Hey, welcome to Busted Pencils, fully-ledged education talk, educated educators, talking education
here with chairman of the board, Jacob. I am Dr. Johnny Lupinacci, you know, Dr. Tim Slecker.
He's out sick today. He's already, he already phoned and dialed in. Let us know, hey, man,
can't be there today, guys, for class and session. But that's okay. He's got an excused absence.
Jacob, we are going to dive into it today. How are you doing, my guy? I'm excited, Johnny. It's been
a while since we did one of these where it was just you and me, I think, because the last time
Tim couldn't be here, we had a guest. Yeah, exactly. It's that way. You know, Jacob Johnny
connection, though, the folks love so much. It's the JJ combo, man. Yeah. It's a good one. It's
a good one. Well, you know, it's also the beginning of the school year. I think it's safe to say most
students are returning to their classrooms. If not, this very week, for sure, after the holiday,
this upcoming Monday, right? By next Wednesday, they get safe to say that a majority
of the students in this country going to school in a classroom will be in a classroom next week.
So it's going to be officially the mark of fall by next week. But this is, you know, still a little
bit of summer for some of you listeners out there, pencil busters. You're hanging on to those
last days. And if you're a teacher likely, you're already in your classroom, getting all set up
and geared up for the beginning of the school year. Jacob, we've been going head to head,
not you and I, but Tim and I going head to head. And you've been in the middle of it. So it's
going to be fun to have you chime in a little today. But we've been going head to head on, you know,
AI. Oh my gosh, technology is it good? Is it bad? And I think that's some great conversations
around, you know, resisting that urge or that that impulse to call something good or bad?
Yeah. Because there are a lot of like really important uses that technological advances,
especially related to education, apply to teaching and learning to what's happening in our
classrooms. But we're in one of those moments where everybody's like, oh my god, AI, it's everywhere,
it's taking over pretty soon. Artificial intelligence will be the next stage of human evolution.
And robots will be doing everything. No more teachers. I thought Tim wasn't here today. I
feel like I'm hearing a lot of Tim points. Well, I'm trying to represent the church of AI,
you know, in terms of regular parishioner. And in that, uh, dare I say cult of technology,
as I say, I think he's up to like bishop or something by now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's head of the
diocese. Yeah, there you go. But we're kind of teasing him because he's not here. But that's
the idea here. It's like, uh, you know, it's to resist that impulse that it's good or bad.
But to kind of sit with the what does it bring? What's the value that it adds? And what kind of ways,
especially for us educated educators and you listeners out there too, you're part of that.
Like the kinds of ways that we're thinking about, you know, cultivating or facilitating the
best possible experience for our learners, whether that's in our districts. If you're, you know,
superintendents office downtown, I like to call it like the folks downtown, right? Whether you're,
you know, a principal or a teacher or a parent or a student, you're not really probably having
many conversations about school that don't sooner or later get to the hot topic of artificial
intelligence or the role technology is playing in our classrooms. And the, I would say Jacob,
the debate is not new. I remember when I used to call it the laptops are coming, the laptops are
coming. Yeah. You know, when they would say, guess what we got you this year? A cart of laptops
or, you know, a set of iPads or I'm going to date myself here. Some of our, you know,
our younger listeners and I put younger in that sarcastic tone. We'll remember this. I also had
a year where the district gifted my classroom with a set of blackberries. Whoa, we were going to use
these palm pilots and blackberries to do all kinds of exciting stuff. There was a technology graveyard
in our school. A lot of stuff that both teachers and kids were like, I'm not really quite sure what
we do with this. And we give it a try, give it a go. And nothing really quite sticks. But it used to
be like the silver bullet. Like once everybody had a device, like a laptop or a tablet at their,
you know, use at their desk, the learning would increase. And, you know, in some context,
that was true. And in other contexts that didn't necessarily pan out. And so I feel like we're
there again with AI. But Jacob, you sent me a really cool article this week. And I'm going to have
you just kind of just kind of introduce the main point of the article because I was like,
oh, we're talking about this because it happens to land right in the midst of a really great
conversation I'm having with teachers right now this week about, you know, what are they doing
in their classroom to include AI? And also with that AI, obviously kind of like some of the hard
technologies like laptops or phones and things that students bring with them to class. But what
else are they doing also to kind of get engaged learning happening? So this kind of fits right into
that Jacob. I won't tease any longer. Give our listeners, you know, the gist of this article you
sent over to me. And I said, we're talking about it in class and session. Yeah, Johnny. So this
article I found it's from Education Week by Sarah Schwartz. And the headline here is why one
teacher told students to put their Chromebooks away for good. And just if the article is high school
chemistry teacher Marcy Samayella decided to ditch Chromebooks in her classroom, not completely.
