[AUDIO LOGO] OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. 

GERALD DUMAGUING: Hello, everyone. My name is Gerald Dumaguing. I am a Project Specialist for the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network, otherwise known as OTAN. And I'd like to welcome you all to this month's OTAN tech talk. Our speaker today is Maricel, and her topic is using available models to approach an AI policy in your classroom. Take it away, Marcelle. 

MARICEL: Yay, welcome, everybody. So let me get my screen running up here. Alright, so as Gerald said, if you have any questions, just go ahead and put it in the chat and I'll answer them after we record. But these days, AI is everywhere, and there's even a policy that's going around that says AI should not be able to give legal advice or medical advice. 

So in spite of inspiration of that, I'm going to be talking about using what you have already, available models, to begin approaching a policy for your classroom. So this is how you would think about getting started and what you can do to get started. This is a picture of me. It is not an AI-generated photo. But it's just a regular old picture that was taken by a human. [LAUGHS] 

All right, so one way that you can start or begin to address a policy or create a policy for your classroom is address the standards. How do you address the standards with the assistance of AI as a tool? Calculators are a tool. Chromebooks have now become a tool. Cell phones are a tool. And so AI, whether it be Gemini or ChatGPT, can be used as a tool. 

And the CCRs for adult education does have a portion that says technology can be used across multiple subject areas, like Math, Science, Social Studies, English. They all have some way of addressing technology in the classroom. And this is the link to the Adult Ed Standards. This is the one that I used from the lincs.ed.gov website. And you can always go back to the standards. If you're ever wondering, how do I start? Same thing as when you do a lesson plan. You always start with the standards and see how it would fit and how it would help your students that way. 

Another part that you can do is think of where AI can be incorporated to build your student skills, whether it's through your lesson planning. So you could incorporate AI through a daily warm up, a group work, setting aside a day where you can just do all technology. You can also do a unit that's interspersed throughout the semester. 

And as a teacher, you can always do a backwards plan. So you start with the product in mind, and then you plan how to get to that end subject, so a quiz, a test, a project. And I'll show you an example that my students used as a way that I backwards planned. 

And then also think about your plagiarism policy. Does your school have a plagiarism policy? Do you have a plagiarism policy in your classroom? So the thing about plagiarism is having students demonstrate their knowledge without copying and pasting something online. Well, now that we have AI, we can start thinking about AI as-- is a different type of search engine. So you have search engines like Google, Yahoo. Anyone still use Yahoo? 

And you have a list of websites. When you do a search, you have a list of websites where you can get results of whatever you're searching for versus AI. AI generates the responses in full sentences, paragraphs, and even bullet points. So I teach my students that AI and search engines are basically the same thing. And so you still have to give credit to AI, even though it has a generative response that looks and talks like a human. 

And when you retrieve information-- oops, that's for later. When you retrieve information, how do your students-- how do your students put that in their writing? How do they put that on their paper, in their projects? How do they give that credit to the original source? And so when you look at your plagiarism policy, you can pick out some format in which your AI could also be put in a policy. 

And then for this would let your students shape the policy itself. So when you observe your students, take a look at what learning styles they have. Are the type of person that needs to hear something, or do they like to do things while they listen? So take a look at their different learning styles. 

And you as their teacher, know best what their learning gaps are, and what their learning behaviors are. So if you notice that a student is struggling in class and they need extra time outside of class to do it, but you're not really available at 12:00 in the morning, AI could be a good source to help them put together information that they would need you for, but you're unavailable to give them at that time. 

AI ethics and its limitations. So I just put this picture of how I generated an image with Gemini. So my students and I did this activity where we would reimagine ourselves as superheroes. And this was a way to show some creative imagination that the students can have. 

So one of my prompts was, because I'm a bit older than my students, an older supervillain with super strength. And so AI generated this person, which is totally fine. But for me, I am more of a dark skinned person. Also, I have longer hair. Also, my hair is not white. 

So you can address the ethics and limitations of AI with your students. And so with a few prompts, I was able to generate an image that was more me, more to my liking, which is the second picture down here-- longer black hair, darker skin. Also, I wanted to be on a beach because that's who I am. 

So when you work with your students on creating an AI-generated image, you would teach them how to make the prompt to their liking. One of my students mentioned that AI tends to not use her body shape. She was a bit full-figured student. And she said, this isn't me. This is not my body shape. 

