Season Five, Episode Six: a look at AI tools in the Fall 23, Part 2.

Tim Van Norman 0:21
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech podcas. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner 0:27
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.

Tim Van Norman 0:35
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. And yes, I hear more people are listening. ai ai ai ai.

Brent Warner 0:43
Yeah, so we made that last episode. And it’s like, well, first, we couldn’t even cover everything in the time limit we’re trying to impose upon ourselves. And then, and there’s just so much to talk about, but also, you know, people want to know what’s going on. Right. So. So I think, Tim, we’re, you know, listeners, if you’re out there, and you’re saying, hey, we want to hear more about this stuff. Great. Let us know, if you’re saying, Hey, I’m getting burnt out on this stuff, let us know. But I think inevitably, Tim and we had a little pre show talk. You know, AI is just part of the technology landscape. It’s just integrated at this point, any we can’t not talk about it, if we’re saying that we’re doing a show on tech and learning. Right. And so I think just by default, we’re going to have regular episodes that I mean, any of these things we talked about last episode, and today. I mean, what are your thoughts? I mean, we could just keep going just make the whole show that?

Tim Van Norman 1:38
Well, that’s part of what we were talking about. And, and I don’t want to make the whole show that I think we need to have other things too, obviously. But because you know, I’ve already got some new Canvas stuff that’s really cool. And some new zoom stuff that’s coming out and stuff like that. But that said, this is where all of the topics are right now. Everybody’s talking AI. If you’re talking about something else, it’s Oh, and

Brent Warner 2:06
AI. Yeah, it’s integration, you know, it’s part of it. Right? Exactly.

Tim Van Norman 2:11
So, so this is where the world is. And, you know, why not be there too?

Brent Warner 2:16
Well, that’s what we’re trying to follow on the show is like, what’s going on? Where can people be innovative? Where can people work with stuff? And, and especially if you’re not following some of this stuff, you know, you need to be on top of this with your students, if you’re a classroom teacher, right? Like you need to kind of know what’s going on. So. So yeah, we’re gonna try and be balanced in talking about different things. But I think there will be more and more, you know, these conversations just about tools that can help people out and make life easier and make your students happier in the classroom and all those things. So. So today, we’re gonna jump into our part two. And again, this is just the brief overview of tools, right? We’re not even really getting into the nitty gritty, although we hope that people start exploring and maybe finding more things and then sharing those back with us to, because if someone says, Hey, this one’s really amazing. And we want to we, you know, I want to hear more about it and see more about it, and I want to share it with other people. I think, you know, we have a platform here to do that. So I think we should encourage,

Tim Van Norman 3:13
absolutely.

Brent Warner 3:14
Let’s jump in.

Tim Van Norman 3:18
Alright, so the first thing I wanted to do, I realized right after we recorded last time that we forgot a really big, a great system, when it comes to image generation. What’s up when we were talking last time, and that’s Canva.

Brent Warner 3:36
Canva I am on Canva all day, every day, at this point, like I’m playing with I’m, I’m really getting into it. It’s so much fun and the AI stuff, they’re announcing stuff like that the integrations in there as well. Which one are you talking? Which part of it are you talking about here?

Tim Van Norman 3:53
Well, so just the other day, I went into Canva and I said, Hey, how about AD just started playing half an hour, 45 minutes later, just in the image, I was not touching anything else, just image creation. I was blown away with the different things that I got for free to be able to try out and does this work, this is not work, and then use it in and in something that I might be using for a mailer or something like that. Absolutely love that product anyway, but wow.