She said that basically for things where you require the Chromebook for for labs or
researching online doing things that specifically you need the internet and the Chromebooks for
doing that still by getting rid of it in other contexts and going back to paper in pencil. And
that's basically what the article is about. I found that very interesting. And apparently you
agreed with me. So we're going to be talking about it today. Well, I love it, Jacob, because actually,
you know, in the spirit of hey, let's not fall on one side or another. I made a joke in a recent
episode. I said, only sits, speak in absolutes. And I tend to sometimes go to the dark side on
this show. Absolutely. And I'm an absolute. And I'm like, no, AI, no, yeah. But that's not true.
I'm actually utilizing AI in some capacity of my classroom as well. And I haven't made this full
move, but I have some peers, some really great educators I look up to. And when we talk shop,
you know, we don't actually have a water cooler. But I say, hey, let's, you know, chat like we're
at the water cooler or in the in the teacher lunch room and kind of talk about how we are thinking
about approaching learning in our classrooms this year. And I will say there's like a renewed
almost nostalgia, you know, what's what was cool in the 90s seems to be hip with the young people
these days. Again, now anyways. So we're kind of leaning into that and building in more time in our
classrooms for some of those throwback learning moments. That's what I'm calling them. Hope
of my students get a kick out of that. But throwback learning moments just to kind of build in,
you know, opportunities to say right, to construct a sentence, to do some free writing, to do some
even the my math friend, you know, she's teaching a precalculus class and got together with another
buddy of mine. We taught math for years. And we were talking about, okay, let's utilize the technology.
But let's also make space for pencil and paper. Because sometimes understanding is tactile
things for some learners. Yeah. And it's engaging and like we might hate it, you know, I'm definitely not
in the in the club of, hey, let's give them 100 problems to do at their seats and make them turn
them in or, you know, write a 15 page paper by hand. But certain things like construct a thesis
statement or, you know, solve a solve a solve a problem that I put on the board, a math problem.
And then if you feel like you got an idea, come up with a math problem for a peer to solve.
And we're just going to be in throwback mode. We're just going to be in a mode of like pencils,
papers, maybe a calculator. If you got one, I like to call them cacolax, like you got your cacolax
and, you know, ready to go pull them out, get punching, but like low tech throwback 90s learning.
And then like you said, our teacher and the article, she didn't banish the the Chromebooks to the
technology graveyard, right? They're not packed away for good. But they're put away. So we're not on
them for everything. I think this is wonderful, Jacob, for a number of reasons because, you know,
some of the myths are, if the technology is out, they're going to be using it for other things.
And I think that's not true. There's a clear purpose for what we're using the technology for.
You talked about in the article, the chemistry teacher she had mentioned, hey, if we're doing a
particular lab, they're filling out their lab report, you know, or they're utilizing some kind
of research prompt, you know, they're engaged with the technology with the direct objective.
I would say almost always when I have a really clear use for the technology in class,
it's being utilized that way. It's those times where it's not quite clear what the learning
objective is, engaging with the technology that it being out, I think can be a distraction.
And so let's maximize our engagement and have times for technology and times for, like, I'm
calling it throwback learning that semester. So you're going to have to slap a trademark on that
soon because you've come up with a phrase. I think you could really capitalize on this.
Yeah. And I want to say, like Jacob, it's not being a Luddite, right? Like sometimes you tease me
and I think it's worth worthy. Like, I'll say, like, I don't know Jacob, if the environment can
sustain all the usage of this technology, you know, cooling off these super computers.
And I start to sound like a Luddite, as though I'm like sitting at home with my typewriter
or some way, you know, like I'm facts and Jacob, my script for the show, you know, I'm utilizing
computers, technology, search engines. And at times, even yes, I admit, I'm utilizing artificial
intelligence to varying degree. Like if my counterpart here, Tim, my colleague, I shouldn't call
my counterpart. He's not my adversary. He's my buddy. But if he was here today, you'd be like,
come on, Johnny, you're telling me I can't do, you know, X, Y, and Z on my AI, you know,
I can't have my Tim clone, you know, answering my student's questions after I've been here today,
the Tim clone. Tim clone could have came in. But, you know, like, I think Tim embodies a really
good balance of these things. It's a little far more learning towards utilizing the technologies.
