001e e e all right okay everyone welcome to tonight's secondary schools Churchill and the high school AI parent University night really excited to have the parents who were joining us here and those who were able to join us on the live stream to share some really great information excuse me and some exciting things we have going on uh this year to start off the Year this is a you know my name is her Palo I guess we should start with introductions her Palo you've been receiving a lot of emails from me lately so I appreciate you reading those I'm the supervisor of educ ational technology here in East Brunswick this is my 19th year in the district which really exciting I got my start here at hamers shold not in this building and the original
002building that used to run alongside uh Ru Lane in a little bit of a different configuration as a social studies teacher and then I moved to the high school to teach uh different levels of History everything from AP uh and all the levels of courses uh elective courses and things of that nature which was a lot of fun and then I became the instr structional coach when we were looking at going one to one and doing some uh investigations of our learning management system canvas that we use now I was department chair for social studies and Media Services for two and a half years and um when this job was created through my hat in the ring and presented the vision that we've been able to execute I think pretty well over the last year
003plus and we're really excited about what we have going on in Ai and educational technology here in East Brunswick couple things I just want to point out there's my contact information up on the slide and you can see it uh at home on the live stream as well the all the information that's shared tonight the slides that I'm going to go through the video that's uh the live stream that's being recorded will be available uh on demand which will be a great resource for anyone who uh wasn't able to make it out or wasn't able to make the live stream I know you know I had to race my son to soccer before uh tonight's event so I know a lot of folks have stuff going on and totally get that so if they're unable
004to be here you can tell them about the uh the video on demand and um they could always reach out if they have any questions the AI Center website's right there you can also just type in EB Center on Google and it's the first result that pops up which is pretty cool and then the edtech website has some other resources there uh and information that can be very helpful so I just wanted to point everyone in that direction so let's jump in and get started so when we talk about AI most people um you know think about the first definition that's up there right and then you know when we think about AI That's started to really impact our society and our world and and the the you know what our students are using in
005school what we're really talking about is generative AI right AI that can create content uh you know for years we've had um we've had apps like shazan where you you're in CVS picking up something and a song comes on you're like I haven't heard this song in a while what song is this he click Shazam and in about four or five seconds of you what songs playing um I know I'm not the only one that likes to do that it's always a fun game and like oh I was I was way off or oh I knew that was the song um you know we've had Siri and Alexa and hey Google for years I don't want to set anyone's phone off in here but you know we've had artificial intelligence elements for years um you
006know we've had different you know technologies that use aspects of artificial intelligence but the generative piece I think you know was one that was really jarring when people could type something into a chap bot and it created something that and it seemed like it was thinking and being creative and and doing things you know making music or writing stories I think that was that was pretty jarring uh for a lot of people and that's the PE piece that when we when we're talking about AI now I think that's really what most people mean is Gen AI so I'd like to share these definitions these are from the state of New Jersey's website and um they're very important but one of the things that I think are also important as we're having this conversation with parents
007and with students with educat ators and community members is really you know I want people to think of AI as a tool and just like every one of the tools up there you know depending on what problem you're trying to solve is going to also depend on what tool you're going to use to solve it right you know sometimes you're going to use that little the pickaxe at the end there always makes me think of the movie sha Shank Redemption and Andy duin trying to Chisel through out of the prison so you know I guess if you're trying to do what Andy defrain did you want to use the tool all the way to the left here does anyone know what the tool on the right is anyone know what that is that is a
008glass cutter that's a glass cutter um so you know obviously if you're trying to um you know do do a project where you're trying to you know trim down some wood or something you're not going to use a glass cutter right you're not going to use a wrench when you need to use a screwdriver you know AI is just like every one of these tools it's going to be you know it's it's may be more useful than other tools for multiple projects but it's not the end all Beall for you know that's going to solve every problem or get you the answer for every you know um thing that you're trying to solve but it's a really powerful Tool uh it can be kind of Swiss army knife in a way where it has a
009lot of different aspects to it but there's no substitute I think for your personal creativity and for your voice but if a tool can help you get there faster and I think gen gen has a lot of capabilities to do that that's a pretty exciting place to be so I'm going to tell a little story before we jump in and you might be thinking what the heck does mustard have to do with with AI well I like to share this story because this was what clinched it for me and got me to you know there's a problem that involved mustard that made me think okay maybe there's something to this to this AI chat G PT stuff so what happened was we were at my house and I have I have three children nine six
010and four and you know like a lot of nights it's busy you're trying to make something for dinner you have all this food you're like we're not ordering out like we're going to make food and I don't know somehow Maybe over Co or different sales or barbecues where you get the three pack or the two pack of like the condiments for a barbecue you the ketchup always goes quick you get you you use the katchup very quickly but you end up with like mustard and relish and things so somehow we ended up with like seven mustards at my house and I had a total like Dad moment I'm like that's it we're using the mustard like the mustard I don't care what we do with it we're going to do something with mustard we're not
011wasting it you know totally total dad moment right so I'm like what am going to do I don't I've never been a really big fan of mustard we made a lot of spaghetti and meatballs in my house growing up um you know use mustard on hot dogs but yeah what am I going to do with all this mustard oh I know what I'm going to try this chat gbt thing and I'm going to ask it what I can do with this mustard what do we have in here we got chicken got this okay I have the following items in my fridge and I have a lot of mustard what can I make for dinner that's not going to take forever um please give me five suggestions click the button and I get a list of
012you know five recipes like I asked for and I was like wow this stuff sounds pretty good that that sounds pretty good I didn't know mustard mustard is a great marinade you mix it with some balsamic vinegarette dressing and a couple spices and it's a pretty quick simple easy and quite tasty dinner so um for me after that moment I was like okay I think I think this there might be something with this gen AI this Chachi PT thing like I don't understand it but that's really cool and I think that that's something that is a uh a valuable lesson for all of us to think about is you know if you're on the fence about this still I totally respect it and I think that's a good place to be I always tell people
