Thanks for checking out Tuesdays with Tom. I was going to call it Tech with Tom but tech is only one part of the focus ( albeit a large one) of the newsletter. It’s more about the impact that tech is having in the classroom. To kick start this off I have added a post that I wrote on October 12, 2021, long before we had CHATGPT or Pi.ai available freely to everyone. The first paragraph alludes to an experience my wife first encountered as we were in the depth of Covid online teaching. A student she was working with had set up their Chromebook next to Alexa and opened a Google doc. The student then opened up speech to text on the doc. In order to answer homework questions, the student simple asked Alexa the question. When it spoke out loud with the answer, Google Docs recorded the text on the document.
We have been witnessing leaps and bounds in technology over the past few years, and at a pace that many of us are struggling to keep up with. The idea of this newsletter space is to help us make sense of it all, especially how it affects us in the classroom.
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Now, a quick flash back to October 12, 2021
Here’s a cool way to use technology for your education. Open up your laptop or Chromebook and navigate to a Google doc. Click the speech to text feature. Then put your laptop or Chromebook next to your Alexa or Google Home. Then read aloud the questions you have to answer.
Done. Alexa answers the questions. Google docs writes it all down for you. Just be sure to edit the doc and remove the “Hey Alexa” before you hand that assignment into your blended learning classroom dropbox.
School is just getting so easy.
Oh and then there is this. Ontario reading test scores inflated by assistive technology, report says1
Kind of makes sense though. We have been promoting the use of technology in education for the past decade or so. And in that time along came tools like speech to text, Alexa, earbuds with built in microphones. My favorite right now is the predictive text that appears in my email. Thanks Microsoft and Google. Now I don’t even need to worry about finishing the sentence. I just hit tab. Is it what I wanted to say? Close enough. TAB.
And those little red lines under the words that are misspelled. Right click. Select. Done. No need to learn spelling anymore.
Right now some kid somewhere is using an app to find the answer to a math problem.
We don’t think about it much, but what is happening is a slow creep of Artificial Intelligence (A.I) into education. And I am not really sure that, as an education system, we are prepared for it.
When we think about A.I, it’s usually because we watched a video of some robot dog climbing stairs, or saw a TV ( do people still use TV technology?) news report about self driving cars.
What we don’t think about is the boring little bits of software intelligence being added into our word processing tools. Or the Google Home that is sitting in the kitchen that you basically use to play Spotify playlists and maybe turn off the lights because you bought the smart plugs.
What we don’t think about is how these tiny bits of artificial intelligence are affecting education. But they are having a profound impact.
Wrapped up under the banner of assistive technology, school boards for years have been adding additional technology tools into the system. And to be honest, this is a fantastic thing. Many tools do exactly what they are supposed to do. They let children with learning challenges speak their answers rather than having to struggle with typing out paragraphs for example. To not add these types of available tools into education would be abhorrent because of…well the fact that it would limit many children’s abilities to blossom when there would be no need for that to happen.
But one thing that the education system may not have taken into account is the widespread adoption of the tools by all students. How do you limit the use of the tools to that kid, and that kid, but not this kid or that other kid?
Plus, education is no longer the gatekeeper of access to assistive technology. It used to be that forms needed to be filled in and students needed to be identified as having learning challenges by testing and outside agencies and stuff. Then, if all things aligned, the IT department would be asked to order a specific laptop and load specific software onto it and send a package to a student complete with big Bluetooth headphones and microphones that many kids would never willingly use in the classroom around their peers.
Now it’s just all in your iPhone. Or the Chromebook on your desk. Everybody’s got it. “Hey Siri, what are the first 20 Prime numbers?”
Thankfully education systems are nimble organizations. Quick to adapt and pivot.
Wait? What? Reread that line.
Ok, I am being sarcastic. Education systems tend to be, overall, slower moving entities that evolve over time. Yes they adapt, but education systems “think about” stuff. They research. They consult.
What they need to be thinking about now, and I am sure that many are, is the slow creep of A.I. and how that is going to affect how they deliver education in the years to come.
- Darren Major, Oct 11, 2021 Ontario test Scores inflated by assistive technology, CBC News ↩︎
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