But I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. As I don't, Jacob, think it's a bad thing for
students to do some throwback learning. It's like some old school ways of saying, hey, you know,
back in the day, here's how we did this. And there was some value to it, right? There was some
value to doing it, some tactile, some motor skills stuff, you know, just some movement that can
engage learners in a little bit of a different way than just typing the keys and maybe slightly
less distracting way. Now, Jacob, I'll also throw on there. If all I'm doing is pencil and paper,
like I'm stuck in throwback mode, then I'm a dinosaur, man. Then I'm not an engaging teacher,
right? My students are like, hey, man, that old head doesn't get it. So I think this is really
important that, you know, we take the best of these worlds and go with it. But I think you're
on something, Jacob, I'm going to, I'm going to look that up today or tonight. And it may be right
a little piece we could put on a blog throwback learning. Dare we bust some pencils in class?
That's part of the article too, Johnny, because the teacher she talks about how having the
Chromebooks as an ever present part of the classroom leads to a lot of anxiety for her about, well,
are they looking at Netflix? Are they goofing off with the Chromebooks? You know, what's going on?
And I think you hit on it there. It's when you're bringing the Chromebooks out for a purpose,
and you're using the technology for specific thing, then they're less likely to be abusing it.
They're more likely to use the tool for the way it's supposed to be used because they have a reason
to do it. And I think that makes perfect sense. And just like the Luddite who's not going to have
any computer in his room, I think that having, you know, ever present technology or using AI for
everything or using the computers or everything, that's also not really the right way to do it. I
like to see where we're using technology in a way that's fit for purpose. And we're introducing it
in ways where it can give us an advantage over the old way and not getting rid of the old way where
that has an advantage over the newfangled technology. There's nuance to it. And that's exactly where
we let this off. It's not good. It's not bad. There's different spots for it to be. I'm right there
with you on that, Johnny. Yeah, man, and I'm excited about too because it gives me, I always like to have
some kind of theme. I like to have a segment of, you know, we know a lot in learning sciences. We've
learned quite a bit about how people learn, right? The HPL framework is actually nice to reference.
It's a whole kind of like psychologists and neurologists all got together and really studied
learning, whether that's in schools outside of schools at your job as an adult or in your social
groups, like kids even at the playground learning rules of a game or engaging in anything where we're
taking an information, we're processing it and we're putting it to use. And then we really study
closely like the stuff that stays with us. It's not just like short term, like memorize it for
this test that's coming up on Friday. Like here's here's here's 25 vocabulary words,
study them this week and memorize them for Friday only. There's some value for some of that,
but we really want to look at like long term skill building. Like how do the things that you're
learning apply to doing? And can you do them like practice them so that they stick with us in a
way where we carry them onto either the next level or into life? So that's sort of like the ultimate
goal, right? Is that sustained knowledge that it gets kind of filed away in a part of our brain
where we can access it and use it. And we feel fairly competent and confident in using that.
So that's kind of the goal that teachers are after here. And I think it's exciting to remember
that things we've learned is especially if your teacher prepping for like a 50 minute class period,
like middle school, high school, and especially college, you have this like these segments of learning
or if you're an elementary teacher and you have sort of the subjects parsed out for the day
that nobody at any age has an extremely long attention span. And that's not new. I mean,
it's argued that like technology has interfered with this and we're in this, you know,
immediacy generation where like because of like Amazon and Netflix and internet and all these things
that like we want it right away. We want to be engaged or like the TikToks and from like if it's not
you know, 15 seconds or less students aren't paying attention, which isn't true. But what we do
know by and large is that much more than 12 minutes and you have lost just about everybody.
And that's all levels of learners. Like there's there's some of us who are primarily processing
information through auditory learning like we are primary listeners. I'm not one of those.
Jacob I'll tell you that. But they tend to have like an affinity for a little bit of a longer
stretch. Say like a lecture might stick with them, but even a really good lecture.