013if you're only excited about AI you haven't played with it enough but if you're only skeptical and scared of AI you haven't played with it enough either you have to have a little bit of of both and I think that's a survival skill generally in the Northeast here a little healthy skepticism go a long way but I think if we all have our mustard moment where we like all right well even if I just it for this how much better is my life going to be or how much easier are certain things my life going to be and I think when it comes to making dinner and not wasting food I think that's a good place to start and for me it allowed me to continue the journey and try different things and then apply
014it to work related problems or helping teachers and and and improving my workflow and things like that and for me I was like okay there's definitely something here this is going to be a powerful gamechanging tool so I would encourage everyone watching on the live stream stream and everyone here to find your mustard moment if you haven't already or um afterwards I'd love to hear from some of the folks here if you what your mustard moment uh was so what I want to go through now before I jump into some of the the things that we're doing that I'm really proud of and really excited about and some things that are getting us some really great attention um you know in the region and um you know I was I was lucky enough to be
015able to speak at an AI conference in New York City this Saturday um with another Su with a superintendent in another District in in um in New Jersey Randolph uh and some other Educators in the New York area and people are you know a lot of districts are saying well how did you do this and we're trying to catch up to where you're getting to and you know can we can we work together talk about it absolutely so I'm really excited about what we have going on but I wanted to start with a little bit of like for parents and folks watching at home like H how can I use this like you know just in my everyday daily life so I have a couple like four or five examples I want share with you
016and then some screen videos screen capture videos that I took that um I think will show you some some of the power of what AI can do and if you're familiar with this stuff that's great it's going to be a great like refresher maybe it'll give you a different take on it if it's a new um if this is new or you're like I never thought to use it you know jump on the bandwagon there's plenty of room and uh I think you're going to get a lot of really um great information out of this so we talk about drafting emails there's a couple of things that AI can really help you with um it said talks about tone about content about length you know to write a really good email can take a long
017time and you know in in my business here as a as a supervisor we deal a lot with parents we're deal sometimes we're emailing students we're emailing community members I deal a lot with different vendors and you know it can take a long time to make sure I'm asking the right questions that I'm not going on too long you know you tone sometimes is hard to to get right an email I see some nodding right that's a you know like oh I didn't think I was being sarcastic I didn't think it would be received that way and sometimes it really wasn't but it depends sometimes on the mood of the person or what have you but wouldn't it be great if you could run a draft to your email through an AI tool and you
018could ask it check for tone uh check for spelling check for um length you know this looks a little long can you make it one paragraph instead of two or three and that's absolutely what you can do and I think one of the examples I'm going to show here has to do with um you know if you wanted to email your uh one of your um child's teachers about a homework rate and um you know you can give it as much information or a little bit of information you can describe the situation so I want I want everyone to watch this prompt here uh and you'll see the example that I'm going to use to help you craft an email write an email from my child's 8th grade history teachers teacher asking about a zero
019on the Civics homework I did watch him do it told me turned it in and you see that it creates the email there with about a sentence and this is Google's Gemini and in Google's Gemini you click that button you can copy the text and then go to your email whether it's Gmail this is Outlook you paste it right into the email and if you like the uh subject you take that copy paste it right into the subject and then the next phase of this is you know you add in the the import the important details right and you also make sure that the email speaks with your voice now this is a pretty straightforward direct email some emails have more of a um you know they're more specific maybe it's about a more sensitive
020topic or things like that um so you you want to make sure that you're being specific and that this speaks with your voice I think that's one of the biggest lessons we talk with students about we I talk with the staff about all the time is that this is great and it it saves you a lot of time but you can't just copy paste it without making some some changes and you have to make sure that that it's the email speaks with your voice that it sounds like it's coming from you right so in that example you had a you know that's a pretty straightforward request right and very quickly sent that email you can make some changes add your child's name uh make sure the salutations if you're not somebody that uses his warm
021regards or best you know maybe you just like to do uh thank you at the end you know make sure it sounds like you still but that's a pretty powerful time saer right there now another example you know about the revised email sometimes you know we have situations that um you know can can be very frustrating as a parent sometimes we may feel like uh you know our children aren't being heard in class or maybe uh a situation where a grade wasn't given fairly um or that a zero was given and you're very upset you know and and I want to make this clear that I think that you know we want to be honest and direct with teachers and with administrators about how we feel but we also want to make sure that we're
022getting closer to a resolution right and sometimes when we fire off that angry email it might feel good in that moment but I know I've I've done one or two of those emails and in the moment you're like yeah like all right I really told them and then you kind of calm down afterwards and you're like that's not that wasn't really helpful like that's not really going to get us closer to a resolution um you know there's a way to be honest and direct but not go too far right so I want to encourage everyone always be direct be honest be straightforward but I think that when we have respectful communication especially when we're talking about trying to help our children through whatever difficulty or struggle or situation they're in you know when we have
023that respectful cordial and direct communication we can really really make a difference and we can really help get children what they need so you know I want to show this example but I wanted to preface it with that with that comment because I do think that that's important so here's an example of like me like an example me V in a little bit to chat gbt I'm very upset fix it now and I ask it to revise it so it goes through and I hope this message finds you well I understand sometimes technical issues and misunderstandings can occur or maybe the mistake was made right so it cleaned up that that anger or that that that just kind of raw feeling and emotion and it cleaned it up a little bit for me and it
024allowed me that once again go back in copy paste it I can make some edits for the sake of time I didn't do as many edits as maybe I would to kind of throw in some specifics about a situation but I wanted to give everybody kind of an idea of how it can you know you can go from like a 10 on the anger scale and get it down to you know like a three or I think a three is is fine for this or a four where you want to make sure that the zero gets corrected if it was a mistake or you know maybe there was a different of opinion about how the homework was supposed to be done or you know you can get to a resolution for this situation pretty quickly
