Man programming LLM with code everywhere image generated by Midjourney. — Image Generated by Midjourney

It’s safe to say that I’ve been obsessed with AI this summer. Going into my fifth week of summer break when I’m not out hiking or eating with my wife or hanging out with our daughter and her boyfriend I’ve been reading and taking online courses. While not all my summer learning has been AI related, I’d say that over 75% of my work so far has been around AI and its use in the classroom. I did sign up for a Pam Harris Math workshop and I’m getting back into my Building Thinking Classrooms book because I’ll be teaching Math again in the fall. I also completed both of Adobe’s Creative Educator Level 1 and Level 2 courses. And I renewed both my Google Educator 1 and 2 certifications, so it’s not all AI but mostly. I plan on finishing my Math prep closer to the end of August so it’s fresh when I start the new school year so I have been working on Google and AI. I’m also engaging with my PLN on Bluesky social and on Threads in addition to Mastodon while also staying active on Twitter and Linkedin in case too many educators end up leaving Twitter. I figure summer is a good time to try out new social media to see which ones will be the best for me to use during the school year when I don’t have much time to engage.

I chose three books for my summer reading on AI:

AI for Educators by Matt Miller

The AI Infused Classroom by Holly Clark

And The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Amanda Fox, and Brad Weinstein.

In addition I took Matt’s four-week course, AI for Educators, which was great and I highly recommend it. Matt is great and has amazing ways of helping educators through this unprecedented journey. Holly has a summer learning series for AI in the Classroom and School, which I just learned about and for which I just signed up. I subscribe to two or three different mailing lists with AI-related news so I’m reading about AI every day and am amazed at how much is happening every single day. I even signed up for and got certified as a Curipod Certified Educator! That was also a great and fun course and I highly recommend Curipod – it’s amazing. Oh yeah, and I also took the Microsoft Empower educators to explore the potential of artificial intelligence online course, which was also good.

I’ve been working at keeping up my whole career, motivated by a strong desire to provide my students with a relevant education to best prepare them for their futures. I had students working on my Tandy laptop when I started teaching in 1991 and used my AOL account to connect them from South Central Los Angeles to kids in Vassalboro, Maine. In 1997 I was teaching kids basic HTML to create webpages as Web 1.0 made its way into classrooms. When Web 2.0 was booming I blended my classes with enough computers in my classroom to have kids working in small teams so we wouldn’t have to wait to use the computer lab (remember when those were shared by all the teachers in one building!) and wrote grants until I had enough devices for a 1:1! Now that Web 3.0 and Web3 are fast approaching, I’m still in and AI is moving faster than any previous Web – I haven’t seen anything Web related move this fast! For something to impact education, which is usually behind or way behind the private sector, is impressive. We educators can’t hide from this!

AI generated LMQL Python Code Image by Midjourney — Image Generated by Midjourney

I’ve also been having fun playing with Midjourney learning that it’s difficult to get exactly what you want when prompting AI generators with text to make images! This whole prompt engineering or getting better at asking questions excites me about bringing AI into my classroom. By the time kids get to upper elementary and middle school they’ve lost their natural inquisitiveness and resources like the Right Question Institute (RQI) were developed to help kids start to ask questions again. AI will force kids to ask better questions because just like the coding, “garbage in, garbage out,” you only get results as good as what you ask!

But wait, there’s more! I joined our Washington Education Association’s (WEA) AI Task Force and we’re starting to plan a Washington State AI Summit for January. I’m also working with my WEA training team, Tammie and Benjamin, to design an AI for Educators course for Washington state teachers. We are going to be presenting our live Zoom Gamification, GBL, Esports, and Minecraft workshops at the end of July and beginning of August so we’ll see when we can offer our AI course. Ideally, we want to offer this summer so teachers are better prepared when school starts but realistically we will have to offer it once school starts in September or October.

I’ve been putting together a list of resources from ALL the resources out there and here’s what I have so far trying to keep the list manageable: