This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
Yeah, it's Tim and Johnny Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk,
educated educators talking education.
Thursday night, Johnny Lupinacci.
Hey, how are we doing, Tim?
Well, I mean, our guests, we're not going to introduce them yet,
but since he's complimented on so many times,
okay, if you're in your car,
if you're on the app listening to the show,
okay, just keep listening.
Don't worry, don't go run to the Twitter feed
or the X feed or the Facebook tweet feed.
Don't crash.
But Johnny's rocking a stupendous mustache.
Stupendous.
Man, Lupinacci's stupendous mustache.
You know what, though, underneath that hat, though, I know the reality.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, we'll get there.
We'll get there about halfway through all ditch the hat
because I always get sweaty up top, you know, Tim.
But if you need to cool off or you need something refreshing,
oh, if you're in Madison or if you're way up north in Monacoa,
you can head up to Monacoa Brewing Company,
Busted Pencils is sponsored by Monacoa Brewing Company,
who sued the state of Washington to end its parasitic voucher system
that hurts public schools.
Monacoa Brewing Company is making Wisconsin great.
Again, one beer at a time.
Check out Monacoa Brewing Company.com to see where you can buy their progressive beer.
Tim, it's Thursday.
It's nice outside Thursday and check it out a little bit, man,
but I'll tell you what I'd love to throw down a Monacoa Brew
if I was in Madison, especially in Madison.
And remember to they sued the state of Wisconsin,
Johnny Lupinacci.
Oh, did I say Washington?
You said, watch that.
I am just making it out.
It's Thursday.
It's Thursday.
Okay, but I'm going raw.
You know, I don't have any, any artificial intelligence here.
Okay.
Well, speaking of that, artificial intelligence tonight on Busted Pencils,
we are diving into the digital frontier of education
with a very special guest, Aaron McKelkey,
a trailblazer in teaching and integrating AI technologies in the classroom.
He has a rich background in social studies and educational leadership,
has dedicated his career to empowering students to not only leverage technology,
but thrive with it by challenging traditional teaching norms
and embracing AI tools like chat GPT.
Aaron is reshaping how students learn, prepare for the future.
Future careers tackle the challenges of the modern world.
Get ready to be inspired.
Let's bust some pencils.
Welcome to Busted Pencils.
Aaron McKelkey, what do you think?
AI generated that introduction.
How did it do, Aaron?
I'd say that was pretty solid, Dr. Tim.
Thanks. I'm flattered.
Well, there you go.
I mean, AI would not lie.
So it's all true.
And actually, no, it's not that it could.
But Aaron, this is awesome.
I've got some great questions here.
And Johnny, you know, say we go at this as if, you know,
like Tim's to pro AI, Johnny's the anti AI.
The reality is, though, is what we're really bringing
are guests like you to bring more information,
particularly in this idea, you know what, in classrooms,
how is it being used?
How is it not being used?
What are some excellent ideas out there on, you know,
because to say, whatever the quote,
I cannot remember who to attribute this to.
But AI, it ain't going to uninvent itself.
And here it is.
And here you are.
So you're a social studies history teacher.
Love that.
You're in great company with the two of us,
social studies education guys.
Johnny actually did a little math education too.
You know, he he decided to go make things a little bit harder.
But Aaron,
what got you into AI as a teacher?
You are a world history teacher.
I see this as one of the things.
What happens?
You're in the classroom.
You're teaching your stuff.
You're you're you're boring.
The kids with really awful stories of the past.
No, no.
But how do you make the move into AI?
Just give us a little background on Aaron McKelkey.
The teacher who said, you know what?
I'm going to start using AI.
Well, the simple version is
a kid showed me a TikTok.
And he said, there's this thing called chat GPT.
Your techie, you should go check it out.
And it changed the course of history.
Hmm.
It changed.
So what what did that immediately do for you though?
And the classroom is a classroom teacher.
Was it a vision of going, whoa, we can use this.
My students can be using this.
Or was it more from the standpoint of,
let me see how it can change my life first.
Or was it a combination of all those?
Yeah, it was I didn't know what I was doing.
Like everybody when you start something, right?
And I basically said, well, how can I practice
this sort of an offline mode, low risk mode?
And I don't know how I came up with this idea,
but I had a new semester starting in January of 2023.
And we're on an intensive block schedule, kind of like a college.
So all new kids, new course, you get a credit in a semester.
And so I came up with this crazy idea to just do all my own assignments
with chat GPT only no matter how bad it was.
But then I also gave myself feedback
and scored everything with chat GPT.
So kids weren't involved and no one saw it.
And my admin wouldn't say I was breaking rules.
I don't know if they knew what chat GPT was back then.
And I just said no matter what, I'll do it for a semester.
And that was my experiment to get me in the game.
And it got you in the game for sure.
Our guest is Aaron McKelkey.
We're talking artificial intelligence in the classroom.
The numbers 8557524842.
Aaron, so you've taken a stance though that actually it's quite contrary
to traditional teaching methods.
But you're actively integrating AI into your classrooms.
Give us a little experiential sense of how are you bringing AI into the classroom.
You talked about how you're used it on yourself for that semester.
But give us some sense of what are you doing to show it to your high school students.
Yeah, well, I knew there would be a process of
it would have to be a teacher-facing tool first.
I'm not going to go unleash this on kids until I know what I'm doing
and what it can't do.
And I'll give you one example, Tim.
I had a student on an IP who had a co-teacher in the classroom
and one of the main jobs they would do servicing reading minutes in a world history class
is leveling text.
So the student's dyslexic,
reading on, you know, third to fifth grade level.
And that takes a lot of manpower.
And we thought, what if we threw the text I'm going to give that's
something from the middle ages and throw it in and say,
can you side-by-side this on a third grade level?
And we got to the point where the kid was doing it himself and he just loved it.
And then the human in the room is like, oh, cool.
I don't have to do the busy work menial thing.
I can actually teach and work on assessing the student and building relationship.
And it was kind of like getting rid of the manual labor side.
And honestly, I think the chat GPT did a better job than the person with the college degree.
Kanye Lupinati, man.
It sounds like he's gearing up for that competition, man.
Well, no, Tim.
I think this is this this one I'm going to have to say I'm going to give myself a credit on.
I've said all along, it's a it's a powerful tool that isn't going to replace the important work
that we need to be doing on the job in the industries we're in.
But that it'll be industry changing.
And I love how Aaron shared it here is like, man, what a powerful tool that that,
you know, whether it's a parapro or co-teacher or, you know,
person assigned to helping differentiate or level out reading.
That's a that's a time-consuming task that is nearly everyone who's done this, right?
No, it's it's so hard to do in real time while you're also supporting the student and,
you know, you're in the the moment of being in class.
And so what a really cool way, like Tim said, take out the or Aaron, you said,
Tim, you this is why you're a big fan of AI.
It takes out that busy work.
You know, it's why I said I really do believe I think the first time I heard about it from
students and then started asking people in the industry about it.
It was with journalists, journalism majors and writers who were saying,
it's not going to replace writers.
It's just going to mean we get like jobs where we're right.
We're not writing meaningless content anymore.
Like that's that that that part of our work day is cranked out.
And we're just editing getting that up and working on things that are, you know,
actual representations of our skill set and our passion for that thing.
So what a cool story about, you know, that student in your classroom,
who now the focus can be on the relationship,
can be on improving their learning and how empowering,
that they can just be like doing it themselves and seeing that, you know what,
I got access to knowledge and it doesn't need to be this painful like process.
That's what I was thinking about with the tools.
That was the thought I was thinking about that, Aaron, when you described the student,
it had to be empowering for the student to realize that this tool was,
you know, and to say in the special education rules,
removing into this, it's an adaptive technology, then,
is what you're talking about here using this with the special education student.
Tell me, I mean, tell me more about the student.
Their experience had to also kind of be, I've been, I've been doing a lot of reading with Ethan
Mollick, who's doing a lot of AI teaching and learning stuff at the Wharton School.
And he's really talking about this idea of AI being a co-intelligence,
something we take with us that helps us fill in gaps where any of us might have a gap
and so that it can help us learn.
And it sounds like this is what's happening at least in this one instance with your special
education student, the idea of saying, hey, the reading level of this medieval text.
Sorry, first of all, it's hard enough for anybody.
And then the reality is here is that you're scaling it down.
I wonder then, too, just like, tell me more about this student.
To me, it was like, given that kid a superpower.
And here's the really interesting part.
We can talk about the student side, but I want to hear Dr. Johnny's response to this.
My co-teacher, who's a certified special educator,
told some other teachers, here's what we did, and the kids kind of running with it,
and got some major blowback from colleagues who said,
well, you can't trust a kid to do that.
How do you know it's true?
How do you know it's good?
And we realized that we kind of had to do this in secret because a lot of people,
even down the hallway, were not open to that and got defensive about it.
So, since you're the skeptic, not the anti, about the skeptic AI guy,
what's your message to those of us that are trying to push and develop things
when people might, their knee jerk responses to fight it or say,
that's bad, that's cheating, it's taking my job, et cetera.
Yeah, well, Aaron, good point, because the opposition is really like kind of a dig in, dig in deep
and oppose. And I tease with that a little bit with Tim here, because primarily, we were looking
at it as a writing tool. And then some of the, like you said, some of the limitations and some
of the benefits. And I would say to those peer teachers like, hey, we've all been here at different
times in our careers where technology has changed how we taught, right? Like calculator in the math
classroom. There is a lot of ways in which, you know, they were, the Google was a big one too,
people were like, kids are just going to Google, Google things say, you know, that the co-teacher is
looking at this and saying, hey, this is pretty good. And the benefit outweighs the possibility
that it's translating that text into a different, you know, level reading. I wouldn't trust it
necessarily to, it's not like you said, hey, we had this student just say, hey, this historical figure,
I'm going to chat with Abraham Lincoln, right? And so, you know, it's a text, it's a basic language
function to change the language into a different level of reading. It freed you and the co-teacher up
to do better teaching. That sounds like a win-win. And it's an uphill battle, like Aaron, I appreciate
you doing that. We're going to talk about it a little bit more, too, because the opposition is fierce.
And I'm on that side of the skeptic.
Hello, when you're listening to busted pencils, busted pencils fully let it,
education talk, educated educators, talking education. Yeah, and we're talking AI in education
tonight. 8557524842 is the number. If you have a question, our guest, Aaron McKelkey,
yeah, doing AI in the high school classroom out in the state of Wyoming,
Johnny was, you know, kind of, there was a little exchange there, really nice between Aaron
asking Johnny about this kind of skepticism. But, you know, it made me think, though, too, I mean,
because we had, we had a great guest who put out some real cautions for us, Tom Mulaney, Johnny,
you remember this. And in fact, the, the, the potential was, is that, can you trust it?
And, and Aaron, I was wondering about, you know, the question somebody might have said,
or you were saying the teachers down the hall were already kind of like, oh my god.
Is it the possibility of taking, let's, let's just work with the example you gave us. So,
there's a medieval text. It's, it's hard enough to read for anybody, but a student with a
special education, IEP, let's use chat GPT to bring this text down to quote the grade level
that's appropriate. So that reads it, this, the skeptical side of this goes, well, can you trust
the way chat GPT took that and rewrote it so that it didn't take away from the original text
in, in that sense, because you don't really know that it truly broke it down to grade level.
Is, is that too much worrying? I mean, how, how do you wrestle with, with that concept of
somebody going, yeah, Aaron, but you don't know if it really did translate it the right way.
You know that for sure, right? You know, it's just a machine and the machine doesn't know what
it's really doing, Aaron. Well, the machine can do what you can prompt it to do, and we forget
that because a lot of those people who haven't played with these tools think the first output you
get is what you're stuck with. And they go, oh, it hallucinates and it fills in the blank and
doesn't tell you what it doesn't know. Well, I'm also a certified teacher who is literate,
and I'm going to read it before I give it to a kid and they forget that part. Like,
and here's the really where it's going is you can teach the kid those tools so that he can do
that on his own and have the understanding of the text or the content area and the prompting process
of the AI to say, okay, I'm not going to just take the first generic thing that it gives me.
And that's really the ultimate direction and where I think that's going, I think kids with
IEPs and their accommodations, they really should in the next couple of years start to have their
own custom AI tool that can do at least 90% of the busy work, especially when it comes to texts
and math problems and changing assessments to be meet their accommodations, that all the time we
spend in these meetings and these giant 55 page IEPs, let's build them a custom GPT that they
can take into English class and learn to do a lot of that on their own. I know that scares people
and the other one like with some of my colleagues was, well, what am I going to do? What's my job
going to be? And I, maybe I'm weird, but I go something other than leveling texts, that's not
what I got into this field to do is to take medieval chaucer and get it on a third grade level
because that takes hours and it's not fun. Well, Aaron, I can just imagine, you know, and I love it
for this use and encourage my students all the time to use this is, you know, as I used tools all
the time to reformat readings, like we all learn, like we're going to bring something that's all
condensed and small and like packed into maybe a journal format or a magazine layout. And if I want
my 10th graders to read it, you know, I got to relay it out so that it's chunks of text that they
can digest, right? And so we do this manually and it would take hours and hours as a teacher
after hours working to reformat text. So as you're talking about it, I'm like, man, I love this tool
because it's freeing you up to do better teaching, right? It's like, it's like, if there is a tool that
would automatically clean my house and do my dishes, you know, like then it just frees me up to have
like time and space at home that I otherwise wouldn't have. So it has a tool that brings value
to the profession that we're in as educators. I mean, here were three social studies guys,
we talk about like the importance of democratic citizenship and and having the sort of literacy
of the world and understanding history. Well, I would say that my peers who are opposed to that
are their skeptical of it's like, hey, what is most like, let's be real? Tim's been saying this
let's be real. Come on, let's be real. Enough kids to know what happens is they shut down and
they're being maybe compliant. Maybe they're behaving or nodding or like, you know, we assume that
they did the reading, but most like most students, not even the student with the IEP, a lot of students
are just like, man, I didn't read that. So you're increasing your engagement by saying, hey, if,
you know, if you read it and you need like a translation or, you know, a breakdown, here are
some that we, you know, here are the prompts we can put in to get a good breakdown. Here's a great
breakdown of this. I mean, to me, it's a quicker version of like cliff notes or other things.
It doesn't replace their original. You're still providing them the primary source. They know where
the information is coming from and they're engaged with that. I would say in a really critical and
realistic day-to-day way. Yeah, think about, man, oh, I'm getting a slight feeling that Johnny
Lupinacci is less skeptical. No, I'm going to say, well, because no, you're seeing your
team in the challenge. Like, you're going to, you're going to, we're going to start with the prompt
and AI and I are going to go head to head on who gets published first. Okay, and hey, check it out
we do. Yeah, one call call are in right now. The call it's 857524842. But Catherine,
Catherine, you're on the line. How are you doing, our friend? Hey there, guy. I am
fascinated by this conversation, first of all, I tuned in late, forgive me, but it feels to me
like you guys as educators are kind of into AI because we have to teach it, right? You are
teachers. Of course you like AI because you're going to be making with your interactions with AI
teaching it. We are all going to be making, I'm sorry, I'm not thinking of terminator, but we're
making the personal assistant like you talk about that are going to be bodies eventually. I can,
you know, that kind of real assistant and starts with artificial intelligence.
Wow, Aaron, it sounds like Aaron, it sounds like you got Catherine thinking about this, Aaron.
There are some other bigger things that I'm, I'm not trying to, to brag, but I mean,
I'll just tell you the coolest one that I think I've ever seen in my classroom in 14 years,
I have a blind student. She has a braille note. Basically, it's a laptop that she feels the text
through her fingers, the little things pop up. And I made a custom AI tool to help my students write
better history essays. It does not write them for them. It gives them feedback on using specific
evidence and all the tools I want them to do. And I sat there and I watched a blind student
through her fingertips interact with this AI tool that I built her and get real-time feedback.
I was just like, I can't believe this is even possible. And why would we not use that? Why should
she wait until Sunday night? When I'm 13 papers through the stack to get to hers to give her
feedback? Why shouldn't she get it right now, too? Busted pencils fully let it education talk. Yeah,
our guest, Aaron McKelkey, artificial intelligence in the classroom. When we get back,
okay, more skeptics questions that are awaiting.
Yeah, we're always standing on the rooftop. Busted pencils fully let it education talk,
educated educators talking education. The numbers eight five five seven five two four eight four
our guest Aaron McKelkey AI in the classroom talking about using it in the classroom. Yeah,
and in fact, bringing the power of a tool, particularly with the students and helping some of the
students really realize you give us two great examples Aaron. I just want to read the text. So we
got a text from Jameson and Pennsylvania. I use AI to generate graphs or charts for me. I came
up with the data and the numbers myself, but instead of taking the time on excel or another program,
I input the data and get exactly what I need most of the time. I don't consider it illegitimate.
To me, it's a time saver and still using all of my found data. It's simply another tool
to that point. Aaron, would you think about Jameson's comment there?
He's exactly right. Most of the time and I bet he read the outputs before he put him in his
report or published it and went, you know, I'll go back and tweak five or 10% of it, but if
90 to 95% of it was right and it does it faster, why wouldn't I use that tool?
Yeah. Well, okay, so Aaron, you're talking about in the break, we say, you know, before we get
into all the positives, you got to tell us about the story. You say a whole department. So
the opposition to you being a teacher using AI, I'm assuming that you're saying like opposition
like within the own your own building that you're teaching that your your own colleagues are
so tell us about this. The mounting, what do you want to say? The onslaught of anti AI people
going after Aaron McKelky. What happened? Yeah. Well, and I'm on my TikTok stream. So I got to
shout out Lily and Christian and John, but to to put it in the the language of my students, I had
some ops. I don't know if your college students talk about their ops. Is that a term that registers
in your guys' brain? Oh, yeah. Okay. Johnny Lupinati ops. So, so ops are like that person that
haunts your dream, your enemy. Say you're that teacher that gives a lot of essays like, oh, man,
he's my op this semester that Dr. Lupinati, he's my op. And so kids would say that the English
department was collectively my op because I showed some students some tools in my room. And I'd
been doing chat GPT for all my own assignments as a teacher. And I finally was like, I got to show
them some of these things you can do. Besides, here's what kids will do if you don't teach them. They
go, hey, chat GPT, write me an essay that summarizes the great Gatsby copy, paste, submit. The teacher,
you know, understandably so, says this is terrible. You cheated. It's AI. AI is bad. And I'm like, well,
once they know that this exists, which they all do because it's on social media and they all show
each other, why don't we teach them productive ways to use it? So that's not the only outcome that
we get from it. And the department share of the English department came and talked to the
social studies department share and basically said, you guys got to stop teaching kids this stuff.
And kids are saying that you're teaching them how to cheat. And my department share, ironically,
he sits me down and he's a great dude in a friend of mine. And he's like, hey, man, I get it.
I have this side business and I use AI to do like half of it. So I'm just going to pretend like we
talked and you were just like, okay, and no one else has to know anything else. And I said, well,
I'll go talk to him, like tell me, tell me where my ops are in the English department. And so I
just went and had lunch with a couple of them. And I said, well, if you'd like to know how I use it,
you can come in my room anytime. You're welcome to see. And if you have questions about what kids
are saying, come ask me and I'd be happy to share the ways that I've used this. And you know,
it turns out none of them had used AI. None of them knew what chat GPT was. They just,
they're like, it's cheating. And you showed it to him. Therefore, you're encouraging cheating.
And so to get to get, you know, department head to department head level blowback,
it would have been easy. But I'm like, you know what, this is the future and kids are going to use
it anyways. I was in an English class, ironically, two days ago. And these two kids were right in
essay and they had their phone out and they were on some free app that was a version of chat GPT
using it horribly. Like I watched what they were doing. I know it was so hard to not say, okay,
this is exactly why we have to teach it because what they're doing probably is cheating according to
this teacher and just typical teacher ethics. But they already have that tool. So we're not going to
just say, don't ever use that again, uninstall the internet, you know, yeah.
Well, teach him how to use it, right? Like I like what Aaron's talking about here,
teaching them how to use it. And this this goes back. I'm I'm dating myself, but, you know,
in the math classroom with the calculator. And then, you know, as the students aren't going to be
able to do their math, it's like, they're still doing math just fine. You know, and it just,
it does change how we teach. You know, and so I want to say it a little more bluntly, like the
English department is going to have to grapple with this probably begrudgingly, but it's going to
change the kinds, like you just said, the kinds of ways they give assignments, the ways that they
teach their students to utilize the tools that are at their disposal to be better writers.