Brent Warner 4:26
Yeah, we are gonna have to do a future episode about Canva it’s, it’s unbelievable and actually Canva is the one when I’m doing presentations. And when I talk about image generation, I usually go straight to Canva because it’s free for teachers right so so everyone you know, we can say hey, look at my journey or look at these other ones that we talked about, but those ones aren’t free for teachers you know, you have to pay well, I mean, you can get partial access or whatever but Canva once you sign up with your teacher account, you’re actually just get access to all the premium features for Free. And so that’s one that I like to share, because it makes it accessible for everyone as well. So, yeah, that Canva image generator, if you go into the apps over there on the, on the toolbar on the left hand side, again, Tim will have to do a whole whole thing on this in the future. But it’s pretty amazing in it. And it’s even stronger I was, these were some of the ones that I was using. I don’t know if you know, I made, they make that little blog AI and esl.com for talking about some of these things. And that was one that I always used at first, and they were kind of these weird kind of charcoal II images. And now they’re coming a lot, you know, lots of different styles are coming in, you can kind of get, you know, you can customize it to the look that you want a lot more. And so it’s really becoming quite powerful.

Tim Van Norman 5:45
Oh, absolutely. Really nice product. So definitely, if you’re listening and you want to try out an image generator, that’s the first one I would try it, it really does a beautiful job.

Brent Warner 6:01
All right, so that we did talk about image generators a bit last time as well. So let’s jump into transcripts. And this is this is probably near and dear to your heart.

Tim Van Norman 6:10
Yes, from an accessibility standpoint, but also from, from even just a reading standpoint, being able to see what’s going on. When you’re watching a video, hey, even when you’re having a conversation with somebody, you could actually on your phone, half of these apps will install on your phone and stuff. So we’ve got things like otter AI, we, I believe we talked about that a couple of years ago, it’s a really cool tool that you can get 600 hours a month, I think for free or 600 minutes for free of just an app on your phone. And sitting in a meeting, it will transcribe that right for you. And you can correct it. And if you correct it, then they will learn and update. So that’s one of the beautiful things about this new concept in AI. The fact that it’s AI is it will learn and it will correct based on what it’s understanding. Otter

Brent Warner 7:08
and I’m going to pick our otter apart a little bit because because I use it so much. And so I agree with you. I mean, it gets me 85% of the way that I want to be right and there’s some there’s some weird things inside of Otter the bother me. So actually, we use otter for transcribing all the episodes of this show and putting putting up all the transcripts to this show. I do that all through otter and the the one thing that two parts bother me one on my other show on the diesel podcast, my co host is named e shell, which is ix ch e ll right and never ever gets her name. Right. So like it’s Michelle, it shall it’s something like that, right? So it’s not some rate for some reason. Oh, it did. It did recently get her name right once. So it’s slowly learning, but it’s been a couple of years. The other thing that really gets me about otter and I don’t know why they don’t fix this is they never recognize. It’s always like a little weird gap between the end of when one person was speaking and the beginning of the another person speaking. So it’s like when you fit when I finished talking here and you’re gonna say that’s right, or something like that, it’ll still say that’s right under my name. And it won’t capitalize the beginning of wherever they’re thinking the new line is starting. So I’m always, I’m always going in and it’s just like these dumb little things that they haven’t figured out the programming for. They haven’t kind of customized to get done. But they’re, you know, as an English teacher, that’s a big deal to me. So all this is to say, of course, these technologies are learning, right? But the, you know, so you still have to deal with it. It’s right there. It’s not this like a perfect solution for everything. But there’s more than otter, there’s other ones out there. And they’re all competing with each other, which is great. So let’s take a look at some of these other ones, too. So

Tim Van Norman 8:51
zoom, when you’re in a Zoom meeting, turn on the transcripts, and you’ll see all the stuff that you just described, it happens in zoom as well. Yeah. And by the way happens in Google. So Google Docs, Google Slides, you can do it at Google Presentation. When you’re presenting, it’ll show up at the bottom, I’ve used that for a couple of years. It’s a really neat way of, of having it transcribed right there in front of you. Notice, I didn’t say captioned, I did say transcribed on purpose, because, as you pointed out, it’s you know, 85 to 95% there depending on a lot of things, but it really is nice to have it live, not two minutes behind if somebody were trying to actually do it themselves. Oh, yeah,

