S11: E1 The Rise of EL and AI in Classroom Learning with Tiffanie Zaugg

Summary:
Join us as we delve into the  developing world of AI and the impacts it has in classrooms. Explore it's benefits, power, and mind-bending potential within the classroom. Tiffanie, a former AAC Coordinator in the school district of Iowa, joins us to elaborate on the integration of AI technology in classrooms. Meet El, Tiffanie's innovative chatbot designed to revolutionize teaching practices and enhance student learning experiences.


Resources:
1. Chatbots:
https://www.canva.com/design/DAF4ZnhZ8TI/bGhftIi8zBjLuBFANJBP2w/view?utm_content=DAF4ZnhZ8TI&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=editor
2. Potential AI prompts for teachers:
https://www.canva.com/design/DAF4ZqYl_jw/_olvAwhe1ckWTsQEOGmmRQ/view?utm_content=DAF4ZqYl_jw&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=editor

Highlights:
-Introduction to El: Explore how El, a groundbreaking chatbot, is transforming classrooms by providing personalized support and assistance to teachers and students.
-Support for Teachers: Discover how El streamlines classroom management and enhances teaching strategies by organizing lesson plans, providing real-time feedback, and empowering educators to create engaging learning environments.
-Enhanced Student Interaction: Experience the power of El's interactive prompts and personalized responses, fostering meaningful interactions with students and promoting active participation in learning activities.
-Future Implications: Explore the limitless potential of El in educational settings, paving the way for a more efficient, interactive, and personalized approach to education.

Transcript

Lisa Dieker 0:06

Welcome to practical access. I'm Lisa Dieker.

Rebecca Hines 0:09

And I'm Rebecca, Hines and Lisa, today, I'm going to take the lead and introduce our guests, because I'm so excited to have her. Today we have Tiffanie Zaugg, who is currently completing her doctoral work. But she has been an Assistive Technology Coordinator and State AT Lead for the Department of Education in Iowa. And she has created a tool that is so helpful to teachers and pre service teachers.

Tiffanie, welcome, and we're excited that you're going to share.

Tiffanie Zaugg 0:43

Thank you.

Rebecca Hines 0:44

First of all, can you just tell us a little bit about El.

Tiffanie Zaugg 0:49

So, El is an education and learning in an inclusive environment, chat bot. She came about because I well, we all know Chat GPT is out there. And we have seen some of the hallucinations that have happened. And knowing that it also only goes up to 2021. And then Magic School AI came out and I did a zoom session with Magic School AI. And I'm just at I was asking, so what are you training your chatbot with? And they wouldn't tell me. There was a meme today, there's three things you don't ask. You don't ask a woman her age, you don't ask the man a salary. And you don't ask an AI company, how they trained their bot. I thought that was quite appropriate. But I feel that, especially in education, we need to know where that information is coming from, right. We can Google lots of different things, we can ask Chat GPT a lot of things. But sometimes we don't get the information we need, or it may not be a best practice or an evidence based strategy. So hence, El came to be.

Lisa Dieker 2:11

And tell me for just a moment for our listeners who might not know what a chat bot is. I can only imagine my mother listening to this podcast going what's a chatbot? What is a chatbot? And what is a hallucination of a chatbot? That sounds very 70s.

Tiffanie Zaugg 2:28

So a chatbot is a digital platform where you go in and you can ask a question and or look for information and the chat bot will respond by the information that it is trained with. So for me it was going in and finding websites and documents that I can upload and websites that I can link to my chat bot to be able to answer those questions. And then a hallucination is when the chatbot just make something up? And to answer the question, and by training my chatbot in itself, I'm making sure that it's only trained to that information. And it's not pulling some crazy idea from who knows where.

Rebecca Hines 3:23

Yeah and Tiffanie so these chat bots, I think most people would be familiar with them from you know, any website you go to anymore, your insurance, your stores, and there's a little pop up that says how can I help you? So it's almost a virtual assistant.

Tiffanie Zaugg 3:42

Kind of like you when the little paperclip first came out by Microsoft, you know, Clippy I think, was Clippy’s name and you could ask Clippy questions. That's what you can do with EL.

Rebecca Hines 3:55

So tell tell us a little bit about how using EL is a time saver for teachers.

Tiffanie Zaugg 4:05

So one of the things for my dissertation is, we measured how quickly lesson planning can happen. And making sure that lesson plans have accommodations, modifications, universal design, for learning strategies, the higher leverage practices, and we broke our pre service teachers into two groups. And our one group is still working on their lesson plan, while other people had it done with under five minutes by just saying, “El can you create a lesson plan for fourth grade addition of fractions?” And within that amount of time, you had a whole lesson plan with all of the different accommodations, assessments, all of that. The students actually said it took longer to come up with an idea of what grade level and what content they wanted their lesson plan versus the time it took El to create it for them.

Lisa Dieker 5:10

So tell me if I were going to go out to, for our listeners who don't know, of all the AI I tried today- Gemini is the Google platform, Chat GPT. I'm sure I'm missing some. Tell me, I loved what you said that you really kind of vetted the resources, whereas we know the others are more open platforms. They're, they're not picky about where they get their information from, how could we be more confident? And maybe in the future, know that a chatbot has some research behind it and kind of how did you make those decisions?