If you break it up into like eight to 10 minute segments where you clearly transition from those,
you can go an hour, but you've got a really clear marker at like the eight minute mark. Like hey,
here's what we just talked about. Check for a little understanding transition, build on it and move
to the next one. There is ability to sustain attention longer. But Jacob, I love to think about
my class periods teaching and think about that I have, you know, if it's an hour, I have about four
segments. And and one of those segments or two of those segments or maybe on any given day three
of them may be learning engaged through technology might not be all for every day just like I'm not
just going to sit or stand in my classroom and present information for a class period straight
through. You're going to lose your students. They're going to become unengaged, even if they're
being compliant, everyone out there listening, and remember is just sitting in class doing what
students are supposed to do, pretending like you're listening, you know, take notes, even if you're
really good and you're writing everything down after about eight minutes here or there, you drift a
bit. Yeah. So I'm excited about that to add in a new segment into my classroom, you know, throwback
retro learning and just call it like that. Like a little bit of like set and get a little bit of,
you know, take some notes, reflect in your notebook. Well, I've got a question, Johnny, can you give
us an example of one of your your awesome patented throwback learning activities that you like to
bring out? Well, remember I told you asked me this a couple of weeks ago about introduction activity
and I talked about first day class. We draw a picture of the, you know, place that's influenced
us as who we are today as educators. And, you know, we talk about that at our tables, we share
them. We kind of put them up on the wall, help decorate our room a little bit because we also
mentioned on on the show that college classrooms can sometimes be a little bit. I think you used
the term Jacob, like, what did you say? Like sanitized or yeah, yeah, yeah, like you're staring
like going, yeah, even even going into the doctor's office, there's posters about health things and
stuff up on the wall. But some of our classrooms, they're just bare. And that's never really engaging
in terms of like an environment that sparks inquiry that, you know, fosters imagination and creativity
and collaboration. So we get some pictures up. But we do that with crayons, pencils, colored pencils,
markers, paper, sometimes. And this is what I'm going to add. And I haven't done a lot of this
in many years, honestly, I'm even throwing back some of my teaching because so many students are
comfortable on their laptops or on their iPads, they take notes and do those things. I like that
form. But there's going to be some structured, like retro moments, throwback moments, like,
hey, we just watched a video together because we always watch current events stuff or some kind of
learning video as a short segment of our class period related to the content. Maybe it will be
because social studies methods class, it may be, maybe say that day, we watched how a bill becomes
a law, right? In, in schoolhouse rock class. So, yeah, classic, right? So after we're after that
little video segment, I might say, hey, close the laptops, right? You listen to it, you watched it,
we experienced it together. You know, talk about where it relates to the three content areas of
social studies and write down a few sentences. And then with technology, wait, talk to each other
at the table, right? And then I'll probably transition out of that 10, 15 minutes of share and
reflect to a shared Google doc where now we're back on the technologies, you could still be in your
notebook. If you, if you're, if you're learning spaces, throwbacks to how then you're still in your
notebook. But a lot of students very, very honestly, Jacob, do amazing note taking in things like
Google Docs or shared drives and things like that. So we'll get in there and we'll do some
classroom notes as well as I'll kind of have a hybrid, right? I'll, I'll take down what people
share and write it on the board and we'll start to construct a visual, which I'll then utilize
technology, take a picture of and quickly upload it to our shared notebook, which is in a Google
drive on our, you know, learning management system at my university, it happens to be a canvas
course shell. This is common lingo for people taking college courses, you know, it's either black
board or canvas or some kind of, yeah, management system. But Jacob, you know, none of that really
utilizes AI or any of those things, but I'm going to build in not exactly. But what I know Jacob is
when I do say, okay, now, what else do we want to learn? There will be a layer of a prompt submit,
what prompts did you submit into chat GPT or AI? What did AI offer and add to the conversation?
How is it part of what we're doing as well? So it won't be like our go-to, so it's kind of like
scaffolding. We worked from our own knowledgees and our human interactions with one another,
with our throwback technologies, pens, paper, pencils, all those things, talking to each other,
listening, interacting, you know, screens closed, maybe your tablet just puts something over it
for a minute if you have that. And then let's get back to that stuff because it is, in many ways,
a tool that we utilize. And let's layer onto that like, ask AI. And that's a little segment that's
going to be in class this year too. It was last year, the students came up with it, but it's like
ask AI, right? Sort of like, you know, let's check. Let's check and see what's a prompt. And what did
it bring to our conversation? What did it add to it? Did any information come up that's sus?
That's the term the youth use as the kids say. Yeah, the kids say, you know, any sus stuff come
up. You know, so we're talking about our information where we get it from processing it. And how will
utilize it? Because then there's, I feel like there's choice in what we do. So that's kind of how I
plan on using it. I have talked to teachers who are banishing it from their classroom. And I'm not,
I'm not even like hating on them. They're saying like, hey, if you think about it, you got five
classes in a day at, you know, in high school, maybe more, or if you're in college, you have like
three or four other classes. And, and a majority of us are engaging in AI. It's not the end of the
world to have one class where you are kind of luddying it a bit. Sure. You're just, yeah, as long as
it's engaging and meaningful, and not just the boring class, right? But I have talked to some
teachers who have said, hey, I'm not even assigning these essays anymore or these long papers.