025without it escalating you know the other thing I wanted to mention about these situations and encourage folks to do as much as this is about AI is you know if an email if if one or two emails back and forth with a teacher or supervisor uh isn't getting uh a resolution fast I think the next email should be let's set up a time to talk on the phone and I found that that's a big big thing whether whether I'm having communication troubles with one of my colleagues or or uh you know teacher and we're just trying to connect on the thing and emails aren't working like hey uh what's a good time to give you a call and it's like oh oh yeah yeah we're oh we're good okay here's yeah oh I here's the
026here's the thing I meant to send you or or here's the idea um that we had and this is what I oh okay that makes a lot of sense um so I wanted to throw that in there as well like and I'm a big believer in a in a blend of the old school with the new school um but I think this is really powerful uh you know tool at our disposal to keep the temperature at a place where we can be productive and helpful and help kids and help each other um you know sometimes a grade gets put in a zero by mistake the teacher's putting that grade in sometimes there's a different issue um but we want to keep that communication uh cordial and uh helpful this is a a different example uh
027I think I skipped a slide here hold on here we go so one of the other things on that list was about like communication s with um like credit card companies or in this case like a property manager so let's say that you have a leaky sink you know and you're in in your apartment and uh you want to try to get the property manager to fix it well this is um this is co-pilot you saw chaty in the last example and in co-pilot I basically explained in one sentence I live in apartment you know my apartment's leaky uh the sink hasn't been fixed I um you know I'm using towels to sop up the leak but um can you help me and I asked chat jbt to help me write that email and um
028boom I have urgent requests to fix the Leaky sync the property manager uh there listed very simple message cordial I asked it in the prompt you be be polite but direct you know a leaky syn can cause a lot of damage um Can can know you know germs and other things is very inconvenient so Communications like this I think are another area um the one of the other things that was listed there before was you know communicating with the cable company uh or a fraudulent charge you know a lot of credit card companies have those things through the websites if you have if you have trouble with articulating those points or getting them refined these tools are fantastic for that and you could see how quick and easy with a few adjustments you have that
029email ready to go and you can communicate very easily so whether it's your child's teacher your property manager the mortgage company the credit card company uh Comcast uh or variet or whoever it is uh these tools can really help us with our communication and help us you know instead of spending all this time writing an email you give it one or two sentences and It prepares that email for you which is really cool okay couple more examples uh this is a big one you know homework assistance for kids and and you'll see I included an example I used um you know not that long ago with my fourth grade daughter who's doing Mental Math um which is pretty cool um so homework assistance you know when we're talking about getting guiding questions or even project
030ideas you know one of the big things I've talked with parents about and even students about this uh when it comes to to geni is using the tool to help us find the answers but not having it do the work for us and I think there's a big difference between those things these tools can be really helpful planning outlining tools uh generating ideas hey I have an idea for this project does this sound good what if I try this will this work are there any examples and you know there's a difference between doing that and write me a five paragraph essay on you know the fall of Rome or whatever it is uh and then trying to copy paste it and say that that's your work um so I think that this is one of
031the areas for parents where like look you know I'm I came up as a history teacher I know some things about technology right my my wife is a math teacher so I think we have those two subject areas pretty pretty well covered um but even even in those situations we don't always we're not in the classroom we're not sure exactly how the teacher is teaching all the specifics about a uh how to do certain problems or about meiosis or whatever it might be in science class but you could use AI to help you help help you help your child and you'll see some prompting techniques I use like how can I help my child with their homework without just giving them the answer and you and you put that right into this to the chatbot
032and it'll it'll walk you through it so I'm excited to show you a couple of those examples and then you know I did my mustard bit before so you'll see a couple there's some food examples there um you know I always say be careful trust but verify is going to be one of the phrases I use when it comes to content and when it comes to food like you know when it says you know different dietary needs always consult doctors and I don't you know I want I'm not that kind of doctor right so consult with professionals and all that before you make any you know if it makes any kind of drastic or odd um you know suggestions always uh check on those things you know it's very important you know you want to
033fact check everything but um it can get you some really great information and you'll see that in a second so those are two more areas so here's one uh an algebra one problem that I I talked to one of the um to some of the Math teachers and got a couple problems and uh used Claude which is another AI tool help me assist my child non answer this question without doing the problem for them copy and paste or typed in the problem there and so far you see hopefully all the different AI tools do it a little bit differently a little bit of a different interface so gives you directions to help your child with this problem ask to identify the important information discuss the concept give them time to set uh guide them to
034set up the equation help them with the unit conversion if needed encourage them to perform the calculations remind them about rounding and then I was going to stop the video at the end right here but then when I saw would you like any specific suggestions for explaining the any of these steps and I said yes and I you'll see I'm like you know what let's see what happens yes let's ask it to explain those steps in more detail took me a couple seconds to typ that yes please provide those examples or explanations and not a great prompt but you'll see that the answer is certainly better than my prompt and it walks you through how to work through that problem and how to help that your your child solve that problem step by step what
035did what do they mean by step one what do they mean by discussing the average speed the unit conversion so you can sit right next to your child they're going to do the work they're going to be going step by step you're not giving them the answer but you're helping them get closer to the answer and you see in every one of the Gen tools you have a different ability to copy and paste right into a Google doc or Microsoft Word doc or an email um an email box uh that message box so as I said I I had the opportunity I was I record as I Was preparing these things my daughter then had her homework and I and I she's very frustrated got done soccer practice and she dances and she's involved in
03617 different things and um like all right we should be getting ready for bed like we got this we got to wrap this up and uh but I'm like all right you know I want to do the problem for I me practice what I preach I always feel like in leadership whenever you give a suggestion to someone you're usually given within 24 to 48 hours an opportunity to follow your own advice and I took it here followed my own advice so this is on my personal Gmail or Gemini account this is Google's uh AI tool I asked it what is mental math and I was looking at my daughter's um you know workbook and and the online resources and envision to make sure that things matched up that it wasn't giving me some different information
037about mental math than than uh that was in the book then I'm scrolling down I'm like use Mental Math to answer this question I gave it this specific question about the speed the differing speeds between Venus and Mars so it gave me some some information and it gave me some time also to I'm not going to lie I was like trying to calm her down a little bit and be like hey honey it's going to be fine like don't worry don't get frustrated we're going to help you look let's read the problem again right and then you know H how can I help my fourth grader do this problem without giving her the answer and just like in the other one step by step and You by the time I got to step like 2.5