Tiffanie Zaugg 5:44

Let me explain right, when you ask El a question, she automatically at the bottom tells you where that resource came from. Two reasons for that. For me doing that was one, I wanted, the people that the information came from to get credit, right, I wanted the source cited. And the other thing is I wanted it to be able for people to get another resource. I was working with a speech pathologist one day and we were looking at El, and she's like, “I've never heard of the Iris Center before what's the Iris Center?” So it's going through and talking about resources that we've talked about in our doctoral program, resources that I would have shared with Claire back before doing assistive tech, I was a special ed consultant, those resources that I would provide. What works clearinghouse, now that was a websiteI had to go in and download the information off of and upload. But like the high leverage practices, I had to learn how to find sitemaps of websites, and with those sitemaps. And I can link them to El and the nice part about that is anytime they load anything new into the website, it automatically updates my chat bot versus the information that I constantly have to upload myself, I have to make sure it's current. So just going through those things that are best practice are evidence based strategies.

Rebecca Hines 7:28

So Tiffanie, I know that you're you've put a lot of thought into where the information comes from making sure these are all evidence based practices, not just a wide spattering from whoever wants to post to the internet. What other types of things could a teacher look for? Or ask El to help with?

Tiffanie Zaugg 7:51

You could ask, well, if you're having a stressful day, El will give you some strategies. Say, “Can you provide me some strategies, I'm having a stressful day?”, and she'll give you some ideas as to how to decompress. You can ask for progress monitoring help, you can ask for help with task analysis. I've had people that have been using her to write emails, one of the emails was how do I write a letter to Sam quitting? So it's interesting to see the different uses behavior strategies, and that was one of the main reasons I really wanted to create El. Knowing that if I went out and just Googled give me some behavior strategies, we know that there are strategies out there that we would not want our teachers to be using. So the whole, you know, the positive PBIS is attached to it.

Rebecca Hines 9:00

I think from, from what I understand, and from having looked at it myself, I think that l can even help with creating some of the types of things that you've said. So it's not just retrieving strategies, but I could ask, or can I not ask for? Can you create a progress monitoring chart for X, Y, or Z?

Tiffanie Zaugg 9:20

Yes, El will create those for you.

Rebecca Hines 9:24

So we can literally ask for materials to be created, and we can be confident that they're created using best practice. That's amazing.

Tiffanie Zaugg 9:34

Yes.

Lisa Dieker 9:36

I would love to know what should I not use El for or what are chatbots not good for? So I'm a new person to chatbot and think it will give me a pay raise like what are things that chatbots what are the limitations we should understand or the got guardrails for that because I think that's the new discussion in AI is where do we not use it? Where is it not safe or doesn't give us what we need?

Tiffanie Zaugg 9:58

I think no matter what chatbot you use, even El, you should vet or what it's saying, You need to look it over, make sure what you're doing, just don't copy and paste and say, “Oh, this is the the next best thing”, right. So making sure that you do have correct information, making sure that things are vetted. Making sure there's no hallucinations and citations are correct. Those are the big concerns right now. And then obviously, the whole use of not citing or not providing citations for people that deserve those for their work.

Lisa Dieker 10:43

And if I'm correct, it can't help me understand how to creatively think like, give me creative, it can give me ideas of ways that can get kids to think creatively. But its limitations for human emotion and creativity are like zero. And I think that's important for listeners to know too.

Tiffanie 11:01

Right. And the most important thing is knowing how to write a prompt, right? And knowing what you need to ask. And I think the prompt is, what is that creativity piece of each person. Each person that asks their chatbot, that's the creative part. And that's the individual piece of it.

Rebecca Hines 11:23

And so Tiffanie, my final question is, if I'm, if I'm a young teacher, and I'm pretty tech savvy, what's something that I could maybe do on El that I wouldn't have thought of doing?

Tiffanie Zaugg 11:36

Well, even coming up with ideas for classroom arrangement El can help with that. You know, breaking down tasks, especially for some of our students, I think is important. And just scaffolding, right? Being able to scaffold your materials is so important.

Lisa Dieker 12:02

And I'm going to end with a really easy question, I think, what would be the most common way you've seen people use El? As a new teacher that maybe I don't even know where to start? So here's a really easy way that lots of people found it very successful.

Tiffanie Zaugg 12:15

Creating lesson plans.

Lisa Dieker 12:19

Okay, lesson plans got it. Great. And can it do it by standard? Or by state standards? Or is it more generic?

Tiffanie Zaugg 12:25

It will provide state standards. Some of the some of them are common core standards, but El does have the Florida standards in there. And then some of the other ones depend on the state.

Lisa Dieker 12:40

So if I said I'm in Colorado, Nebraska, Hawaii, it may or may not do it based on that state standard?

Tiffanie Zaugg 12:48

Right. So an example of some of my other chat bots that I've created. Their science and social studies, one have the Colorado standards in it. So it's just asking, and it'll actually spit out what those standards are. So you can double check them.

Lisa Dieker 13:03

Right. Good to know, good to know. Well, we are excited. And of course, we will post for our listeners the link to your El site so they can play with your chat bot and give you some more traffic. But we appreciate you taking the time Tiffanie to join us. We know you're busy with that dissertation and can't wait to see you graduate.

Tiffanie Zaugg 13:21

Thank you so much for your time.

Lisa Dieker 13:23

Thanks for having us. Yeah. All right. So if you have any other questions for us, you can tweet us atAccess practical or post them on our Facebook page.