And so she tried different prompts to make it more like her. And at the end of class, she said, I could see the limitation because the AI is pulling information from elsewhere. But there are some ethics with AI that need to be addressed, and it would be good to go over that with your students. 

Jobs, careers. Your students are going to be using those technology in their future jobs and their future careers. So it would be good to start addressing AI because it's not going away. And we have been using AI in its simplest form. Like if you use Grammarly, they actually have an editing tool that would give you suggestions-- whoops-- that would give you suggestions on how to spell something or a word that would sound better in that sentence. 

So we have been using AI for a long time, but-- oops, sorry guys. But the jobs and careers are starting to use AI in some form. So having your students that safe place in the classroom to be able to use AI and experiment with it would be better than having them fumble around at work. 

And the whole point of this doing AI in the classroom is so that you learn together. I learned from my students how they use AI. And when you learn together, you discover the different uses with AI that your students do, but you've never thought of before. So it's nice to learn together with your students. 

So I wanted to give you a little bit of an experience. I already mentioned that one of my students thought that the AI was not very accurate. So one of my assignments for my students was to create a presentation using an AI-generated prompt. So that one was, if you could be a superhero, what would you be? What would your superpowers be? What would your costume look like, and how would you help people? Or if you were a supervillain, the opposite. 

So I selected some of the students' work that show it's not AI-generated response. And you can see that because in this first one, the I is lowercase. And as our students make that mistake where they don't capitalize the I's. 

So this one, if I could be a superhero or supervillain, I guess I would be a superhero. My superpowers would probably be to see part of the future. The ability to control water and air, be invisible and strong. And I feel like it would be useful to help the community in all aspects. My costume would be a dark violet, full-length bodysuit with a white cap. 

So the image is actually from Gemini, because you can tell with that little symbol at the bottom that it was an AI-generated image using Gemini. And they got the costume-- or AI got the costume pretty accurate. But what my student mentioned was the hair was inaccurate. She had dyed red hair, and so adjusted the prompt to have dyed red hair. 

The other one here was very detailed, and I wanted to show how much detail the student put in her prompt. When she generated this image the first time, she said it was perfect. She wouldn't change anything about it. And so these are just some student examples that I wanted to share with you, just to show how much work AI prompts need in order to get the results that you would want. 

So when you are thinking of using or creating an AI policy, think of how your students would be using it. The way that I used it with my students here is that we did it together. We did it as an entire class. And then we also talked a little bit about Gemini. So because we are a school-- I'm in East Side Adult Education-- we have a setting where the prompts and the searches are not shared with anyone else. 

So that's one of the benefits that we have with Gemini. But the thing that I envisioned was to have my students create this kind of presentation that they could begin sharing and begin communicating their presentations, practicing their presentations, practicing their speech. And one of the ways to start that was to have an AI-generated imagination of themselves. 

So what I envisioned for them was to have a slides presentation, and that was my backwards planning. That was my-- outcome was to have them do a presentation, a slides presentation. And we started working backwards with AI, in which they would generate an image to put in their presentation. But then they needed a prompt to have an AI-generated image. And that's where I came up with-- do a superhero. Or if you don't want to be a superhero, be a supervillain. What would you have done? 

And so having this where you let your students shape the policy can begin to inform you how you want AI to be used in the classroom. So for me, I have explicitly told my students to use it as a tool to help you generate images, to help you come up with an imagination that maybe you haven't thought of before. And I'm just going to go backwards here. 

And then I talked with them about what I expected as plagiarism. Does AI count as plagiarism? Yes, if you copy it yourself. If you don't summarize the information yourself, then that would mean you are copying. And so when I use my plagiarism policy, I make sure to incorporate AI as part of the plagiarism policy. 

And then when I create my lesson plans, I try to see where I can incorporate AI in here. Now, I'm not going to be using AI every single day, but to expose the students by having a tech day or having a daily warm up would help them understand that this is the safe place where you can use an AI model, but also to be used as a tool. And then I make sure that after all of that, everything fits within the state standards. 

Alrighty, so thank you for joining me today. This is the OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. 

GERALD DUMAGUING: Thank you maricel for all of that great information. OTAN would also like to thank all of you for coming to this tech talk. If you have an EdTech tool or some tips that you'd like to share with the adult education field, email your idea to support@otan.us. 

We also encourage you to subscribe to the YouTube channel. And whether you can view OTAN videos, you can contact OTAN for additional services, including professional development at your site Visit the OTAN site at otan.us, or contact us by phone or mail. Thank you again for watching today's OTAN tech talk.