is to find tools and resources of value and put them into action in their classrooms.

Whether an educator is trying to build their understanding of a particular pedagogical practice (UDL, UBD), a technology tool (AI, SAMR, TPACK), or creating a list of possibilities for their students, curating and correlating resources can be the most difficult part of our jobs.

In March 2022, I attended SXSWEDU week. After an amazing session on comics in education, I walked across the hall to the d.school’s Future(s) Museum. I knew the d.school, like many, from exploring design thinking and its applications in education, but I was not prepared for what I was in for at the conference. The d.school had set up an amazing maker space that guided participants through designing for their future descendants.

There is just so much out there on artificial intelligence right now. Just spending a few minutes exploring social media and what is being said by experts, armchair experts, and laypeople alike can make it hard to discern the best responses to AI’s boom over the last few months.

The last few weeks of my work life have revolved around artificial intelligence. I am working on a course for Utah Education Network on AI in schools called The AI Frontier. The course is meant to be an introduction to AI in classrooms beyond trying out an AI and seeing what it can help you do (albeit sometimes poorly).

I, like many of us in educational technology, have been somewhat taken away by AI over the last few months. ChatGPT, Dall e, and Midjourney have been weekly, if not daily, topics of discussion, along with AI policy, frameworks, assignments, and assessments in education. For example, just in the past week I have run an edcamp session on AI in schools, developed coursework for an AI course, and shared a presentation with a local educator team on creativity and AI.

When I was a kid I really wanted to make videos. Being able to capture and then slice together scenes to make a movie was always so intriguing. I remember watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too many times as a teenager and just loving how scenes were cut to make movement or tension. However, I didn’t have a camera or a computer that would edit footage or a school with those tools. So, out of practicality, I put those aspirations on the shelf until I was a teacher.

One of the fundamental issues facing educators is a two-fold problem. One is the amount of attention we are able to give each day to the larger educator community. Whether it is a new program in your school, a strategy from your local or state board, or a blog post from a national figure, finding attention to give each day come be complex and difficult.

I attended my first UCET in 2018. I had just come back from SXSWEDU week and I was on fire for more ideas and community. At the suggestion of my good friend, Quin Henderson, I headed to the University of Utah and joined the conference. I was excited to talk to a lot of the speakers as part of our podcast project at the time, Edtrex Rewind, and to just take in the conference. It was the first time that I had attended a state-level education conference and I was tickled by how much fun I had throughout the event.

Before I was a technology trainer I was an ELA teacher for a very long time in my career. I loved teaching novels and engaging students in the writing process. Teaching students to engage with their own ideas about specific topics and to build connections with the larger world through writing still is one of the favorite parts of my career. I was lucky enough to have administrators that understood my love of technology, and the skills I have for writing grants to bring that technology to my classroom.

A couple of months ago I was asked Katie Garrett, an associate director at UEN, to help a group of college and graduate students explore podcasting. These students were from the American Indian Resource Center and were developing a podcast to highlight the work of the AIRC. They also wanted to explore the issues facing American Indians who are in college or graduate school. We spent an hour or so together developing ideas, touring the studio, and recording their voices for the first time.

I have a distinct memory of sitting in my third-grade classroom, surrounded by bright colors and desks, learning about phonics. My teacher instructing us to sound it out and figure out the world by struggling with the sounds. It was a reading lesson, which at that point I needed more help with my spelling (still do), but other students needed it.

When I was in school I know I had some pivotal conversations about learning without knowing they were about learning. I knew that I was unhappy at a few key points in my education and I know that I spoke about those issues with those around me, teachers, other students, and counselors.

Last year at this time, I was working on developing a course for Utah Education Network. The course was, and still is, a passion project for me.

What I really love in podcasting is when you get a group of people with disparate backgrounds and they, without planning, synchronize their comments.

Artificial Intelligence is a topic that almost immediately makes for panic. I don’t know if it is the philosophical idea of humans creating intelligence or the demonization of AI through popular science fiction (looking at you Matrix, Transcendence, and about a dozen other movies), but every time AI is brought up, even pre-Chat GPT, it felt like the air was moving out of the room. AI is a tool and should be thought of as such. Like cassette tapes to the recording industry, AI is being worried about as a way for students to do less thinking and writing.

I started taking goal setting seriously when I started teaching K-12. I had just completed a grad program in English and was just about to finish my second degree in education and I realized that I had not read for fun in years. My life was a mess of professional goals and obligations (conferences, new courses, lectures) and lists of books that I needed to read, not wanted to read. So, after a few adjustment months, I started reading for fun again.

Open Educational Resources, or OER, is an underutilized part of education. I know many educators who head first to Teachers Pay Teachers rather than spending time looking for something in OER.

Gitte Frederiksen’s TED Talk “Great Leadership is a Network, not a Hierarchy” hit a deep chord with me. Leadership often takes on the role of gatekeeping with workers sharing ideas or their struggles with their leadership and the ideas being struck down or the struggles ignored.

After yesterday’s post about AI, I feel like cannot escape it now. That afternoon I was reading You are not a Gadget and much of the chapter was on the associated problems of artificial intelligence and algorithms. This morning I opened my email and there was another edtech company sharing their latest AI-driven project (more on that in a future blog).