Brent Warner 9:34
it’s I mean, I mean, what a powerful tool just like, you know, Can you can you imagine how it’s like having a stenographer in your pocket, right or something, you know, it’s great. So, and then this other one too, Tim, Microsoft Word has this this transcribing, as well and I you can actually upload files into it. Now you can upload audio files into Word and it will transcribe them out to so there’s all sorts of like, I was like, Whoa, this is this is here like i I never would have thought of it as a you know, as for like a Word document, but then I was like, okay, I can actually see some places where this will be really useful. So there’s some hidden places that you might not think about for for transcriptions.

Tim Van Norman 10:12
Well, and to that point, I heard of somebody who wrote a book, literally trance, dictated a book, and then went in and corrected it. Now I’ve tried to do some of that, and I don’t talk right or something. It drove me nuts, because there was no punctuation and stuff like that. But again, the all of these things are improving. So every time you use it, it gets better. But word PowerPoint, there’s some amazing things going on with that, too. Yeah. So and YouTube’s got transcriptions built in as well. So if you upload a video to YouTube, if you own it, so this is not where somebody else you can have somebody else’s video transcribed. This is your own, you can hit a button and YouTube will Trent will do an auto transcription on your video, and then you can edit it. Yeah, edit the transcription.

Brent Warner 11:01
Yeah, the feature is pretty good in there, too. And then, you know, of course, with YouTube, because it’s tied into all the other things you can, you know, that’s why you can see translations from other languages too. So like it’ll, so if you make sure that your your text is correct in English, then that’ll, you know, strengthen the possibility that it’s translation into another language for another person who might be watching somewhere else in the world, or who’s struggling with it. can also follow along. So lots of cool things inside of there.

Tim Van Norman 11:30
Absolutely. So the next part, and you know, as we’ve said, before, we’re hitting topics, we’re not getting into depth on any of these. But the next part is meeting notes. So I’m going to talk about a couple otter as well. That one, one of the cool things that it’s designed for is you can have it sitting on your computer in the middle of a meeting and actually take notes within the transcript. Right, right. It’s designed to do it, it’s not just like an add on, and oh, I can have it beside it. It actually is designed to do that. So that’s a really cool thing. But another one that I’ve started playing with lately is the Zoom AI companion. So what that one does, is in a meeting, if the host has it turned on, it’s all about the host, the host can either send it to everybody, they can send it just to themselves, they can not have it at all, stuff, like there’s a couple of different settings. But what it’ll do is at the end of the meeting, without recording the meeting, so this is not necessarily a recorded meeting, at the end of the meeting, it will send a summary of the meeting to the host, or to everybody or whatever is in there.

Brent Warner 12:42
You sent them that’s an awesome, you sent me one of those reasonable, yeah, you’re like, hey, here’s a bunch of stuff I talked about the other day, I’m like, oh, okay, here we go.

Tim Van Norman 12:49
Well, and and it’s, it’s about 85%. There. It’s not, not complete, but it’s amazing. The fact that now, if you’re taking notes in a meeting, you get that and you go oh, no, we didn’t talk about that exactly. Change these three words. And now it’s right. You know, so kind of what we’ve talked about all along about the accuracy of AI, that’s still in here. But it’s a whole lot easier than sitting here and trying to take notes while I’m talking. And at the end, it gives next steps. Oh, I like that. Automatically. At the bottom, it says this is what you’re going to do next. How do we activate this diamond? Is it available for everyone. So at IVC, we’ve turned it so that everybody can turn it on themselves in their account. But if you have your own personal account, I believe it works in personal accounts as well, that it’s just a setting. But if you’re in a business account, like we are, it has to be allowed, at least at the main level. And then you literally go into settings. And there’s there’s a setting that says AI companion at the top, and you just turn it on there. And then there’s a couple of other things.