Well, and that's the part too. I heard this a lot. It it my institution, Aaron, I got to
some low back from some history faculty and the English faculty about go, my god, you know,
just keep this away from our students. Like, first of all, look, you can't. And that you've as
you said, Aaron, what a great story though, too. It's like seeing kids using it inappropriately,
incorrectly. And maybe even cheating, the reality there then is to say, you can't do that,
or you can say, guess what? You're not using this ethically. Let's engage in how to use this tool
ethically to actually help you, you know, put it as as a co intelligence. Got another text from
Jethro and Spokane, Washington, great conversation with Aaron. He's obviously doing great stuff.
We shouldn't expect someone to read something that AI wrote faster than they can read it.
Man, we're getting the text coming in there. You can jump on the phone to 8557524842
Boston pencils fully-led education talk, educated educators talking education,
educated educators talking AI education tonight, our guest, Aaron McCalkey.
All right. So Aaron, here's one from your blog. I got to quote this. It says, what if I told you
that you could use AI tools to gain an ethical advantage in your learning sentence number one
opens up the blog using. So right there is what you're saying is go like, look, I'm going to teach
them how to use it ethically. What about somebody who says using AI is unethical, therefore end of
story, Aaron, out. That's easy. Is fire bad or good? Is it cooking your food or burning down your
house? Yeah. Because it's all about how you use the tool. And we know teenagers,
they will take the shortcuts and the easy mode and the cheat code if that's all they know.
And the accusation that it's cheating or that's unethical, I think it's a lot of deflection and
projection. It's really important as educators that we are self reflective on like what's working
and how are young people learning and what are the really relevant ways that they're going to need
to understand how to use these tools as they go forth into college, you know, for talking about
high school students or college into career, this is the reality. And so to learn to use a powerful
tool ethically is really important, right? I like what Aaron said about like fire is like come on,
we have all these tools at our human disposal. It doesn't eliminate the human, but it changes how
and what we do at work. And I think honestly, I know it's going to change the landscape, but I really
do believe it's going to make space for more meaningful engagements and the professions that we
go into. I keep hearing that too is being that that that opportunity for us to do more meaningful work.
Aaron, in fact, one of the other things that you do a lot of is is that really emphasizing this
for your students so that they actually recognize that how they're going to use it in college and how
they're going to use it into the workforce. Talk, talk more about that from the standpoint of
preparing them for the future. And the fact is is that AI is their future. Yeah, I'll just give an
example. I got a text last week from a former student, brilliant mind mathematician, got an
economics and blockchain degree. The University of Wyoming has a blockchain program and some awesome
stuff going on in the crypto space. And this student got a job with the financial services office
on campus. And he texted me and he goes, Hey, I just met with my boss. I got this going on. And he
outlined my new position. Here's my big goal. Go learn how to use AI because none of us know how to
use it. And then in about six months, come back and teach all of us. What can we automate? What can
we outsource to it? How can we apply it? Because we know it's out there, but we have no idea how to
put it to work for us. That was like his whole objective as a new employee in that department.
And so he texted me and he's like, You want to do this together? Can I join your group? I don't
know how to do that, but that's my job. And I also asked him in the university, what teachers were
okay with it versus tried to ban it or make you afraid of it. And he goes, Only the business
professors. And I said, I wonder why that is. And he goes, Well, because they know that's the
future and it's capitalism. Like if I can do it faster and cheaper, I'm going to do it. Whereas
I've had some, you know, not to hate on our own profession, but a history student at the same
university say, all my finals are paper, pencil and my teachers, anti AI. And we scan it with
this. And I said, you know, here's a little dose of irony for those, those type of teachers and
professors. And I get it. I love them. But I am kind of starting the pot here. They tell students,
you can't just rely on a piece of software to do this thing for you and not use your own faculty
and evaluate it yourself and put your own content in it. But then they're using a program like
TurnItIn.com or GPT zero. And they go, Oh, this thing magically says it's AI generated
there for zero. You cheat it. And I go, what happened to not relying on a piece of software to
do it for me, Mr. Professor? Exactly. Aaron saying it saying nicely is like educators fundamentally
opposed to this or who are taking a hard line on this. You know, you really got to turn the lens
inward and ask, like, are you, are you a good teacher? And I'll put it out there. Like, you
might be a brilliant and engaging person. But like, these are the technologies. These are the tools.
And they're not replacing the learning. Not instead of, it's not, it's not really cheating.