038she goes oh okay I got it I got it let me let me let me try can I just try yeah please go ahead she she finishes the problem and I have my notes there and like oh thanks so much Dad I'm like yeah of course they no problem I I got this we're good right and um you know she went to bed happier uh got the problem correct and remembered all the stuff we talked about so you think about you know I was really excited about that because you know when we get to the algebra one stuff um you know if Mrs pal is not home I'm I think I'm going to be relying on this one uh pretty pretty big to help out uh in some of those areas uh so dinner ideas
039um this is perplexity another one of the geni tools so I gave it a prompt about these are the things I have in my fridge uh can I make you know how what can I make for dinner three recipes one of the cool things about this tool is it gives you the sources right across the top so that's one of the great things about perplexity that the quick sourcing you can also get the sources from co-pilot uh and also get sources from Gemini but you have to click you know sometimes you have to click an extra button or ask to present them perplexity puts it right at the top for just about every search uh that you do you also don't have to create an account with perplexity if you don't want to and it
040kind of has a feel like feels like a search engine 2.0 um and I'll talk a little bit about the different specific search uh geni Tools in a second um at the bottom it has alternative questions and that one was about are there any vegetarian suggestions for that for those recipes and it provides several of them in the list there so it's uh it's pretty cool pretty cool some of the things that you can do and like I said it's not just about the hard-hitting like mental math or Algebra 1 or you know zeros on homework sometimes it's just like trying to get your dinner cooked and not eat another takeout or something unhealthy and and not I you know I hate throwing away food I just hate throwing away food and uh this can
041help us with that so gluten-free I I kept going you can get all kinds of suggestions and um you know the biggest mistake people make when they're prompting is that they a lot of times if they don't get the answer they want on the first prompt they stop and they say all right well this thing doesn't work I always say well when you Google something if you don't get the right answer you either keep clicking to different pages or you refine your search right I was looking for you know I typed in Chipotle and it gave me the closest Chipotle restaurant it's like well what were you looking for I was looking for a chipotle chicken recipe well you got to tell it that you got to be a little you got to refine your
042search it's the same idea uh with with geni tools if you don't get the answer you're looking for or you don't get a good response refine that prompt try again ask the question a different way and the last one uh is work rated tasks you know depending on what kind of work uh that you do if you're in in meetings a lot you know sometimes uh I write my notes out I have like a legal pad I'll jot notes down sometimes I'll type the notes it depends if I've been staring at a screen all day sometimes I like to give myself break uh other times it's just easier and efficient I can kind of go back and check my notes so if you have um you know if you have a bunch of work meeting
043notes or you know maybe you're you know we recently are working on some Renovations on our home and jot a lot of notes down from from different things um you know or when you're trying to organize you know with kids sports and activities and and um different obligations they have you take a lot of notes you can take a picture of written notes and Tool like Gemini will will refine them and organize them digitally for you or if you have your notes written in like a word doc or something or a Google doc you can copy paste them into a tool like Gemini and then ask it take my meeting notes the quarter two management meeting I was pretending I was you know a financial executive in this and have it organize those notes so
044it took all those like rough notes of just paragraph and it bullet pointed them and organized them very neatly and nicely and this is Google Go's Gemini tool then we when the next meeting was and then with Google Gemini you can do the the copy option or if uh it's linked to um your Gmail account you can export it right into Google Docs in your Google Drive which is pretty cool so and you can ask it to refine it in different ways I asked it to organize it a couple different ways and it has all that information there which is really cool so I say all that to say and I'm oh good like right at the Midway Point excellent one of the big things I talk a lot with the staff about and my
045colleagues and we're talking starting to talk with the students about this too think of gen as a thought partner and think of gen as a work partner there's a lot of grunt work and a lot of you know things like the emails and all that stuff that we do that a lot of us do as part of our jobs that um and part of our work and part of our communication with the sports teams and the activities and you know religious obligations and other things and organizations that we're part of and sometimes um with those things you know I think that the Genai has a really great practical use to help us with a lot of the different work that we're doing I think that when we're trying to solve problems this is that's the
046one that sometimes throws people off a little bit starting to think of this as a thought partner but you know we all have people in our lives if we're lucky that we can pick up the phone and call or we can email and we can say you know try or you know sit down like here at work you know I have a bunch of people Miss's here is one of my best thought Partners I have uh that works in District here and we'll sit down and we'll kick around ideas and we say you know I'm really I had this idea what do you think well did you think about this have we thought about that all right let's let's go back let's see what the data tells us right and we talk out problems one
047of the nice things about gen is you can do the same thing with Gen and it will give you ideas it'll give you suggestions based on all the vast knowledge and information it has access to and what I found is whether I'm looking at survey data whether I'm looking at um taking you know um you know parent surveys or discussions I've had and um you know punching that information in when I get the the the information crunched by geni tells me what are the common themes in a survey what are the outlier opinions all that stuff then I can go back to someone like miss Shay and I can say you know it's really interesting what uh what the AI Bop said about this or that like you know got me thinking what are you
048what are your thoughts on this like does this make sense to you and it a lot of times it will enrich our conversations far more then you know and it'll get us to a place where maybe we would have gotten but it gets us there in half the time right and time is the most precious valuable asset we have and when we're talking about working in a school district the faster we can get to solutions for problems uh you know the better it is for the kids for the for the students for for the staff for our administrative team right and we can move on to other things and and start organizing planning and all that stuff so I think that that's something that maybe is a little uncomfortable for some folks initially but when
049you jump on on board and you and you try it out with a couple of different things you're trying to work through I think once once again similar to the mustard situation you start to say all right this is there's something to this it's pretty cool I think it's important not to forget the human element and to use that information to then enrich your relationships and your work uh situation and your analysis of data and planning to use it in that situation and not to forget that piece of it right so let's talk about some of the tools that we've been talking with students about and with teachers about at the secondary level um and if anyone has any questions we'll for the folks that are here definitely we'll have time for anyone's questions for
