I was an English language arts, and social studies teacher for 20 years. The worst part of my job by far was evaluating essays. Even if we resist machine grading by AI for now, it will eventually be here to stay. And even if the AI grading isn’t perfect, we can work on our prompts to make it better and better. As a human grader/evaulator, despite my best intentions, I am certain that my essay evaluations were likely uneven. If I had 40 essays to mark, while they were hopefully fairly consistent. I’m sure there were still inconsistencies and I’m certain that I gave better feedback to some students than others.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider is that it takes a human a long time to grade 40 or 60 essays, especially if you aim to provide helpful feedback. If AI can provide reasonable and consistent and immediate feedback to our students as writers, I don’t think it is fair to ask them to wait for two weeks while a human marks a whole stack of essays to hand back at once.
Perhaps the human marks the final essay, or the final draft of the essay. In the in between, however, I think we need to consider teaching our students how to ethically use generative AI to access immediate and specific feedback about parts of their writing.
I know there are lots of other points to consider, but as a life-long English teacher, I believe AI is a path to a better way of assessing.
Here’s an AI workflow that works great with writers at all grades from K-12. It’s around short story writing. We have the kids generate the elements of a short story plot – character physical/personality description, antagonist, initial incident, problem, moral of the story. etc. This works really well in pairs. Each student or pair completes this outline in a collaborative doc like a Google doc. Check out a sample outline that we used for a school-wide story project (with sample prompts and outputs.)
The teacher takes the students’ outline and prompts ChatGPT (or CoPilot, Perplexity, etc.) to write a [insert # here] paragraph story at a [insert grade here] grade reading and writing level. The teacher then copies this AI output back into the student’s document below their outline. Each student now has a story that feels like theirs, but it hasn’t taken four weeks to write.
Here’s where the magic really comes in. Now that each student has a story draft to use, all of the real great work of writing that we never get to – the editing, developing the setting, using juicier wording, writing more interesting sentences, etc.- can finally happen. The students are willing to be much more ruthless with the story and the revision process,. We are then able to do much more valuable writing work in this editing/revision phase, than when students labour over writing their own short story for weeks.
For example, if you want to work on plausibility, it is fun to add a section to the planning out line that says, “at some point in the story this random thing must happen.” Most often, the AI assistant does an incredibly clumsy job of adding the random event to the story. It is fun to listen to groups of students as they come up with a better solution.
Some teachers take a different spin and instead of working the “writing process”, they ask the AI assistant to generate the story with a particular type of error. Students are more interested in finding and fixing the errors when the story is based on their outline.
Another twist is to take the prompt and the outline and feed it into 2 or 3 different AI assistants and share the versions back with students. The lessons that follow can be about the predictability of AI or students can use the best elements of the 3 stories to weave their own together.
In some cases, the teachers have gone on to publish all the stories in Book Creator, or a Canva presentation with AI generated images.
Please note that I am not proposing that we remove the struggle of writing from students entirely. It is absolutely crucial to instruct students in writing, and to help them build writing stamina. However, I think this workflow is a great way to let AI help us get to the parts of the writing process with our students that so often gets squeezed out.
A key element of adding items to a student’s digital portfolio is adding photos and videos – these are most often captured on a student’s mobile phone camera roll. At this point though, most students become stumped at how to get this media into their Google Site. (This becomes ANOTHER evidence that students need more practice with their digital skills.)
The best method is via the Google Drive app on the student’s phone. (Video coming soon).
If you often upload media (photos and/or video) to Google Drive or other platforms, you can save yourself lots of time – and storage space on your phone – by reducing the file size of your photos and videos as you capture them.
Watch the video for some quick tips on how to do this with both photos and video.
And, I’m pleased to add that I had to learn some new skills this week for this video and some others that I made for my Clean-up Blitz. Previously, whenever I’ve included videos from my phone, they have been just screen recordings with no commentary. I’ve just learned how to record my phone screen with a voice-over – something I should have learned a while ago. It involved Quick Time on my Mac – an app that I seldom use.
K. It seems that I’ve been looking for a flashy “K” for a long, long time, yet a good option still alludes me. So here we are at “K is for Google Keep” – the trusty tool that is one of my all-time Google favourites. My everyday Google Keep account looks like this when zoomed in; I should have just done K is for Keep years ago and been done the alphabet sooner.
What: This tool, found in the Google Waffle, is a note-taking multi-tool. People sometimes ask why they shouldn’t just use a Google Doc to collect the same things – link, images, text, checkboxes… My answer is ease and convenience. I use Keep somewhat as a list-maker, but primarily as a link-catcher. Because Google Drive doesn’t let you just store weblinks, Google Keep is the place where I keep and organize links of resources that I want to access in the future.
For this video, I’ve touched on a dozen things that Google Keep can do: 1. Save weblinks and text, 2. Save images, 3. turn lists into clickable checkboxes, 4. Colour code for organization 5. Label (think hashtags or tags) with 1 or more labels, 6. Share and collaborate with others, 7. Capture Voice notes on mobile, listen to them on any device, 8. Grab editable text from an image, including handwriting, 9. Add drawings, 10. Insert a Keep note into a Google Doc, Slides, or Sheet, 11. Search the Google Keep ecosystem, 12. Organize your notes by pinning, moving to reorganize, or archiving.
Audience: I use Google Keep just about as much in my personal life as I do in my educator life. Students have access to Google Keep through the waffle and I firmly believe that we should be teaching students about digital organizational tools as young as 3rd or 4th grade.
Even though some of Google Keep’s features like a click-able checklist are now available in Google Docs, Google Keep’s simplicity still makes it a good tool to introduce students to.
Time to Play: You can become a note-taker in Google Keep in 30 seconds or less. For basic notetaking, the interface is very easy to use and intuitive. Most tools are accessible from the simple tool bar at the bottom of each note.
Organizational elements like managing and creating labels and assigning titles to colours are easy enough to do, but will take a few extra minutes to figure out. Ultimately, the power of Google Keep is in its simplicity. It has lots of features, but they are all quite easy to learn just by clicking and trying.
Equipment: This is Google Keep’s superpower. The desktop app and mobile apps both work fantastic. The mobile app has a voice recording feature that the desktop doesn’t have, although you can access recordings from the desktop site.
Another feature of the mobile app is the ease with which you can switch between Google Keep accounts. Here it the workflow. Open the Google Keep app in one of your accounts. To switch accounts, simply swipe down on your profile picture. If you are logged into the 2nd account, it will flip over to it immediately. This is one of the reasons that Google Keep is a superior note-taking option to Google Docs or other notetaking apps like Evernote.
What I learned today... 