I hate that it's even called cheating. I mean, we can potentially, we can use it to cheat. We
absolutely can, as we're saying. But again, like any tool, I'll even say, only if you get given a
really bad assignment. There you go. Okay. Again, we had this debate, you know, like decades
ago in high school, like, Oh, they're cheating on their essays. Like, well, it's the prompt
really meaning this. Are they engaged? Like, did you, you know, make the assignment relevant,
engaging, timely, and meaningful? And is it measuring what you really want to know from them?
And in most cases, like Aaron shared with us tonight, and I'm sure it's kind of congruent
across his teaching is that, you know, what he wants to measure from his students learning,
this is helping him do that. This is helping get to that essence of learning the content,
rather than making it all about an assignment, be a particular way that's super easy to cheat on
without AI. So, you know, it's like, I always hear when teachers say, well, they're cheating,
and I'm like, that's usually a red flag for me. It's like, okay, I kind of want to see your
teaching now because. So, so Aaron, the time is flown by. I mean, we're right up on this. So,
people are looking at where should, you know, somebody who's interested, where should the people
find Aaron McKelkey? Well, my website's Aaron McKelkey.com, A-A-R-O-N-M-A-K-E-L-K-Y. My biggest
platform somehow, some way has turned out to be TikTok. Whoa. I, one of the, I think one of the
best things I do as a teacher on mediocre on a good day, but one of the best things I do is I
ask my students to teach me stuff. And my wife said, you know, you got to get on TikTok. You do
cool stuff. People like it. I got over that fear and did it. And my seventh video I ever made is
it's like nine or nine point something million views after seven weeks. Wow. And it was not my idea.
I didn't set up my phone to film in the certain mode or pick the song. It was all my students
just kind of giving me advice on that. And it taught me an important lesson that those platforms,
young people understand. And if you're an old person like me, just, just go to them. So my post
a TikTok every day, which one of my favorite things to do as a teacher is when kids are on their
phone in class or I have to take it away and like, but I'm on your TikTok. And I never thought
that would be the case. But I'm on Twitter and all my handles are Aaron McKelkey. I just did
that to make it easy to find. And I'm working on my YouTube channel. But my website is the biggest
one, Aaron McKelkey.com. We will have and we'll absolutely have that link out there too for people
downloading the podcast to make sure that they can get that Aaron McKelkey.com. It's busted pencils.
Aaron, thank you so much for busting pencils. We got to have you back one more time. When we get back
though Tim and Johnny, breaking it down.
Yeah, bus defences fully. Let it education talk. Educated educators talking education talking
AI education tonight. Yeah, you know, if you want to jump in, we had some text or caller though.
The numbers 8557524842. You're a teacher. AI, are you using it? If you are, how are you using it?
If you are on that side of going, I don't want people using it. Give us a call too. We'd love to
hear from you. I mean, tell us about the realities of of why we should think very deeply about whether
or not students even should be using this. And again, you know, yeah, Johnny and Tim, we're always
playing like Tim's the pro anti pro AI guy, Johnny's the anti AI guy. We're really educated educators
talking about AI education, making sure that we say because you guess what? It's like a lot of things.
It's a tool. And yeah, it can be used to do horrible things. And it can be used to do some amazing
things. Johnny, when I hear Aaron talking about again, the the IEP, so a student with an individual
education plan, so that special education student, he's got a co special education teacher with
a minute's history class. Yeah, talking about, you know, presenting the kids amid evil text for seniors,
juniors and seniors in high school. Heck, even for anybody, reading that is really hard reading.
So the reality then, though, too, it's saying to a student with special needs, using the tool to
take that text and to level it down to the ability so that now the student, a little bit nervous
on what the student now just uses that tool to help them engage in texts. Yeah, Tim, and it doesn't
it doesn't replace or change anything. It just makes space for more meaningful engagement. And I'll
give you know, kind of building on that same sort of example. That's not even for the student with
the IEP. Right. Just that's an empowering example. It's for all the students. Like, you know, this
is not that different than you know, when we when I was teaching social studies, we went to a special
training around reading apprenticeship. And it was great. Kind of taught us how to break down
difficult readings for our students to kind of look at them differently, change the format of them,
give them, teach them how to pull out a main sentence, you know, highlight critical questions
that they have from the reading. So you're still doing that with this really powerful tool that
you can also be fact checking be like, Hey, we talked about good prompts for AI, bad prompts for
AI. What did AI generate for you based on this article or based on this reading that we looked
at together this week. And we can see and we can sort of evaluate and question our sources
and determine together, right, with consensus. Hey, was this good meaningful information that we
can take with us? Or, you know, or was it that fall short to have some gaps that process alone?
