A few months ago I was teaching a session on digital literacy/citizenship and I posed a simple question, “Should students learn about Artificial Intelligence?”

The answer generally from 30+ educators was “Of course not.” Not enough time in the curriculum, too little expertise in our teacher pool, students don’t need to know this. I immediately shot back, “Of course they do.” We are surrounded by AI now more than ever and it is only getting better and easier to use in daily life.

One of my favorite education-related videos over the last ten years is Richard Culatta’s “Rethinking Digital Citizenship.” It explores how and why we teach our students from a young age the dangers and prohibitions associated with technology, but now the proper ways to use technology for good, nor praise them for their good uses. It is an amazing deconstruction of why, as a society, we have determined that students can only understand technology in terms of the evils it can perform.

A few years ago I was fascinated with Adobe Character Animator. I had my yearbook students make their own avatars and then make photography explainer videos. It was just so much fun to play around with little cartoons and make a video with my voice. Adobe just upped the game with a web version that relies on an audio recording of your voice. It takes that recording, auto animates to your voice including arm and head movements. The whole process of making the video to the right took me about 10 minutes

I am a big fan of grants. They help teachers find the money to support their professional development and curricular needs. Whether you are looking at a grant for materials or to travel the world, there is a grant to help you fund your idea. However, I have found that many educators are unaware or under-aware of the grants available to them as educators. So, in order to help with awareness in Utah, I created this Wakelet collection that I add to a few times a year. It has national and local material and travel grants to apply for throughout the year. As a recipient of many grants, I would encourage any educator to find a grant that meets their needs and apply.

Last night, I was lucky enough to run a Twitter Space for the ISTE Community Leaders Twitter account with Erin Dowd. Erin had just finished her Expert Webinar on Creativity earlier in the day and it was so great to just sit and talk about creativity and how to share it with students in our classrooms. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter Spaces it works almost like a call-in radio show allowing a host to add speakers to talk and share their ideas with whoever is in the room. Shout out to Greg Bagby for jumping in last night with some great questions.

About a year ago Adobe announced Project Shasta, an online podcasting tool for revising and editing podcasts. I joined immediately. I loved the simplicity and getting a transcript as I spoke, but I just didn’t want to add something that was in beta to my podcasting workflow. A few weeks back, Project Shasta was rebranded as Adobe Podcasts and is working towards being a full part of the Creative Cloud.