Blog Post #5

I think it is very tricky to decide how AI can be used in a K-12 setting. It is a great resource to use to brainstorm ideas for teachers and students. Teachers can use it to help make lesson plans and students can use it to find topics for research and many other things. However, there are obviously some cons to it. Students can use AI to write essays for them, get answers to tests, etc. This can lead to academic dishonesty problems and can affect a student's education because if they are using AI to complete assignments and/or tests, they are not learning the content for themselves. Also, it is important to decide if using AI is age-appropriate or not. For example, I think it is more useful to high school students rather than kindergarten students because they are not doing writing assignments and they might not understand how to use it responsibly.

I like to use Instagram and TikTok to get inspiration for my future classroom. I have saved videos in the past that provide ideas for different classroom setups, activities, and advice for interviews and finding a school that fits you. So far, I have not really interacted with anyone besides liking and saving videos. But, I think that in the future it could be very helpful to follow teachers on Instagram because I can reach out to them for help but I can also find other teachers that follow the same account and connect with them. I think this will be very beneficial to help me find a community and people that are going through similar things as I am. 

Growing up, I went to a few elementary schools. Only one of them I would consider to be digitally rich and that is because it was a magnet school and each student got their own laptop/iPad. For the two years that I went to that school, I learned how to make PowerPoints, Prezis, and we even used Canvas. This has greatly helped me in my college career because I have been using Canvas since the fourth grade, so I am extremely familiar with it. Another benefit is that I learned how to use many different applications on computers, leading me to become more comfortable with it and I have a good foundation of technological knowledge. It helped me be more comfortable in public speaking as well, because I had to do many projects where I created a digital presentation and presented it to my class. 

Some tools I would like to implement in my future classroom to support collaborative writing would be software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word. Depending on the school, these may or may not be accessible but I think they are great for collaborative writing because you can work on a document at the same time and leave comments. This facilitates communication and can greatly help students develop social skills while getting valuable feedback from their peers. I am not sure exactly how this could be implemented in a young elementary class because the students are so young and are still learning to read and write, but in a fifth grade class I could assign a project where they have to write a newsletter/brochure together on Google Docs. This allows them to work together to research, write, and design to make a good newsletter.