Right. We engage in really about learning. So I mean, I we tease like you're for I'm against it.
You know, I think I'm 100% for it as a tool. Right. And I'm against the the world is changing
and it's replacing us. And there's these terminate, you know, we're headed towards these
machines that are going to end all teaching, you know, and end all professions, just robots doing
everything and people sitting at home, you know, it's like, okay, we've watched a matrix too many
times or other movies that, you know, that that gets played out, you know, Aaron shared it with us.
It only knows as much as it's told. So as we engage with these, you know, these tools and these
plugins, I think our caller Catherine said this too, like as educators, we need to be really,
you know, engaged with this tool. I can't imagine that there's a math teacher out there that
doesn't interact with calculators these days. Right. You know, similar. There's no right.
There are writers who choose to only work on a typewriter. You know, there are, you know,
there are musicians who do everything all analog still. But in, but there's some balance in between
you go into a studio and there's all kinds of tools and computers that help make music. It doesn't
take the musicians out of it. You know, and so like, let's stop with the scary stuff. We're like,
oh, AI is going to replace everybody and, you know, and the students are cheating. They're actually not
cheating. Teach them how to use this powerful tool. It's like Martin. It was like Martin said.
The two Martinackens are guests of drummer. You know, it's going to it will eliminate bad drumming
like Martin said. And guess what? If you're a crappy teacher, yeah, it may be it is coming for your
job. But you know what? Stop being a crappy teacher. Use the tool. It's busted pencils. The numbers
eight five five seven five two four eight four two. We just had a guest Aaron McKelkey will have a
link for the podcast. So you can check out all of his stuff. And in fact, you know, you can even
sign up for one of Aaron's courses. If you want to get yourself in front of, well, you can't get in
front of AI at this point right now. We're all playing some form of catch up by going after this
because it truly changes every day. Johnny, I got to tell you the one of the things that's happening.
And you say about using it, right? And using this as a tool. I can tell you that in my house now,
my wife and I will typically start to do the, you know, we're having a conversation. We're thinking,
what do you think? What do you think? And then we're going, I wonder what AI thinks we've actually
started. I know. But because it's like, okay, I want to figure out whether or not I should
say something in a certain way. I tell you what, as an email generating idea tool right now,
I almost use it exclusively to say, I need to write an email to Johnny Lupinacci and needs to
talk about this. Give me a three sentence email to Johnny that's quick. And it's just the way it's
become a tool now that I'm using it in that direction because it is better at making sure that I
don't say something stupid. Well, that's good, Tim. I mean, that's great. I'm still, I'm still
skeptical on that front. And I like that it works for you. I'm still like, that sounds like so much
more work than me just typing up my email to Tim or my email to, you know, my colleague or whoever.
So I mean, I'm always open-minded about it, but I'm still going to dig in a little bit and be like,
for me, it's quicker. You know what else is quick, Tim? If you're in Madison, head down to the
Monaco Brewing Company. And why would you head down to the Monaco Brewing Company? Because
busted pencils is sponsored by the Monaco Brewing Company who sued the state of Wisconsin to end
its parasitic voucher system that hurts public schools. Monaco Brewing Company is making Wisconsin
great again. One beer at a time. Check out Monaco Brewing Company.com to see where you can buy
their progressive beers. And while you're there, take your phone with you, download one of the
latest AI tools. Hey, and if there's no one there at the bar to talk to, talk to your AI. I have
a conversation with it, Johnny, because that is though the reality too is we're using AI,
is that I see a lot of people's skepticism and Aaron talked about this going in. It's either
they haven't used it or they've used it one time and they used it one time. And they kind of
didn't really realize that actually it's a dialogue machine. You really need to have a dialogue
with this to really get its work. And so when you're talking about prompting, it likes context,
it likes details, it likes for you to say, hey, I didn't really like it that way. Tell me a little
bit more. Busted pencils. Hey, tomorrow night, Friday night, wrapping it up. Busted pencils.
Thanks for a great night, everybody. See you tomorrow.