Brent Warner 0:00
Like some AI, but don’t trust it to use anywhere that touches pedagogy. We’ve got some ways to incorporate it that won’t interfere with your classroom. This is the higher ed tech podcast season six, Episode 11.

Tim Van Norman 0:26
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College, an adjunct professor of business at Cypress College,

Brent Warner: 0:32
and I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about. Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us.

Tim Van Norman 0:40
So over winter break, our last episode, second last episode, we had some ideas for things that would be nice to get for Christmas. And yes, I did get a couple of them. It was kind of nice.

Brent Warner: 0:48
Good, good, good.

Tim Van Norman: 0:56
I got an AI book, and I did get a portable monitor. So,

Brent Warner: 1:02
oh yeah, you showed that to me. That was cool.

Tim Van Norman: 1:09
It has a really nice touch screen. So, you know, see, sometimes people do listen to Santa a bit.

Brent Warner 1:18
So we are a little off schedule here, Tim, we kind of held off a little bit and gave ourselves some breathing room to come back in. But we’re we’ll be fine. So welcome back. Welcome to the new year 2025 I hope everybody’s doing okay. We are, of course, in Southern California. So just to briefly say, for those who are not fully aware of the geography and where we are with everything is Irvine is far enough away where it’s not really a major issue. There might be some, you know, bad air stuff going on a little bit, but we’re not in any threats for most of us, but we do have students and stuff that we are worried about all over the place, and so colleagues and colleagues, yeah, there’s a lot going on. So the fires are terrible, obviously, but okay, I don’t know …

Tim Van Norman 2:06
our life goes on, and hopefully this will be an upbeat, a little different, a little bit take on. Ai, yeah,

Brent Warner 2:13
Yeah, all right, so Tim, let’s jump into it. So we were talking about this idea that there are definitely teachers out there, and a lot of our teachers, not a lot, but, I mean, there are a number of teachers who are like, hey, I want to play with AI stuff, but I don’t trust it. I don’t I don’t think the quality of the output is good enough, or I don’t want it to make stuff that might mislead My students or to misunderstand things. I definitely don’t want my students interacting with it, because they don’t have the knowledge to check it, and we get all these ideas right, like that. Those are valid points that need to be discussed and understood as we’re kind of making this, we are making a transition into this AI world, right? A lot of us, we sometimes say we’re already here, but sometimes, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of people who haven’t, and so we wanted to kind of talk about some ways for people who are somewhat curious, and say, Hey, I’ve got, I’m interested, but I don’t want it to hit those pedagogy points, or I don’t want it to, you know, I don’t want it to interfere with the possibility of my students learning or learning the wrong stuff, right? I know you’ve interacted with some of these teachers too,

Tim Van Norman 3:22
Absolutely, and we’ve, we’ve talked in the past about things like tutors and stuff like that. That’s weird. That’s pedagogy. Okay, here, let’s look at it as a tool to help you and and maybe even help your students a little bit, but without getting into trying to have it teach your class or something. That’s not what we’re talking about here. So I love this first one. Syllab Brent, you put that in there a syllabus? Yeah.

Brent Warner 3:51
So we’re, we’re, I am, but Tim, probably you too. We’re going to be doing a small workshop on this in coming weeks on campus, which is basically the idea that you can load up your syllabus into one of these kind of walled garden ones, right? So we’ve talked about play lab in the past. And so anyone where you can kind of have what they call, they have different words for these things, but the agents, right, where it’s like, Hey, I have a specific task I meant to do. That’s what the AI is doing. And so you upload documents, or you link it to certain web pages, and it only references those things when it’s trying to answer. And so if you upload your syllabus into this, or if you, you know, connect it to a you know, if you have all of your dates planned out, maybe you could kind of download that as a PDF from Canvas or something and upload that as a resource. Then you can have your students use that to ask questions before they come to you, right? Which is to say, hey, you know, what are the classroom policies around this? Or I’m going to be late, is that okay? Or I’m. Um, you know, like, all these types of questions that students often ask, and it’s like, hey, you know, the teachers kind of, like, they do the the old like, oh my gosh, come on, you just read the syllabus. It’s in there, but they don’t. And that’s, you know, that’s the reality of things. But maybe if they had a quick little bot, and with, with play lab, there’s an embed option, right? And so, Tim, I don’t know if you’ve played with this, but like when you click on that button, you get the the embed code, and you can then go into Canvas, and on your syllabus page, you can actually embed, you know, the bot directly into the top of the page, right? So above the part where it says, Hey, these are the dates of the assignments. You can make that be part of it. And so you could say, hey, talk to this thing first. And then, before you email me, talk to this thing and see if you can figure out the answers. And then, with play lab, it has an option for, like, you know, 0% variability. So it’s like, only going to be working with exactly the content that you are uploading and sharing with it. So So you have pretty good trust that what the students are going in there and asking are going to is going to be fairly accurately, you know, shared with them. And so I think that’s a really good way to start playing with it. And in fact, on our campus, Professor Carney mentioned this in one of our sessions when we actually, when we had Rodrigo Gomez come to speak with us, and, you know, Professor Carney was like, hey, you know, this is something that I would use it for, is that, does that exist? And we’re like, Yeah, we could do and so, so that’s what kind of sparked the idea for this one, too. But I think it’s really useful. Really useful,

