Category Archives: What’s Behind AI?

Teachable Machine, Google Quick, Draw! Scratch Extensions

Set the Scene & Build Background on AI & Traditional Programming

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While some students may be familiar with how they use AI in their everyday life, it’s important to never assume a baseline of background experiences. Shout out to Scholastic Action Magazine for an absolutely engaging article on ChatGPT and how we use AI in everyday life with Alexa, Siri, Youtube Recommendations and more!

Pair Reading about Content with a Strategy

Their article Could a Chatbot Write This Story? builds background and context and then includes the comprehension questions pictured below. The comprehension questions are comprehensive! They establish a solid understanding of what ChatGPT is and provide a framework of how other Artificial Intelligence may work.

Scholastic Action’s comprehensive questions based around WH- questions are simple, comprehensive, and accessible for English learners.

My newcomer to advanced students all engaged these questions. While this series is primarily a content series on AI, this post focuses on an English language development strategy particularly useful when we build prior knowledge with reading & answering comprehension questions. It is key for EL teachers to combine content with functional cross-curricular strategies that students can leverage across their content classes.

After a read through, I taught the Sentence Mirroring strategy. This is how Tan Huynh, a prolific ML teacher and author, references it. In the past, I have called it the “Start with the Question” strategy but will change to Huynh’s term Sentence Mirroring because I love the imagery of a mirror, how the student creates a reflection of the question in the answer. It requires no prep, simply instruction on the part of the teacher. It is iterative and can be applied later on to any other questions/responses.

In this strategy, we teach students to use the question to create their own sentence starters. The question itself is a built-in word bank. This tool is absolutely empowering to students. They don’t need a teacher to provide them with the sentence starter–they create it themselves. Equally powerful, it teaches the student to examine the question’s content before attempting to answer it. Further, it reinforces word order, pronouns, and spelling. This is how I approach it:

How to Employ the Sentence Mirroring Strategy

  1. Read the question. Reread the question.
  2. Number the first word in the question to start the answer, then copy it in the answer space.
  3. Continue to number the second, third, fourth word etc in the question to continue the answer, then copy in the answer space.
  4. Read the newly created sentence starter for clarity. *This is where students can check for pronoun changes like you to I and identify any word order corrections.

Sentence Mirroring in Action! (Enjoy the pun) šŸ™‚

At that point, the students answered their questions searching the text and their own sentence starters.

Now Apply & Code in Scratch!

We weren’t done! I then used this exercise to introduce basic coding to my students in Scratch, a free web-based coding platform designed for students to explore coding their own interactive games, stories, and animations. The task was this:

  • My beginners/ early intermediate students coded one character (a sprite) to share their answers from the ChatGPT article in a monologue.
  • My upper intermediate/advanced students coded two characters (two sprites) to share their questions and answers in a dialogue. 
See a beginner/ early intermediate student example here. 
See an upper intermediate/advanced student example here.

Check out my original assignment “Let me tell you about ChatGPT!” and remix it to make it your own!

Students created and customized. They revisited and reviewed the content. They interacted with English Language Arts concepts, conversational discourse conventions (do we talk in sentences? or phrases?), and engaged basic, traditional computer programming. They had a blast and are well ready to engage foundational principles behind AI. We’ve just scratched the surface of this unit.

To be continued!

AI Aboard! Teaching Language Learners About How AI Works

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AI Aboard!!! Duh duh. Duh duh. Duh duh, duh duh. AI AI AI!

Teachers and students are jumping on the ‘crazy train’ on how to teach with and use artificial intelligence (AI) for learning, but what about learning about AI.

It is important that students with different cultural and linguistic perspectives learn about AI and its foundational principles to ensure that they get appropriate representation as AI tools and ethics are being formulated and regulated. Equity for EL students will mean a purposeful and even tactical emphasis on the foundations of AI by local educational agencies, especially now as our world is burgeoning with new AI technology and considering its implications.

I tell my students, “This is your ‘when I was your age’ moment. For me, ‘when I was your age’, I had no texting capabilities on my phone, certainly no internet apps or camera capabilities on my phone. For you, you will tell your children, 20 years ago… AI was just emerging and… I was in high school and Ms. Sawyer taught me all about it! LOVED HER. Wonder where she’s at? Ha!”

As EL teachers, we can help our students climb aboard. Understanding and bringing their diverse voices to this transformative technology is crucial. We must adapt our content-based instruction as the content adapts. This is the language of computer science, of social studies, of current events, of now.

This March I had the privilege of leading a small cohort of my colleague-friends in a introductory PD on how to teach our secondary EL students about the principles behind AI. My Maryland friends from the Maryland Center for Computing Education and a PLC of like-minded educators presented me the opportunity to host sponsored by the Scratch Education Collective grant. It was an honor to be selected to run the secondary portion of the grant and bring computer science PD home to Chesapeake, VA.

This will be the first in a series of posts that document what we did to introduce Scratch and foundations of AI technology to our EL students. We explored activities and brainstormed language acquisition supports that would bridge access to the content. All of our units looked similar yet different as we customized the activities and learning to our classrooms. 3 of 4 EL teachers had limited to no experience integrating computer science in their classrooms, but that soon changed!! I was also new to facilitating my students in their exploration of the foundations of AI and learned alongside my English learner teachers.

Let me leave you with the introductory lesson I implemented.

It begins the “Great Cognate Race,” where deductive reasoning is used to create a formula for Spanish to English connections. The focus word was ‘intelligence.’ Students race to list as many words in their home language that end in -ancia or -encia. Then I list the English equivalent. Students deduce a rule based on their data, and use it to convert their cognates to English. This activity honors the home language and how their expertise in Spanish can serve as a ramp to equivalent English vocabulary. It is similar in principle to artificial intelligence. Machine learning considers broad data to set parameters to later produce specific results.

Next we explore human v. machine. The purpose is to show students the value of their own experiences and expertise–to rip them away from the over-dependence of computer influence and also introduce how computer learning can be used to expand–not replace–their own work.

Students brainstorm the meanings of the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence.’ We use their answers to create a definition using the stem “Artificial intelligence is________.” Ss share their definitions. Then they copy down a dictionary or AI generated definition. They reflect on how their own definitions were similar or different. Last, they combine elements of both to create a “master” definition. Instead of human v. machine, human AND machine.