050anyone that's on the live stream we don't have a chat feature in the live stream but please reach out uh on email um or um you can take a look at the website some contact information and resources are there and you can always follow up with me after so all the tools up here with the exception of meta AI we haven't talked about Meta Meta AI with with students and with teachers as far as use in school I put meta AI on this list with all of you and with the folks at home because I think it's actually if you haven't tried an AI tool yet that's probably going to be the first one that you're going to use and um so I I gets important to include that as we talk about that with
051the community and with parents so right now in our schools co-pilot and Gemini co-pilot is Microsoft's uh AI tool and Gemini is is Google's AI tool those those are the two approved tools for use by staff in our district the tool that's approved for student use for students 13 and up 7th grade through 12th grade is co-pilot when you're logged in on your EB account you can use both of those tools safely there's extra safeguards and firewalls in place um when you're logged in on your Gmail account or an Outlook account that's personal anything you type into the chatbot gets put back into the large language model and can be used to strengthen um or enhance the chat bot's ability to Think Through problems and learn when you use it when you use those two
052tools with the ebet account or you know your workplace if your workplace subscribes to Microsoft Enterprise account or a Google Enterprise account what they do is they create a firewall around that information so that it's protected from going into the large language model so for our purposes here both of those tools are what we talk about using and when it comes to kids co-pilot is the one that we talk about Microsoft has assured us that they have put the right safeguards in place so that for users 13 and up that it could be ca compliant and CA is one of the federal regulations that we have protecting Children online privacy uh Google is not quite there yet with regards to uh Copa compliance but they are there at the point where they say you know
053employees of school districts or private company or you know public company Enterprise accounts where that information can be protected uh I think Google is not that far behind from doing that but until they give us their assurances we're going to play it safe and we're going to make sure that we you know protecting student data St data that's that's our first priority before we look at any edte tool um you know I have we have some teachers who are requesting tools we have a process for that and that's one of the first questions before we even like you know yes of course we care about how cool a tool is and how great it is for learning but if it doesn't follow those regulations and it doesn't protect data then we we got to look
054at something else because that's what's what's important so Gemini and co-pilot right if you're logged in your EET account that's that's our those are our top to two go-tos however there are other tools out there the other tools up here like I said with the exception of meta AI Claude perplexity um chat gbt there's another one for teachers that we talk about called Magic School which has some really great capabilities um but those are the ones that are approved for pilot use so you can create an account with a personal email and you can use those to do the you know do the prompting and and find some great tools and everyone has a favorite uh who's been using this and those who haven't found a favorite have found Google's Gemini and Microsoft's co-pilot to
055be really really strong tools um you know for for my work you know what I what I do is I kind of have a tab open with all of them I'm one of those people that has like more tabs open in their browser than they show I see a couple people nodding you you hear me on that one and when when the browser starts to slow down I'm like I maybe I don't need that uh tab open anymore but uh I'll ask the same question of two or three different tools and sometimes it's like well they all gave a pretty good answer I get to pick which one I like um but these are the tools that are approved for uh use and for or for pilot use you know what what meta AI is
056doing is really cool um if you have a Facebook account or an Instagram account that search bar at the top if you haven't noticed this yet next time you go on you're going like oh that herb guide now I see it um you'll see the The Meta symbol and whether you're searching for like an old friend on Facebook or if you're asking a question that's about um like a current event that's going on or or the you know who's winning the Mets and Phillies game or what have you it's not going to what it will do is it will generate a response for you the same way that those other geni tools will and that's a pretty cool pretty cool feature to have so um these are some suggestions there you know if you have
057a Gmail account you can access Gemini you you have a Gemini account if you have the Google app on your phone you have Gemini already you don't need to download a new app um even when you Google something you're not signed in sometimes Gemini will autogenerate a response depending on what the topic is um to perplexity you don't need to create an account so that's another one that people sometimes start with you can go to it just like Google um each of these programs have paid versions and obviously with the paid versions there's different features and you might have seen with the Claude example it told you told me I only had four searches left so those are some of the things that sometimes that they'll Throttle Down certain usage um elements of it um
058you know Claude and chbt you have to create an account to use it some people don't want to create accounts chat gbt will ask you for your cell phone number for multiactor authentication if you're not comfortable doing that then you know once again you have perplexity and you have some other options there but I would encourage everyone on the live stream and folks here um you know take the leap pick one start playing around if you've played with one or two of these and you haven't heard of the others try one of the other ones out see what you like about it see what you don't like about it and try some of those things that we talked about um using uh to help your kids or or help uh you with different issues or
059you know problem solving and things of that nature all right let's get into a little bit of uh the meat and potatoes of of what we're doing with guidelines and the AIU scale and some things I'm really excited about so last year one of the first things when I when I uh when I took the job and I was um you know I'm very thankful for uh you know for Dr f Dr Bly our assistant superintendent of academics and the board of education for creating this position and supporting the educational technology department and when I was uh lucky enough to be given the honor to have the job uh one of the things I told Dr bully was I don't want to just make decisions in isolation I don't want to be like you know
060there's there's a lot more that we need to learn about this and we need to bring the team together need to bring our our we have really bright smart teachers you know specialists media specialist you know we have a lot of talent in this district and I think that it's important that we bring people together and we talk about what we're excited about what we're a little bit afraid of and how we can work together to make the right decisions and do what's best for kids and for for teachers so what we did was we formed AI working groups and there was an AI working group for the K to four level uh at least one representative from all eight of the K4 elementary schools we had a team here at Hughes that was made
061up of someone at least one person from each department and across grade levels we had a team at Churchill same idea different subject areas grade levels and at the high school we did the same thing and what I did was I tried to meet with them four to five times over the course of the year we also had canvas courses and Google classrooms where we would communicate uh on occasion share articles do some work kind of uh on through those platforms um and work efficiently that way um and that would enrich the work when we were able to get together and what we did through that work was that work and those discussions the real work that was done in those those sessions allowed us to plan out this overview of what we were going