Tim Van Norman 6:43
absolutely, and something that that won’t affect your teaching, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s great. The next one here, generate images and videos that demonstrate specific ideas. Ooh, I love this. Yeah? Because, because you can go a couple of different ways, you can create these radical things that are amazing and aren’t something that you could actually see in real life, or you can get to real life and stuff very quickly and by just playing, yeah, so yes.

Brent Warner 7:20
And I think the one thing about this too, Tim is, I think every, well, definitely, as a language teacher, I’m always looking for sample images and things that are engaging, right? But it’s like, well, you’re go searching on Google, or even when you go searching in something like pixels, or one of these free, you know, free download services, or, like, really good stuff, but it’s not quite the image that I’m looking for, right? And so then I’ve found myself spending as I’m like, Okay, I’ve been spending 80 minutes trying to find just a picture for this thing. And it’s like, I could have built this now, now I can build that in 20 seconds and just kind of go, Okay, well, well, this is, this is good. This is what, exactly what I’m looking for, right? And so I think that’s a really powerful one to kind of continue to play with and see, like, hey, I can get specific, I can get the images that I’m looking for. Let’s make that happen. Well,

Tim Van Norman 8:14
I know a lot of times you can get good enough, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. You know. Okay, maybe it’s red instead of blue. Whoop de next, you know, those types of things. Sometimes it’s just you make it happen and, and I love that you can really push these. And there’s a number of different tools that do this. We’re not doing this about tools, but there’s a whole bunch of different places that you can find stuff like that. So it’s a great idea. Yeah, for sure.

Brent Warner 8:41
Okay, so next one up. Tim, I just recently learned about this. There’s an app called captions, which I think is available on iOS and maybe on Android two, but also on a Mac and maybe desktop. Anyways, it’s called captions. Basically, it’s really cool. Like, what it does is all the things you’ve seen these like, you know, Tiktok style videos, where, like, the the text comes up on top of what you’re saying, and then, like, when you say the word, you know, that’s that’s cool, and then like, an ice cube shows up, or something like that, right? So, so what this app does is, and there, I’m sure there are several of these, but this one is the one that seems to be right now. Right now, and it makes that all for you really quickly. So you can make a talking head video, which a lot of teachers are starting to do now, right? They’re saying, hey, I want to make my announcement videos, or I want to make my, you know, like my little explainer videos. And so students, though, have a different expectations of videos than what teachers are usually making, right? Most of us are making kind of still, frankly boring videos that are like, hey, slideshow. Maybe my face is in the corner, and then that’s kind of it, right? And it’s still kind of dull. But students want these, like, zoom, bow paint, bam, boom, right? All this like, high. A high engagement, lots of moving parts, things. And so these these apps can do this stuff for you right now without doing anything. You just click and it’ll do it automatically. It does little zoom ins on you, on the video that it made, and then zoom out. It’ll change the background out for you, like when you’re talking about something. And so it’s not a big learning curve. I mean, there’s there’s stuff to play with to make them better and better. But if you’re trying to make more engaging videos, one like this app, this app called captions, could be really good. I know we’re not mostly talking about specific apps, but this one is specific.

Tim Van Norman 10:37
That sounds good. I’m having just published my class, maybe I need to redo a couple of videos. Yeah,

Brent Warner 10:43
I mean, I’m sitting there doing the same thing. I made a bunch of videos, and I’m like, I like, I want to make, you know? Like, I need to get my next step, next level, up, right? And it’s actually might be easier than what I ended up making, which was a little less interesting. So anyways, I’m going to keep playing with it this semester. Nice.

