Lit & Tech

Jen is available to speak virtually and in person depending on your needs and geography. Please reach out if you have an event coming up where her perspective would be helpful. Jen(at)Litandtech.com

Jen's Edutopia Articles

🗣️ When Students Use AI in Ways They Shouldn’t
✍️Authentic Writing in the Age of AI
⛔️ Proactively Limiting the Use of AI in the Classroom
🤖 What ELA Teachers Should Know About AI Detectors
📄 Using AI Tools to Give Feedback on High School Students’ Writing

Donate a book to my classroom

One Google Doc All Year Long: The English Journal

My students each share a Google Doc with me in September and they use that doc all year long. We call it their English Journal and it holds all of the small daily work we do. This is one of the secrets of my 1:1 classroom and it is such an ordinary part of our workflow that I have rarely thought to write about it. Let’s fix that. The challenge for any educator is knowing what kinds of work and thinking students are actually doing in our classes. The traditional way of gaining this insight was to collect papers: homework, notes, reflections, quick writes, exit slips, graphic organizers, etc. It all happened on paper and we collected it to look at--or at least to make students think we looked at it. The challenge for teachers switching to digital classrooms is that we still want all of that information and it is natural to assume at first that we just need to collect those things digitally. The result though, is a separate document for every daily bit of work students do. If y...

How I convinced my students that I could tell if they used AI

Part of preventing students from using generative AI to do their work for them is showing them ways it can be helpful without violating academic integrity. I wrote about that process here. But another big part of keeping students from using the AI unethically, is convincing them that I will be able to tell they "cheated." This is how I showed my 9th graders that I could tell when they used AI to respond to a question. One of my colleagues came to me because she thought one of her students had used ChatGPT for one of the short paragraphs about a book we were reading as part of a novel study. We talked about the student, why they might have done that, why she thought it was AI, etc. And then I ran it through an AI detector. As predicted by this expert educator colleague of mine, it was flagged as entirely AI written. She pursued her own actions at that point, but I saw an opportunity. The Opportunity: I took the AI generated response and put it on a page wi...

Introducing 9th graders to ChatGPT

First of all, most of my 9th graders have already met ChatGPT, so for most of them this tool was not new, but together we used it in new ways. Back story We are working on a comparative analysis essay based on art my students viewed in our student art gallery. I've done this project very successfully in every year the art gallery wasn't closed due to a pandemic. I've blogged about the project here before . Resources and directions are there if you are looking for a generative AI proof writing assignment, and you happen to have some student art around. The ChatGPT Lesson To begin with, I asked my students if ChatGPT could write this art essay for them. I didn't explain what ChatGPT was. I wanted to see how they would respond without any other information. At first the question made them nervous. Then a brave soul spoke up, "No, because the ChatGPT hasn't seen the art we are writing about." "Exactly," I said with a gleam in my eye, "Yo...

Group Creator: Group Students Fast, but Not Random

I want to have my students work in groups and with partners as often as possible, but the process of making their groups or choosing their partners took me a long time. I kept looking for a digital solution that would speed up the process for me, but I could never find one with the features I wanted. Then I figured out how to make a group creator that works for me and I'm also sharing it with you. My Group Creator runs in a Google Spreadsheet. (Don't panic, it comes with directions.) After you add your class roster and sort by a score you put in, you can click on the different tabs across the bottom to see the different groups students should be in. The tabs include both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups of six, groups of four, and partners. Directions Page Click this image or any other to see it larger. Roster Page On the roster tab replace the sample names with your own students. Then add a score that you can use to rank your students,...

NBCT: Component 1: The three hour test

Stock Photo: Not from the testing center. In the summer of 2016 I began the process of National Board Certification. I stumbled upon a program from our county office that supports teachers through the process over two years. I just finished Component 1 and 2. For more on Component 2 see my previous post . While Component 2 is a year long process of collecting student work and writing about it, Component 1 is a test I took last weekend. This test counts for 40% of my overall NBCT score, and that's more than any other component. Of course it is a three hour test, and yes, every time I say that I hear the theme song to Gilligan's Island in my head. So just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful test... Actually, I can't tell you anything about the test. I agreed to a confidentiality statement when I sat down to take it. I can tell you about my experience, and how I prepared, and what the day was like. The testing center is a 20 minute dri...