062to do for this year so what you see here is a direct result you know I don't want to it's not just me it's it's a team effort here in East Bruns we work together we get our smart people you know and by the way on these teams it wasn't just people who were like total AI like you know uh Believers we we I said look I want people who are skeptical I want people who have questions I want people who are skeptical and have questions but are interested in finding Solutions and are going to bring and we're going to help us strengthen our policies and our guidelines going forward and I think we did a really great job and we're continuing that work into this year so we're here to tonight to talk about
063the um the secondar so you know you'll see in the elementaries mostly teacher facing awareness literacy all things that we're going to do at and we are doing at at the secondary level as well the difference with the secondary level is that the kids are exposed to this they already know about it they have accounts they're supposed to ask for parents permission before they sign up for chbt Claude or any of these other things I'm sure all of your children here did that and asked your permission before they created those accounts um according to the terms of service they're supposed to but um you know maybe not everybody did so we said we have to be a little bit more um you know aggressive about our Ro and put some rules in place and put
064some guidelines in place so that it's not a free-for-all and we're learning how to use these things properly it's not going anywhere the you know some of the early research is showing showing that students who are using these tools and learning how to use them effectively are getting edges in college searches and in the job world so and the kids that aren't that some of those achievement gaps are going to you know continue to grow and we don't want that we want every one of our children regardless of of of what their learning needs are where they're at academically we want them all to have all the tools that they need to succeed so at the secondary level we worked on something called an AIU skill uh this this um research has been going on
065for about a year it's been a really strong um community and a really strong part of the AI Community talking about how to to generate the rules and how do we have a scale so I'm going to show you that in a couple seconds but that's something that we worked on in the working groups instituted this year and are really proud of we updated our guidance we had guidance documents to start last year that I think were pretty good but we took the work of the working groups we took student feedback surveys I went to principal's council at the high school multiple times had conversations with the student leaders this year we sent out uh surveys to for students to join the nextg AI uh teams to continue those conversations they're going to be hearing
066from me in the next week or two if any if any of your children are interested on the live stream or uh that are here in person tell them to go on to the AI Center website the form is up there we're accepting any kind of feedback um ideas and also interest in joining the next geni team good thing to put on the college transcript also uh so we're going to have a Churchill team and a high school team and the other thing that we're looking at this year we started to have some conversations about this uh last year um but we're going to really kick this into second gear this year is talking about the idea of a student digital code of conduct that's not just talking about AI but talking about the kind
067of digital and physical Community we want kids to to to live in and to learn in and it's not just about AI but it's about you know some of the you know we I'm talking about a lot of positive things that come with AI but we know that it's not all positive with any Tech advancement there's there's some drawbacks misinformation some of the deep fakes uh there have been some news stories about students who've you use some of these tools inappropriately and really embarrass some of their classmates and you know at one of the principal's Council we talked a little bit about this and you know so like we we need to identify what kind of community we want to live in and we want to learn in you know how we treat each other
068we talk about this all the time in the physical classroom but the digital space our kids live in the digital space as well so the idea with that is let's talk about what we want that to look like let's give kids a seat at the table we're here because of the kids and sometimes I feel like they don't feel like that they have a real seat at the table and I told them last year and continue to tell them this year you know as long as I'm in this job you have a seat at this table because this is about you what's best for you we want to do this together so these are the some of the things that we're really excited about with regards to the secondary first thing we talk about a
069little bit is the guidance these documents are on the AI Center website um there's a student guidance and and staff guidance um there's guidance documents for students and staff at Hughes and there's a staff guidance document for our K4 teachers as well once again tonight we're focusing on the secondary so I these are zoomed in I didn't want to try to make everyone read the small print on the other slide there um so you can see at the top there it starts with kind of a statement of you know you know what we what we believe about geni you know we believe it can be a force for good that it can enhance learning but we also know that there needs to be some core principles and yeah we're not going to ban AI but
070here's here's the road map a little bit about what we believe so um for for staff we talk about specific things like using the IU scale that we're going to have clear identifiers of when AI is appropriate to use and when it we're going to ask students not to use it and that scale is going to be really important um we have academic Integrity statements the University of Penn put together a really great website for their professors um to you know kind of different models and ideas for them to put in in their syllabus documents for their courses and that's been one of the things that I've heard had a lot of teachers say you know those were really good statements I I modified a you know I was like you could even use AI
071to modify some of those statements a little bit uh but make it make it sound like your voice what do you believe about in your class what's the class culture that you're that you're looking for um and a lot of teachers have said that those were really helpful so trying to give teachers the resources they need I'm not trying to micromanage what they're doing we're not trying to tell them this is exactly what it needs to look like but the biggest piece of feedback last year from staff and students was that both groups wanted to wanted clearer rules and clearer um identifiers of where the guard rails were so the guidance e see here for staff is a direct result of of that feedback both verbal we did a lot of qualitative you know research
072and and and discussions I talked with a lot of people K12 we did surveys and it was really uh interesting to see the similarity between the staff and the students and what they were asking for here you can see some additional tools how to it the use of AI MLA and APA citations you see um we use turnit in.com which has an AI detection tool now one of the things I've been telling the teachers and I'm being transparent is that um you know experts in these tools so turn it in.com there's another uh company called copy leaks which is kind of a turn it in competitor and at an AI Summit that I was at at a at a high school in North Jersey uh the representative from copy leak said we have maybe another
073year and a half to two years where AI detection tools work and then after that it's going to be hard for those detection tools to work because there will be so much AI generated content out there on the internet and it will be hard for those tools to differentiate and identify so what that says to me is number one I think we should use the tool right now I think that that's appropriate and a good idea but it also reinforces for me the cultural discussion about academic integrity and the importance of you know setting the rules and the guidelines like that's an important piece of this too because we're not going to always be able to catch everybody using these tools either so and maybe that will change maybe we'll get different information but I