Brent Warner 14:00
You’re talking about the settings in the website zoomed out us not the settings in the app. Correct. Okay, sometimes it gets confusing, and like, oh, we gotta get those things going. So

Tim Van Norman 14:10
especially with Zoom, because there once you’ve turned it on, then inside of your, your zoom session, there’s a spot where you can turn it on and off to

Brent Warner 14:23
think so. I mean, it’s all cool, but it’s like a little organization helps. Okay, so actually, let’s combine these two because this is going back to the transcript. So these are linked together pretty closely. Sometimes when I’m in a meeting, it’ll we have otter also at IVC. But you know, sometimes these things turn on so like when someone is using the otter transcript or the otter meeting notes it in the past and maybe still now it logged itself in as kind of a separate account and so I always see people going, Oh, who’s this? Tim’s otter Tuesday. In otter, or otter, it says some sort of kind of weird name. Usually otters in there. But that’s a note that someone is trying to AI, from some, some version usually take notes or something like that. So just to be aware that, hey, this comes up as a notification. It’s not some someone trying to zoom bomb your class. Remember, zoom? bobbington? We don’t, I don’t think that happens as much anymore. I don’t know, maybe

Tim Van Norman 15:24
not? Not very often. So that said, in zoom, for the AI companion, it shows up at the top. And you can see it if, if we were running it right now. For instance, if you had it turned on, you’d see it at the top, saying that it’s an AI is getting a summary of the meeting. So it’s, it does let everybody know, just like it does with recording and stuff like that. So it’s trying not to. It’s trying not to be hidden, trying to be transparent, but not necessarily everybody’s gonna get that summary.

Brent Warner 16:02
I mean, at the end of the day, that’s better than like, knowing that there’s some hidden thing behind there. That’s just like, hey, you’ve been something’s been listening to you every single time. So it’s like, there’s some sort of notifications. Oh, that’s actually a good move on. I assume that’s on zooms part. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So, now we got another big one, video generators. So let’s talk about this for a minute. The so these are the ones where they can either they can start from total scratch, right? Like, you can actually start from absolutely nothing, some of these I’ve seen where you can actually just type in a scenario. And they’re actually like, creating whole landscapes and scenes. So you can say like, you know, five people walking down a city street with lampposts, and, you know, and trees growing around, and then it’ll actually generate a video like, you know, a CG video of that. And then you can say, oh, there’s too many trees, spaced them out a little bit more, or something like that, right. So, and it’ll do this all on the fly as you’re going. So that’s like, it’s already exists for these things. But let’s not quite worry about that full level, because there’s a few of these things that are a little bit more accessible to us right now. And I think di D is a good one. Have you played with this? Tim? This is one of the first ones I guess. Yeah. Okay, what was your experience?

Tim Van Norman 17:21
So, d ID, d dash ID, is I use it as just a chatbot here, and just chatting back and forth, me texting, and them speaking back and on the screen at the same time, just to see what it would do. And I was surprised at how well it did. Again, the accuracy thing, I’m unfortunately, it’s one of those things that drives me nuts is when something’s not accurate. So I keep bringing that up. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t expect that. But it was it was decent, accurate, wise, but but it was friendly. I wouldn’t have been surprised for to find out that there’s a person behind it. Because it just it wasn’t bad. But it was, you know, somebody needed a little bit more information on the topics that I was trying to cover with it. And but then I loved how it did it. The talking and stuff like that I actually took one of the recordings and put it in a class that I did with the AI for the classroom, as an example of how you could actually have students do stuff like that.

Brent Warner 18:35
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I, this is one of the first ones that I played with. And Tim, you probably saw me doing some of the presentations we did on campus early on. This is the one where I uploaded a picture of my face. And then I gave it a script, which I actually had Chuck GPT write the script. And I actually used I actually used 11 labs to create my audio. So I uploaded that as well. So it had my own audio of my voice speaking. And this was the one that animated my face. So it was kind of a Harry Potter style picture of me, my head was kind of wobbling around. But it was a little weird. At that time. I haven’t gone back and tried it again. But my beard stayed in place, but my head and my mouth were moving. And so it was a little bit unnatural, but but it was, you know, it was clearly me talking. So if you’re, you know if you are clean shaven or if you are a person who doesn’t need to shave, you know, if you have a little bit more of a clean face than I do, basically, I think it would work really well and it does come across pretty cleanly as being able to see that picture is now talking to you and saying things or whatever else that is so so it’s really cool because you can you can upload a picture of yourself or you can upload some you know, like an animated picture or something like that. And it’ll it will actually generate that talking and so di D you know, was one of the early ones that came out for that and I I’m gonna I’m gonna go back and visit it again, because it’s it’s pretty powerful.

Tim Van Norman 20:03
And it’s improved quite a bit since then. Yeah, because I’ve looked at it much more recently than that. And the next one Colossian. I loved that I actually did an intro to a class with Colossian. And I, you know, welcome and I gave it the whole script and picked up a face. And all of a sudden, this woman and you’d watch her lips move you it’s hard to tell that it’s not a person that actually recorded it. It they really did a did a really good job. I mean, you can tell, especially if you blow it up, but it really did a good job. And it’s good enough, especially in short pieces that you could, you could put script like that into your class and use it and tell tell some information. And it literally did it just like a PowerPoint presentation up to the side. There’s the text that I wanted, in the images I wanted, what the stuff that I wanted to do. It’s all right there. And it looks like this person did a presentation, like I said, is just a little off. But it it’s really, it’s not off so much that it bothers you.

Brent Warner 21:15
Yeah. There’s that little tiny gap in the uncanny valley that they call that right. Okay, cool. I haven’t played with that one. So I’ll have to go. I actually a couple of these ones I haven’t played with yet. But let’s take a look. So there’s a few more Synthesia. Is that right?

Tim Van Norman 21:31
Yeah. So there’s a couple of them here that I’ve looked at briefly. Cynthia is one of them. And then we’ve got our one that AI?

Brent Warner 21:41
Oh, yeah, I think I’ve seen Joanne Shan presenting on that one.

Tim Van Norman 21:45
Yeah. So. So we’re, in this case, we’re trying to get some variety out there. We also don’t know how long some of these things are going to last before they’re swallowed by somebody else. Or, or something else. And also, we want to give you the idea, as the listener, try some of these things out. But don’t pay for them until you actually want them.

Brent Warner 22:08
Yeah, yeah, everyone’s will, like I’ll do like, I’ll pay for it. It’ll be a subscription, I’ll be like one month and then immediately cancel it. So I just get the one month to test it out. But But yeah, there are lots of different things. So look around, try these different ones. One thing I do want to say to him just before we kind of step away from the video generators, like these things are super cool. And some of them might save you time. But I also want to be careful about them, because you are the teacher, right? Like you are the teacher of your class. And I want to be careful that we don’t just say, well, you’re just, you’re just putting off all of your work. And the students want to know you, and you are the reason that they are going to keep coming back to class, right? So if you just kind of outsource everything to AI and AI generation, you’re not it’s not going to have your personal touch on those things, which I think a lot of the students respond positively too and say, Hey, this, the person that I actually talked to, this is them actually trying to explain things to me, instead of it just kind of being the semi robotic other voice, like those things can be cool, don’t get me wrong, and they can, they will have their right spots. But I don’t think that we should be in a in a mindset to say like, okay, everything that I make now has to be AI, when in fact, it might even just be easier for you to quickly turn on the camera, click record on, you know, screen pal, which used to be Screencast O Matic and just make a three minute video and upload it right away. So so just, you know, always take both sides, right? Take it with a grain of salt.

Tim Van Norman 23:37
Absolutely. And and I love that. So talking about that course that I did. There’s a couple of videos in it that are AI generated. Every single module has a video for me, that has me. So it’s that type of thing. So think about that as well. And in a little bit, we’ll get into some other things that you can do with AI that can help that. But there’s uses for AI but there’s also times when it’s better not to Yeah, yeah. And you as the instructor, you as the person who’s consuming it will figure that out where it really as best.

Brent Warner 24:13
Absolutely. Okay, so paraphrases.

Tim Van Norman 24:18
So this to some people is the bane of their existence. And what I mean by that is, if somebody if you’re, if you’re really concerned about AI, and you think students are using AI to write their papers, often if they take and they have Bard or something, write their paper for them, and they run it through a pair of Fraser, it becomes very difficult for somebody to identify that it was aI generated. That said, the paraphrasing that I’ve seen, I didn’t really like Yeah, yeah, it’s always a little funky. It felt funky and so I’ve used tools like quill bought, paraphrase tool and paraphrase her are three of the things that I’ve tried out, and they just haven’t quite gotten to where I was comfortable. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t do a decent job of creating some other text for me to use that was different.

Brent Warner 25:24
Yeah, sometimes, sometimes I’ll be like, Hey, here’s an article that I want you to paraphrase. And I’ve read that whole article, and then I read the paraphrase. I’m like, there’s some really key information that’s missing, or they skipped, you know, they skipped over this person’s name, who’s important to the story, you know, things like that, that do cent tend to happen. And so yeah, it’s not always there. Again, going back to chat GPT pretty good. Like, I mean, better, better, better than better than some of the tools that were older and using different systems, I guess, but, but the like, there was a resume or, which is one that I used to present on a lot. And she kind of show Hey, this is what can happen, you can change your Lexile levels, or whatever they’re all out there, they’re worth knowing about one that’s has a slightly different approach to him that I did want to share is chat PDF. And there’s, there’s now several of these different things. But basically, what they do is, this is super useful for a lot of us is you upload a PDF, and then you ask it to extract information about whatever and it’ll tell you that part of the information and or where to find it inside of the PDF. So something like add code or, you know, home and you know, like all of these types of things where you’re like, oh, I have to go do you know, do all this research and find all this information? Or even for us, like looking at our school contract, right? And saying, hey, what does it actually say about this, right? And like, how do we interpret this? Sometimes the language is so obscure that it’s like, Hey, can you help me interpret this language. And so some of these things are coming through with it as well, that are really powerful for it, to be able to pull that information, analyze it, and then help you interpret it afterwards. So chat PDF is one of the ones that can kind of do that stuff. Not quite paraphrasing, but still kind of in that category. So I just wanted to share that as well. Because it can be, it can be a big, a big time saver, and at least point you in the right direction. Because like, for example, when I look at that school contract, or ed code, or whenever there’s like, oh, how long is even just to get started? How long is this going to take me just to find the place where I want to get going, you know, so, so worth worth looking at?

Tim Van Norman 27:33
Excellent. So one that I would say near and dear to my heart, not really, but anyway, is exam proctoring. So, exam proctoring, there’s a lot of different ways of doing an exam proctoring and one of the big things about it is a number of them are using AI. And part of what I like about using AI is it’s actually that not a person watching you. And so the reason I bring that up is because I as I’ve mentioned, I’m taking my master’s degree, and my classes, I have to have a person watching me take the exams, oh, really, literally on camera, I it has to be so that they can see my face, the screen, my keyboard, my mouse, my desk, my all of these different things all at the same time. So I literally have Google cameras, no, you can only use one camera. So I have to set it up on a boom, I literally use the same mic standard that I use for for recording podcasts and put it up on the side so that I can get just just the right and the last time they’re like can you make it a little further and I’m like, I only have so big a desk. But that’s a person watching you and that that’s I’m sorry. I know in classroom you have that but it’s not a person standing over your shoulder literally watching you in the classroom or walking or walking into your home and, and especially walking into your home. And so I kind of liked that idea of a proctoring software. So we’ve got things like Proctorio honor lock Respondus lockdown browser that all of those use a certain amount of AI to determine suspicion levels. Okay, and just because it’s suspicious doesn’t mean it actually is a problem. I had saw a student who took a test in a stairwell Okay, multiple phases showing up in the screen as people walked by voices noise, you name it, it was going on. Everything about it said absolutely. This person was cheating until you listened and heard what the person was saying. You know, somebody go by and go Dude, what are you doing? Taking the test? Oh, cool. Yeah, that’s not cheating. It’s a horrible place to take a test. Yeah, but that’s not cheating. Okay. And that maybe that was the best place that they could have taken the test. So it’s I love the fact that that a person would have talked to them, Hey, you got to get in a different environment, you got to do this, you got to do that, versus the AI said, I’m just going to record it. let somebody else deal with, with if this is a problem or not. And, and that really made it so that that student was able to be successful in the environment they had, rather than if a human was involved, they would have forced it a different situation.

Brent Warner 30:29
Yeah, so I think this one, I mean, I, you know, Tim, the I’m quite opposed to the, to the software’s, and I’m not, you know, we can have that more of that conversation another time. We always do. It’s developing conversation and everything. But it is worth knowing how these things work. And the way that you explained it is very useful to understand that because when people are making decisions on those and saying, Oh, is it just going to, you know, NAB students and say that they’re all cheating in there, oh, bad? Or is it going to, you know, like, whatever else is going on, you know, some people are just in a position where they can’t get in person to campus, right. So for us, we have at IVC. I know we have students that are commuting in from Big Bear, which is, you know, I mean, it can be a two hour two and a half hour drive just to come to school. And hey, I’m gonna take a 30 minute test, or I’m gonna take a one hour test. And so I have to drive, you know, five hours of my day just to get to do this one hour tests, and maybe I’m done in 45 minutes, you know, like, so there’s these different parts where you kind of say, Hey, I understand what’s going on inside of here. There’s, there’s a bigger conversation. It’s not what we’re talking about here today. But it is worth knowing about how these work and how the AI functions inside of them. Because you or your colleagues or someone on your campus might be talking about them and might be using them. And it’s good to have some safety of understanding around what that means. Whichever, whichever way you lean in the in the proctoring, or proctoring exam world, which you know, is is, again, we’ll talk about that later, maybe there’s more to talk about here, Tim. So we got a couple more before we wrap up. process documentation.

Tim Van Norman 32:07
Yes, scribe AI. So scribe AI, lets you record. I hate to put it this way. But it’s basically record a process. And then it writes that process for you. Oh, okay. So you, you get a PDF out of it at the end of what that process was that you went through, and the steps that you did and stuff like that. So it’s

Brent Warner 32:31
tracking your screen movement, like the things we’re doing on the screen on a computer, if you read that I O or

Tim Van Norman 32:38
IO rad I would be it would be a similar thing there. But I Oh, read is about the video. This is about automatically creating the text, okay, and detailed text to so you actually get a really decent write up of what steps you went through and stuff like that. So it’s a, it’s a really neat system, check it out. I believe I might have had to actually do an create an account, but it was free. I never pay for any of these right away. So anything that I say that, hey, that I had to create an account, it was still free, because I never put in a credit card or anything like that, because I’m not going to do that right now. So it was a really neat way of just creating that text. I hate creating step by step, multi page, steps, mentation documentation drives me nuts, I’ll send you five steps with a couple of screens, you know, a couple of pictures, but you get much more than that. And I’m really I gotta keep writing. So, so this was a really neat way of, of creating that. But scribe AI. Cool.

