Lit & Tech

Teaching literacy with technology in an era of educational innovation. By Jen Roberts 🦋 @jen.litandtech.com

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Digital Foundations

May 08, 2013

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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

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Pedagogy for 1:1 Classrooms

What Happens When Students Have Access to Instant AI Feedback?

I teach English to 9th graders, which means I frequently ask them to write things. Right now we are working on a narrative unit and I often ask them to write stories related to our readings. Recently, we have watched the famous TED talk about the danger of a single story, and read a great essay on the same topic, and then I asked students to write about a time when they had a single story about a person or place, or a time when someone else had a single story about them. Nothing revolutionary here, just a pretty typical classroom writing exercise, except that I also gave them access to immediate AI feedback through Magic School . What happened: Some students started writing, some went to the idea generator in the Magic Student room I gave them, and then started writing. So, as usual, the first ten minutes of writing time was pretty productive and on task. Initial AI Feeedback Then we hit the usual wall. You know the wall. The moment when one student ...

Revising From an AI Created Essay Draft: An end run around potential unethical behavior

I just finished packing up my classroom for the 23-24 school year; my 28th year as an English teacher. What a ride it has been. I'm not retiring, I just mean this last school year has been quite a ride. In 22-23 ChatGPT became a thing and students started to try using it. I started to try to guide them in ways to use it better. You can find previous posts about lessons for introducing AI and strategies for promoting academic honesty elsewhere on this blog. Ideogram: A high school English classroom of seniors 23-24 though, was the year we all took more than just a few cautious steps. A new group of students meant I had to start over with my campaign to convince them I can tell when they use AI instead of doing their own writing. Teenagers are natural risk takers, and that is generally a good thing, but it also means a few of them will take a risk and try using AI to cheat. Eventually, they believe me that they will probably be caught. I overheard one of my seniors tell a ...

Converting the text in an image to a Google Doc with a lot of help from AI

The photo, circa 2018? Years ago, in a different classroom, I had a glorious long whiteboard. It stretched for nearly the full length of one side wall of my classroom. One of my favorite things to use it for was listing sentence frames my 9th graders could use to help them craft body paragraphs of an essay. To take a picture of it I had to use the pano option on my phone, but I am so glad I took that picture. Fast forward to this past spring when my teaching partner suggested we revive the comparative analysis uint we used to do. I knew I would need these sentence frames again, but my current classroom (while beautiful) has only an eight foot whiteboard—not long enough to recreate this helpful scaffold for my current students. I decided a digital document could suffice and also be available to students outside the classroom through our LMS. Arguably an improvement. But, it would mean accurately retyping these sentence frames into a table of a Google Doc. Not something I was ...

Collaboratively Written Scenes: Dialogs on Video For The Win

I have found a remarkably effective way to get students writing and speaking. I let them work in pairs, specifically writing in pairs. Earth shattering, I know. This protocol works well for argument writing and narrative writing. It works equally well with my seniors and my 9th graders. It is remarkably easy to grade, and students produce really good products. Process: 1. Students choose their own partners. (This works better than having assigned partners.) I usually don't tell them why they are choosing partners. I want them to pick their friends. That's fine. 2. I assign the prompt, but it is always to write a scene in the form of a dialog between two characters. For my seniors it was a scene between a director and an actor arguing about whether or not to cut a speech from a Hamlet production. For my 9th graders it was a scene about some pitfall of social media that had to tell a story with a moral. The seniors were writing to show they could argue and the 9t...

Digital Alchemy: Transforming Images with Adobe Express

It's been a fabulous three days at the Adobe Innovator Summit, a chance to connect and reconnect in person with many educators that have and will continue to inspire me. The focus was very much on Adobe Express for Education , a product from Adobe that is free to K-12 educators and students. I won't say free forever because forever is a very long time and we've all seen other tools that promise that and then...poof, but it is free now with a promise to continue to be free. I've used Adobe Express a lot in my classroom, but this week I (finally) developed a better understanding and appreciation for a great tool in there called, generative fill. Generative Fill lets you select an area of an image and then use a text to image generator to change that part of the image. The picture on the right is a good example. There is a famous room at Adobe where the furniture is attached to the ceiling. It is all white. You can step inside and have your picture taken. When y...