074I think that that's a that's a good um a good assumption to continue to make uh there's staff resources equity and communication you know one of the big draw like one of the big um you know I think criticisms of AI is that it does at times exhibit some bias it does have some Equity issues at times sometimes it can be really uh Forward Thinking and Progressive when it comes to those things other times you know depending on how the prompt is is worded who some of the developers are behind some of the prompts you know that's one of those areas that we have to be careful so important guidance for for staff and students about that has been critical just to make sure that you know if you're using an image generator or if
075you're asking a question you know depending on how you ask a prompt it might skew the response if it's about if it's political it might lean more to the left or the right and and you may have to check the source information so that you know where you're getting the information from just like when you read news sites you have to understand where you're getting the information from um so you know you may ask it to generate an image um of your classroom and you may get the image and it may not look like your classroom so you have to be a little bit more specific sometimes if you want to get it to do that and there's other times where I've seen image generators do a great job without needing a lot of prompting
076just like people these tools are imperfect so we have to educate we have to make sure that people are aware of that planning assessment differentiation support all important stuff um the guidance for teacher or for students rather so this is not just about AI this is about edtech as well I didn't want to make this as you know all about Ai and and you know anything scary about you know that I wanted to talk about it in the context of all all technology so and we do it in a Q&A format you know talking about ethical use and appropriate use of various tools and then you'll see some of the similarities well you know are students allowed to use edtech and AI tools for school assignments it depends right talk to your teacher here's the
077AIU scale here's more details about using AI tools that that that redirects to resources that are on the AI Center web page that are specific for students uh the citation guide you know a lot of simp communication for both the staff and the students because the idea is to is to really like make sure that they understand what the expectation and they can talk about it together and be honest about it and not try to pretend that this thing isn't happening and that these tools don't exist right um remember these points before using a and you know the last piece there when in doubt be honest talk to your teachers it's really really important one of the big things with these guidance documents right is to make sure that we're having the the conversations we're
078talking about these things I think that that's really really important and so far you know look look it's hard to bat a thousand on any of these things but I feel like we've set up the structures that have allowed for those things to happen and you know we're going to get better in a lot of those areas but I feel like that these have really set some good uh foundational principles and being that it's the second year second full year that we've had with Guidance the First full year with um with our AIU scale I think we're really excited about the progress that we're making and and I think that getting more voices involved having parents uh come out watch on the live stream having students on those next geni teams continuing the AI working
079groups with the staff I think is going to be really critical and important for us to continuing to to continue to take those next steps so as I said before we have uh the Hughes guidance and the K4 guidance uh I've would encourage you to take a look at those and kind of see how we're building up to the secondary um but we'll save a lot of that for the uh Elementary parent University next week so this is the AIU scale that I was talking about before there's a researcher um out of Australia Leon Furs who um started posting about this on LinkedIn about just under a year ago and kind of started this Global conversation with other folks in edtech or or in positions like mine uh supervisors or directors of of edtech around
080around the country and um his original draft of this had a five here system and one of the things I brought it to there was the Church Hill AI working group in probably March or April of of last year so they're the first group that I had a chance to sit down with as I was diving more into this research and I um I said to them like what what do you what do you all think of this this is pretty neat and they're like oh yeah this is pretty cool said well let's take a look at this and let's work for the next I don't know 30 minutes and let's see if we can start the beginnings of like a rough draft of what do you think this should look like for Church Hill
081like what are some points or what are some values that would be really helpful as a Church Hill teacher and you know we have math we have science we have history we have health we have practical Arts we have everybody here represented let's um you know we got music we have we have art let's let's try to do something that you know it's not just the math department or the social department but something that will work for everybody and they put together rough draft notes and I said okay I'm going to the high school in a week or two for their working group I'm going to share not to them and we're going to kind of do a combo effort on the Google Doc on this and they were really excited High School group opened
082it up I said all right here's what the Church Hill team did so far what do you what do you all think like what do what do we think same diverse group of folks together put together some of their notes kind of drafted some alternative versions um and between those two groups they they were like you know a five tier seems like a lot like maybe can we do it in four all right let's give it a shot and and we played around with different configurations we even tried a three tier ultimately all the notes that we gathered together uh the team and it made me feel pretty good A lot of the team uh members and the working groups basically said all right herb like we trust you to kind of take all our
083notes distill it down like you know put together a a second draft or close to final draft and um if we get to meet again at the end of the year we'll take a look we'll make notes email it out to us and we'll before we leave for the end of the year give you some time to talk with some other experts and see what you think about this and um this is kind of what we landed on and um and I'm really proud of it I think it encompasses all the different scenarios everything from the fact that we wanted to make it clear to students that maybe using AI is not always a good idea and there's going to be times that your teachers ask you not to use it and they're going to
084do that because they have a good reason there sometimes is an important it's important for you to just think and the struggle is the thought struggle is part of that's part of the learning experience and that's okay we don't want you to struggle so much that you disengage from the work but we want you to struggle because there's that's a point that's a that is a part of the learning process right all the way to AI powered where we say okay make sure you cite it but you could use these AI tools as long as you site the use and you do it properly in certain cases we're going to say go go all the way to level three and then the level levels one and two are good for kind of a stop Gap
085that there's a there's a point where you can say you can use it up to this point you can use it to outline for your outline you can use it to generate ideas but everything after that we want you to use your brains we want you to use the strategy we talked about in class um I actually very excited we just got a grant approv by the uh uh East Brunswick Education Foundation uh for uh 350 of these us scale magnets that are going to go in every classroom at Churchill and the high school so there it's a uh 19 by 15 magnet and uh and then the the stoplight over there which by the way I'm going to disclose here that was AI generated uh I used AI as it to create an image
086of a bear holding a stoplight because there was a couple schools I believe in North Carolina who used the stoplight and I was like that'd be pretty cool we could get a bear the bear pictures that like got cropped out where the scale is now were a little silly and goofy and you know uh were funny but not helpful for this so I but I like that the Paw was around at the bottom and and some people have said why blue at the bottom like I toyed around with the idea of a a green turn signal like with the arrow and you I said you know a couple of schools I saw had like a blue light a blue Infinity kind of underneath the red the yellow and the green light and I was like
087well I don't know if Infinity is really where we we I don't think we're there yet I don't know if that's that's really East Brunswick at this point with our thoughts on AI but I like the idea of like a blue light like and I joked say I always joke with people and you know some have heard me say like I'd love to have a jetpack it would be easier for me to you know travel to the all the all the 11 of the schools and the admin building for meetings and evaluations if I had a jetpack it might be easier to get around with traffic so maybe someday when we all have jetpacks the blue light will be like okay jetpacks you can go or uh or something like that or flying cars like
088and Back to the Future so um you know we had a little fun with it we're having fun with the with with the present we're having fun with the future uh so this this is something that's I'm really excited about those are on order now and I'm hope to be up in all the classrooms uh soon and there's going to be a uh the EB bareface they measured it out so that it fits in the stop lights so the teacher can put the bareface on whichever level is appropriate for that assignment class so we're really excited to to provide those tools for teachers and for students all right we're running we're uh I think I'm right at 8:00 or just about so uh and I want to leave time for for questions so a couple
089things I want to leave you with here right embrace the challenges but and also Embrace those opportunities uh I hope that everybody uh on the live stream and the folks who were able to join us in person uh come away feeling a little bit more confident about using some geni tools and um you know come out with some more questions too and and and you know thinking through the process and ways that you feel empowered to help your kids and and help yourself with the various different challenges that you have going on it's hard like you know adulting is tough as they say um but it can be a lot of fun and I think that um you know with these AI tools there's some opportunities to help us with the numerous things we have
090to do so embrace the challenges and opportunities talk to your kids I think that Honesty you know being transparent about about AI is important about the appropriate use of AI the same way that we should be talking about social media uh about respecting each other themselves their classmates their teachers I think that that's a really important piece of this is you know being honest asking them questions um and and making you know making sure that they know that you know about this stuff now I think is really really important um you know trust but verify I was a history guy before I was a technology person and uh President Reagan used to say trust but verify talking about the Cold War I think it's an appropriate phrase when we're talking about AI talked about hallucinations
091a little bit before about how AI isn't is not infallible so you have to you know trust the results but verify them make sure that you're getting accurate information equity and representation talked about that as well these are things that are important to be aware of um if you get a result that doesn't hit you the right way I think that's important to kind of investigate that and make sure that you know your kids are aware of that and that's something that we talk with teachers a lot about as well um before they just copy and paste and use it in any kind of uh you know assignment or if students are going to copy paste and use it as you know uh that that why that's not a good idea one of the reasons
092is because of equity representation and um and misinformation as well you know uh make sure that the content speaks with your voice I talked about that with the emails you know that's a really critical piece you still want your voice and your ideas to come through I talk with the students about that a lot um that's a really critical piece use these tools but make sure that it's still you that people are hearing right um be careful when you share any personally identifiable information I talk about this a lot with the staff that um if we use this for different purposes responding to emails to make sure you take anybody's name out um you know if if you're using gemini or co-pilot with your ebet account there are some built-in protections and scrubbing of information
093and things but even on those tools I've told people we take out any information um any personally identifiable information you don't need to share that you can just put I put like you can put like uh t for Teacher you know um C for child or s for student whatever and that way we're not sharing a lot of our information's out there you know there's been big hacks and things you you get some of us have gotten six text messages asking you to verify a package that was delivered to your house and you shouldn't click on it uh you know if it's Amazon or something go to Amazon's website um you know or those phone calls you get and you're like yeah sure here's my social security number right you don't want to you don't
094want to do those things so personal identifiable information it's already out there too much of it don't give away any more of the store right and you know privacy settings are important children under the 13 should not create any accounts on these things um and anyone you know who I think that if if you are going to allow your child to do that you should be aware of those things and have the conversation about that similar to if you don't want them on social media talk with them honestly about it if you don't want them creating accounts on this talk with them honestly or if you're going to let them set some of your own guidelines use our guidelines as a start but maybe set your own guidelines as well with your kids so anyone
095who's watching on the live stream and for the folks that are here I have a feedback survey U I want to thank everyone first of all thank you for coming out I know like I said I know this is a busy time of year every time of year is a busy time of year but um you know I I really do appreciate you joining on the live stream or if you're watching this on demand afterwards appreciate you taking the time to watch this um you know you could be watching playoff baseball or football or something so I appreciate you taking the time to watch this and I really appreciate the folks who were able to make it out if you could take a few minutes to fill out the feedback survey um it's a few
096questions and mainly just asking for people to share any additional questions that you have um and sometimes it's like you know I should have asked that while he was there you know sometimes on the ride home when you're not thinking or something's play on the radio that's when those good questions come so um you can go back on I will put the link to this survey on the AI Center website or if you want to capture the QR code there um you can feel free to leave me any feedback um or you can email me afterward um you know and uh I think that it's you know it's really important I'm really proud of the work we've been doing it's been getting recognized in the region and I think that's a a real Testament to
097the hard work of the teachers the staff our administrative team you we have a really smart team at all levels here in East Brunswick support from uh our awesome board and our great central office team um and we're really proud of that but we're here for kids and we're here to serve the community so um if there's anything that you have questions about or anything we can do uh you know we're here for you and I want you to reach out to me and my office anytime thank you so much for the folks at home thank you for the folks here have a great night and for the folks that are here we'll stick around if anyone has any questions and uh have a great night everyone thank [Applause] you e e