Tim Van Norman 11:00
Yeah, that sounds good. So transcriptions, even if you’ve got a transcription service like ours, they all start with AI processing. Hey, it’s worth, worth doing. So that’s something that I include with all of my videos. Every video is captioned, and I get the transcript, and I put that underneath every video so that the students can literally click on it. They have all of my notes, and it’s a Word doc. They can do anything they want with it, so they get everything that I’ve said really quickly, and they can take notes. They can read, work it, whatever they want to do with it. So it’s been that’s been really neat to have that available for the students. And it’s very simple. When you get captions anyway, a lot of times you can get the transcript pretty simple.

Brent Warner 11:53
Yeah. And, I mean, the truth is, Tim, I don’t know if you, I mean, you’ve been doing this, of course, but like, the quality of these things is really quite good, even when you and I started talking about it, remember, remember a few years ago when we were kind of joking, and you were always give the example of, like, it would misunderstand Canvas as cannabis, and like these things that are kind of problematic, and it’s like, I don’t think that’s really in a thing anymore, right? Like, that’s kind of gone, and now we’re on to, like, it’s quite good. I mean, unless you’re getting very specific and odd, use words like it’s getting it seems to get most of what’s going on.

Tim Van Norman 12:28
Yeah, context. It’s actually starting to understand that context. And with that said, if you are using one of these that you can go in and edit the text, then it will learn from your edits. So that was one of the things, a tool that I started using several years ago. I used the term Proctorio, which is not a word, of course, it came up wrong. I fixed it, and I went back a month later, and it was correct every time I would say it. And those are the types of things that I love about about AI right now is it’s if you correct it, it will learn and it’ll start correcting it, at least in your account.

Brent Warner 13:09
Yeah. So, so transcriptions should be one definitely to look at if you haven’t been doing that, because I think also a lot of teachers kind of shy away from it, just because it feels like a ton of work. But it’s really not anymore. It’s kind of a click and upload and a download, and then you’re good to go. Most of it’s just the waiting time, and you can go make a tea during that time.

Tim Van Norman 13:28
So, yeah, it’s fast, very fast.

Brent Warner 13:31
Yeah, all right, so this one’s an interesting one, and maybe it’s not really, it’s not integrate, it’s not interfering with your pedagogy, but it’s maybe a little bit close ish, or the closest one I think that we’re getting to inside of your classroom, which is planning seating arrangements, right? So you might do something if you’re in an in person class and you’re kind of have your students sitting around, you could go in and use AI to customize and optimize like the best way. So you could say things like, hey, you know, you could make a spreadsheet, for example, and say, Hey, here’s all the the factors that I think about when I’m putting them in, like, strong skills in this class, you know, a little bit shy, you know, you could put in things for me. I might put in what are their their languages. We might put in things like how to, how to mix them up based on age, whatever it else it is. And so you could have all that stuff. If you have different categories on ways that you kind of set your demographics for your students and you want to mix them up, you could just click a button and it could say, Hey, here’s, this is the best way that you know you might be able to balance out their seating. And you could also even say, like, what your seating arrangement looks like. So, Tim, you know my classroom? Well, one of my classrooms has like, seven round tables, right? And so, so then we’ve got about four students, roughly, that sit at every table. And so it’s like, okay, well, I want to put them in the four different ones at these different tables, and so it could recognize that and say, Okay, this is how we’re going to place the students in there. And so, so that could be a really good way to, you know, that’s not really touching anything that you’re do, you’re doing in your class, but it’s setting up and making sure, hey, you know, the things that you want to do, and the things that you might not think about, or the things that you just might have to spend a lot of time going, Wait a second, did I do the best balancing that I could could be taken care of with something like this

Tim Van Norman 15:22
Along those lines. And I absolutely love that, if you do group work, putting the groups together, you know, yeah, you let maybe you let them pick their own group. But what about those students who don’t pick a group? What do you do with that? How do you put them together? And you know that that’s one I struggled with last semester. I’ll struggle with again this semester, because I’ve got group work in my asynchronous online class. So you know, all of the negatives that come up. How do you put them together? Do you put the top student with the bottom student? Do you put top students together? Do you put bottom students together? Grade wise? What about, you know, whatever. And maybe get some ideas from Ai. I love that idea.

