Flight path time.

Current coordinates:

For this course I am looking at the impacts on and applicability of various social media formats to a secondary school learning environment, as a teacher currently working in the BC public school system. As an older student who got to watch the idea of social media rise through the hotmail/ICQ chat days of the 90’s/2000’s through to the kind of things that spellbind my current students, I can see the undeniable draw and facility of these resources; similarly, as a long-ish time public school teacher I’ve been trained on safe, sanitary, and rights-respecting use of the internet and copyrighted materials, which is also a part of my sometimes-role as a content creator.

Mapping the route:

My goal for the course is to find new ways to engage my students both in terms of assessments and in terms of general content delivery. I’ve fallen prey in the past to engaging in a cycle of assessment types that might be covering core competencies required of the students, but tends to wear students out by the end of the course. Since they should be ‘peaking’ in power at the end of the course instead of lagging in output/interest, I can see that there’s improvements/alterations to be made in modality – not that they need to do less writing, per se, but that having it come in new forms might rally engagement as courses move on through the months. Just as a pet might need some kind of cheese-based format to get an antibiotic pill down, so too might new angles make school work more palatable for my clientele: let’s give them something new to chew on.

If I can increase the number of tools in my box, I’ll be able to do more jobs. Honestly, a man gets tired of marking essays and overseeing dodgy/slapped-together presentations.

Anticipating turbulence:

There is always a learning curve when encountering new platforms, programs, and concepts; I’ll expect that same sensation will be part of the tools this course will promote. I’ve always looked at AI, if I’m being honest, rather the way a raven might look at a ‘learn to fly’ poster on a bulletin board. My degree in English (and educational hubris) basically dismissed generative AI as a writing tool outright when I was first playing with it some years ago: sure it generated a sonnet about the Ninja Turtles quickly enough, but it got a bit off pentameter partway through. Surely it must be useless!

Well, no…not useless. In the same way that I can truly sit and think out what 23.3 x 10.5 is due to my amazing Math 12-level background but it’s annoying and takes a bit of time, AI for writing has, at a minimum, incredible potential at the ideation phase of the writing process. While I can see some logic in paper-based tests to see who has ‘it’ in their brains, I’m cutting people off at the knees if I’m not giving them technologies and utilities that make their learning easier/more engaging.

Just as I adapted readily to the world of the calculator after memorizing my timetables, so too should I learn to ‘love the bomb’ of AI use after crossing the stage with an English degree. I’m here to help students – it’s not so much for me as for them: there are more of them than there are of me.