An essence just saying, hey, you know, I'll have blue books and classroom and we'll write our
responses. And I'll collect them and I'll use them. And then I don't have to worry about, was it
plagiarized or did they use AI? Because they just shared what they knew. I like that, Johnny, because
the thing about that that I really appreciate is that it's an effort not to just, you know, focus on
enforcement and stopping people from using AI or things like that. It's finding ways to have
activities where you don't need the AI. You know, we're going to do this in person. We're going to
do this in the classroom. We're going to, and the notebook has a different quality to it doing
it in class than going home. And let's be honest, since about 1997, everyone's been looking stuff
up for those essays at home. You know, so doing it in class, seeing what you know in the moment,
how your brain functions, how you work on these problems in that situation. I think it tells a lot
more than just sending it home with people anyway in the first place. So I like that AI gets us
asking these questions about what should we have been doing in, you know, in the first place this
whole time? What could we have fixed the whole time? And how can we adapt our processes to deal
with the technology to adapt it to sometimes shun it if it's doing the wrong thing in this spot or
that? I think there's going to be a lot of innovation here, Johnny, for people like you and Tim,
especially in this education leadership role you've got. Yeah, I mean, I love it. And the other
thing I like, I like about to Jacob is I think when you learn how it works and you see the power of
say, you know, AI generated tools and things like that helps us. Like when you have to write a
paragraph and you or you have to kind of dig around and talk to some people about something for a
few minutes, it gives you the appreciation for what that technology is bringing to us. You know,
when I was when I was a student research, you know, we had to go a library and you give these little
pencils. If you didn't have a pencil and look something up in the library, you had to kind of go
to the card catalog and the dewey decimal system and, you know, flip through it and then go find it
in the library and look around in that section and locate things that way. And then really quickly
in the time I was a student that transitioned to, you mean, I could look this up on search engines
or I could, you know, use database, large database searches and really quickly like have PDFs
emailed to me a lot of these like, you know, it didn't mean I was cheating. It was a different
experience, but same task, it took a fraction of the time. I would talk to people who say, oh,
well, lucky you, you're doing your dissertation and your research and, you know, 2013, you know,
imagine me having to have done that. And, you know, 1992, we had to have all these note cards and
all these handwritten notes and we had to compile. I was like, I get it. We're essentially doing the
same thing with different technologies and also saving some time. So I love like learning the,
like, having given students the opportunity to learn how it works, right? To do it both ways a
few times as part of their education. So that as they're utilizing these powerful tools, say in their
career or in their other courses or as part of their learning, they understand maybe now I sound
like a real old timer. They appreciate it. They really learn to appreciate it, right? But,
but I say that jokingly, but I mean it like you have a deeper appreciation. I think when you
understand what a tool is bringing to a work you're doing and how it's doing it and what it's
in place of, right? And so I think this balance that like the article you shared that this
chemistry teacher has introduced into her classroom and that so many teachers out there probably
listening are finding that balance. Even if you're the teacher who's like, it's pens and paper
only in my class, you know, you're still bringing some value to that. It's not going away how we
learn in general hasn't radically changed to only being glued to a device. I don't think we'll
ever be there. I think the the the scare is out there like, oh no, all that we're going to do
in school now is beyond computers. I don't think that works for a majority of people, but we're also
not going to throw the tool away and completely reject it. And so I like this balance. I think
it's a good one. Jacob, we've belabored the topic a bit. We'll get to it later this week. I'm sure
more I'm sure Tim's going to have a lot to add on to it. But man, this has been a great class with
you. And now it's time for your moment of Zen. I had always insisted that a good education was a
synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action that each enriched the other.
I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge while fascinating in itself
is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that
fascination. Hey, oh, listener, thanks for tuning in to Busted Pencils class in session.
And you can always get great podcasts just like this one. You just got to go over and search
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website or on our website BustedPensils.com. Hey, and don't forget you can find us throughout the
week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with home rooms, class and sessions and lots of fun to wrap
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You can catch Busted Pencils at 3 p.m. Central time across all the civic media network stations for one
hour of your favorite blue color scholars, Jimmy Johnny and keep Busted Pencils.
Thanks for tuning in to Busted Pencils class in session.