Brent Warner 16:04
Yeah. And then you can keep on running with that too. Because if you’re doing group work, and then you say, hey, last time these were the groups, let’s mix them up and try and get, try and get them spread out to totally different groups, right? Then it’ll do that way faster than you might do it. So, so, yeah, really cool. I like, I like that idea a lot.

Tim Van Norman 16:24
The next one here, event bot, connecting web pages, resources that help students know about upcoming local events that might be relevant to them. This goes back to a lot of what you’re talking about with the with the syllab that you can upload. Again, it’s content from that’s not necessarily in your class, but it’s available to your class, and they can just ask a question, Hey, what’s going on? What’s the next event coming up? What’s the next whatever? And it doesn’t teach the class, it just gives them a search engine, basically, to see what’s next. And you don’t you just upload the documents. You don’t have to even, you know, organize really well or anything like that. It’s just available to the students.

Brent Warner 17:09
And you could also, I’m going to tie this in a little further, because, let’s say you’re a drama teacher, and you want your students to sometimes go check out plays that are local to the area, right? Well, you, as a teacher, you might have to gather that information all the time and then send it out to them every time and go like, hey, reminder, this is here and this is here. But the way that you could do that is link it to the local you know, you could link it to two or three local theaters, playhouses. Websites on the homepage say, hey, scan this every time a student asks about it, and then give them the most updated information. And then, then that would be relevant to the students. Doesn’t touch anything that they’re doing in terms of their learning or whatever else it is, but it’s, it’s going, Hey, like one of your assignments is to go to two plays in the semester, for example. And sorry, Drama teachers, I don’t know what you classes, but I’m just going to imagine, right? And so, so then they could, or if you just say, hey, like, if you’re interested in this stuff, you just want to know what’s going on, right? And so it’s just to help out the students, but you don’t necessarily want to spend all your time curating that work on, you know, every week, or whatever, however, often you need to do it. And so I think that would be really good. You could do the same thing with sports types of events. You could do it with cultural things, right, like anything that had that’s being posted about and shared online, as long as you have a couple of reliable sources, I think you could link them in.

Tim Van Norman 18:35
Absolutely. That’s a great one. I love that Now, switching it back actually putting something in your class, but it’s for your use, and your students could use it. But Canvas has something called the Smart Search, and while we’ve kind of avoided a lot of specifics, this is a tool. It’s built into Canvas. It is Canvas tool. It’s not somebody else. There are other systems that do it, but it allows you to go in and say, Where is this word, where is this phrase? And then it uses AI to say, Well, what’s close to that? And it gives you a whole list, and you can actually thumbs up and thumbs down the results, so that it trains it to get better, but it can really make a huge difference for you. Looking, I use it for you know, hey, where does it say syllabus and find all the references of syllabus. That’s great. But, um, what about other things? And so one of the cool things is for your for you, it’ll look through your whole class, published and unpublished. For your students. It only looks through the material they have access to. Yeah, so it’s a really cool tool. Doesn’t teach them anything. They still have to read it. They have to look at it. You have to look and make sure that it’s giving the information you’re wanting it to give. But it’s you. Built in, and it’s, I like it. I think it’s really useful.