Brent Warner 33:51
Looking at. Okay, and then the last last little section here, we’re running out of time. Slide presenters, you know, slide decks, PowerPoints, whatever it is. A couple of these ones are coming out. I’ve used cure pod, Have you have you played with this one yet, Tim?

Tim Van Norman 34:09
No, I’ve used the other one that we’re going to talk about in a minute. So we’ll start with Cara pod

Brent Warner 34:14
is pretty cool. Because you go in, you log in and it’s kind of a Pear Deck type of thing, but you but instead of just you know, instead of it’s a shared slide deck that students can log into with the code, and you can see everything and they can interact with it. But you can also just start it by saying hey, you know, I’m doing a lesson about, you know, the, the skeletal system, right, and I want to do the fundamentals of it, and you know, make it 10 slides long, and we’re gonna get started and then it’ll do that and it also built in like fun ish little activities. So you can do, it’ll build in multiple choices inside of there. And then it’s there. Like, it gives you the baseline to start with and then you can actually create from there and sometimes it’s pretty good. It’s just, you know, whatever you’re building and sometimes you can kind of Make adjustments to it. But cura pod is kind of one of these up and coming companies, they’ve been kind of making the rounds over the last year or two, trying to get some, you know, some some hype built around their name, but it is pretty cool. And it does seem to work pretty well. So, so it might be one. Oh, and one thing that I really do like about it is if your students are burning out, you can push a button, and it’ll play it and it’s like, okay, game time, brain break time, let’s just stop the slides. Let’s play this different game, doodle something on the screen, you know, whatever you’re gonna do. It’s like 2030 seconds, and then you come back and you go, Okay, now we’re a little refreshed. Let’s start again. Okay, so, so it’s your pods, pretty cool.

Tim Van Norman 35:38
Name. Nice. So one that somebody else did purchase for me. I haven’t purchased it, but somebody else purchased it for me. Slides AI. Okay, so slides AI is a Google ad in. And it you can type in, this is what I want slides about. And it’ll create them. Or you can type in the all of the content that you want on an on slides, and hit a button and tell it I want 10 slides with this content on them. And it will break them apart, it will create the background for the slides. It does everything about the slides themselves using your content that you’ve created. So it what I loved is the fact that I took I copied Oh, if I out of the class that I’ve got here, I want all of this page to be a slide deck, copy, paste, and it started working with it and it came out. It doesn’t mess with the order that you got things or anything like that. But it broke it in what is basically logical increments into five slides. And then you take it from there and tweak it or whatever. And then you’re actually doing the presentation. But it’s about breaking content into slides, or, or having it generate the slides. I didn’t like the way it did that as much. Because I deal with much too technical. And so I want the actual technical, you know, terminology, numbers, that type of thing. And that wasn’t it wasn’t as nice as I wanted for that. But it really did a nice job of taking the content that I had, and breaking it into usable slides.

Brent Warner 37:33
I like that. Yeah. Well, and I also like the idea that like, hey, over the years, I’ve already built up a ton of content, I’ve got this stuff that’s already written out. So if you just drop it in there and say make this present, you know, in a way that I can use it for presentations, for my class or whatever. That’s that’s actually really powerful, too. So cool. I’ll have to take some time to look at that a little bit more in the future as well.

Tim Van Norman 37:56
Absolutely. All right. Well,

Brent Warner 37:58
I think we’ve kind of hit a lot of these things were now the cover was quite a big range. If we missed anything, send us a message. We’ll we’ll take a look at it in the future. But, Tim, let’s jump out.

Tim Van Norman 38:11
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we took a look at AI tools for the fall 23 Part Two. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you’ll find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner 38:27
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com. And let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows, again, things that we missed. There’s a link over there where you can give us your ideas

Tim Van Norman 38:40
for everyone at IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you’ve got questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by IVC the training center sign over the door now. And a 322 or contact me to Tim VanNorman at Tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 39:01
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 39:07
I’m Tim VanNorman

Brent Warner 39:08
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everyone