The summit was part of a two-day professional development event, “Redefining Learning,” that sought to help educators find better ways to enable students in the classroom.
“Last year, we had Technanigans and the Summer Symposium, and they were at different times,” TSD Chief Technology Officer Kelly Sain said. “The learning side of the house and technology are all one big team, so we wanted to have one big conference together that would work with learning. It doesn’t matter if it’s technology or not technology.”
Both the Summer Symposium, held Tuesday, and Technanigans on Wednesday featured keynote speakers who addressed topics relevant to the day’s focus: Armando Silva, a Greeley-based artist who spoke about community engagement on Tuesday, and Holly Clark, an educator and author of “The AI Infused Classroom,” who explored how artificial intelligence could be used to overcome barriers for students.
Clark used a metaphor about a college trip to Rome in 1994, moments of which are recorded on a VCR tape that she can no longer access, because technology has moved beyond that medium.
Her memories of that trip, she recalls, were stressful, and she long dreaded returning.
Clark, who has dyslexia, first visited the city before things like Google allowed for easy navigation, and she was forced to rely on a travel book with small print that she found functionally unreadable. Decades later, she returned to the city and with the help of modern technology like Google and AI powered glasses, was able to find beauty in a place she had once dreaded.
The same principle could be applied to students with difficulties in the classroom, she said, moving to an example of a 10-year-old girl with dysgraphia, or an inability to properly translate thoughts into written words.
The young girl instead made an AI video featuring her own spoken words instead of a handwritten poem assigned to the rest of the class.
“This little girl is 10 years old, and no one has ever said to her that she was a good writer,” Clark said. “Because they couldn’t see past her dysgraphia. Dysgraphia doesn’t make you a good or bad writer, it just means your teachers judge the wrong thing. Like Rome, she has a masterpiece inside of her that we aren’t able to access. We need to change the format a little.”
Other applications of this kind of technology in the classroom are already in use in the Thompson School District, according to Markee Ramirez, principal at Mountain View High School, where the two day event was held.
“We’re still in the early stages of allowing teachers to learn and explore what the AI tools can do, but I do have some teachers that have embraced this new technology and are moving very quickly,” she said. One such option is Snorkl, an AI tool that provides immediate feedback to students as they work on instructional material.
“I’ve observed classrooms where students are using Snorkl, especially our math classrooms,” Ramirez said. “When I ask them questions about it, they’re excited, because they know they’re on the right track, and if they’re not getting the right answers, they’re getting instant feedback.”
Because some teachers have experience with these tools, giving those teachers a platform like Technanigans to share their experiences with their own colleagues inside the Thompson School District allows these ideas and technologies to spread organically among trusted coworkers.
“That’s what I think makes this day so important,” Ramirez said. “You can go into model classrooms and see the different ways that teachers are using it.”
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