Brent Warner 20:04
I think this type of use of AI is a really powerful one that gets kind of brushed over or just doesn’t get mentioned a lot, which is, I’m searching for something that’s close. This is what you’re mentioning, right? It’s close to what I said, but I didn’t say it the same way. So I think about this on LinkedIn, I play one of these games. It’s like, you know, oh, figure out what category all these words are coming into, right? And so maybe, maybe the actual answer is, you know, constellations. But I write the answer as you know, things related to stars. And then it would say, Oh, that’s right, right? Like, basically, that’s close enough, that’s good enough. But they can’t have someone sitting there writing every single version. I think a lot of people, especially of our age, are kind of imagining that, like, the logic tree must be the exact words and the, you know, in the Boolean search and all of these types of things, and those are kind of gone right where it’s like, it’s like, you don’t need to have precise, you know, it has to be that capital letter and then the lowercase letter, and then there, you know, and then it has to be this exact thing, or else it won’t find it. It’s like, no, kind of, you know, it figures out things that are close enough in the area, and then it’ll share that with you. And so I really like this in Canvas, and I think that I would love to see this actually would be much better to me, in Google than what Google’s doing right now. Like, Google’s search is a mess, right? But, and we’ve talked about that before, but, but, like, if I saw something like that where they’re like, hey, basically, you’re looking for this, right? Here’s a few of the things that are options, and here’s a few things that are connected directly to what you said, like the exact words. Here you go. I like these types of potentials a lot, absolutely. All right, so last one here, Tim is reference letters. I think we’ve mentioned this in the past. I’ve certainly talked about it in many presentations. So I know there are a number of tools out there we’ve talked about before, like conmigo has options to do this right in the in place reference letters. I always kind of preference preface this with that. It’s a little bit tricky, because some people feel that reference letters are meant to be very personal. My response to that is that I struggle with it too. And when I went back and started looking at all my old reference letters, pre AI, they all look pretty much the same. Tim, like, I mean, I hate to say it, but like, I and I wasn’t copy, you know, just like, Oh, I’m just kind of end up saying, like, these are like, patterns of things, right? And so if I were to say, like, hey, here are four or five things that I really do know and want to say about this student. And like, here’s what I kind of normally the types of things that I normally put into it. Yeah, maybe that’s okay. Now we should be careful on this one, because I’m already seeing news reports saying, well, now they’re turning down reference letters because universities or companies are scanning them saying that they’re AI and then not accept so, like, so we’re in this whole world of, like, okay, the back and forth, the scanning, all you know, I know, for those of you, for everybody who cannot see, Tim is slapping his forehead as we talk it through, but, but, I mean, you Know what I’m saying? Like, it’s a tricky thing, because we got a couple problems. One, when our student is really good, how do we write a really, really good letter of recommendation? Is one part of it? And then when a student’s not so good, but they’ve asked for it, I’m not of the personality type to say, Oh, you don’t deserve it, you know. You did, you know, and I know some teachers are hard lined on it, but I’m not. And it’s like, if someone asked me, like, I’ll probably say, like, hey, let’s figure out a way. Or, you know, or you can kind of see when you’ve read letters of record in the past, and it’s like, this isn’t, this clearly isn’t a very strong letter of recommendation. It’s just being asked upon them. So anyways, there’s all sorts of, you know, issues around letters of recommendation, but if you want to kind of get a kickstart on it, because you might spend an hour writing it, and then now you could say, Hey, I’m going to get it done in or I’ll have something to start with that’ll be take me a minute, and then I can clean it up in 10 minutes or so after that, maybe, maybe not, but it is a possibility

Tim Van Norman 24:23
Well, and, and one of the things that it does, as you said, it gets you started so you can go in and clean it up. As always, you’re responsible for the output, yep, so do make sure that it is accurate. I’ve heard of some letters of rec that gave people skills that they never knew existed, so, you know, and stuff like that. But as long as you’re…

Brent Warner 24:48
“Tim was great when he was serving as president of Microsoft!” (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 24:56
Yeah, I’ve never worked for Microsoft. So that would be a good one, yes, but the. That’s the that’s the thing, just Ed. We could talk about meeting summaries. We can talk about a lot of different things that that all fit in this category here, of outside of actually pedagogy, but really useful tools for AI in your classroom and in your everyday life, in some cases.

Brent Warner 25:19
Yeah, and I let’s follow that up one more time with what you said before, because I think we should be hitting people over the head with a hammer on this idea you are responsible for anything that you use, right? Like that is, at the end of the day, you are the one, right? So don’t turn around and say, Hey, I did it. It’s not my fault, right? Like that is that is, you like our part of our new responsibilities are to be the filters through which some of this AI stuff gets put out. So absolutely, yeah, so let’s be careful about that. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of possibility here and a lot of ways to play with it that are not necessarily going to impact your pedagogy if you’re not wanting to do that type of stuff,

Tim Van Norman 26:02
And even if you are, these are really good tools that that you can use, in addition to,

Brent Warner 26:09
oh yeah, sorry, it’s not, it’s not an either or, right? It could be this or, and, or it can be that, right? Yeah, all right, awesome.

Tim Van Norman 26:21
Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website, at the HigherEdTech podcast.com

Brent Warner 26:27
as always, we want your feedback, so please go to the HigherEdTechPodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.

Tim Van Norman 26:33
For everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by a 322, or contact me. Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 26:47
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner. I’m Tim Van Norman and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.