The day began with a first class presentation from Michelle Cummings (author) and I very much enjoyed her caring approach to teaching students. Her favourite educational AI apps for planning are Brisk Teaching (She is now working for them), Suno (makes songs), NotebookLM (currently 18+) and NapkinAI. She also showed us the professional deck that Brisk has made to help educators. There’s a lot of good content about AI as well as how to use Brisk itself. I will admit when I first saw her slides, I was thinking you’ve not switched the Brisk button off! Then I thought, actually that’s genius given who she is working for! If you would like a 3 month premium trial, here is the link: Brisk Teaching Many of the features are free and the intention is for the basics to remain free. My favourite quote of the conference came from Michelle:
Moving from the “wow” to the “how.”
After the keynote Michelle and I had the privilege of having a private session with Joel Birch who facilitates LEGO® Serious Play®. This one actually blew my mind! Such a simple concept of transferring your ideas into blocks and the conversations became deep real quickly through this metaphor. He is an expert facilitator and the nature of what he does means that its really aimed at adults. The bricks really enable people to depersonify a problem, but he says that you need to be in a place where you can understand the concept of a metaphor and so it generally does not work well with children.
My blocks represent teachers and governments burying their heads in the sand about AI and the potential impacts it will have on what people will do in the future to have fulfilling lives. All this from 7 bricks! I also thought about if there are cultures not used to Lego and I am sure there are, everywhere I have taught Lego bricks have always been around. (Or at least something similar).
Andy Lee gave me an exclusive preview of he VEX AIM robot and rest assured we’ll be working with Vex to help integrate these tools into Computing curriculums. It really feels like the robot for the 2020’s with computer vision built in and from a practical point of view it charges with a USB C cable! So we look forward to it being available for schools. (Coming in May for around $200)
I feel I should mention my partner Daniel Budd who has been busy running Swift Workshops with me during the conference, but his last presentation was on Design Thinking. We did go back and forth on if we should do this one fully paper based, but its nice to use the Apple Pencil, because no mess when you iterate with ideas and you expand the page as much as you like. (We will keep you updated on the site when we next do a conference or Webinar for Apple)
I had my own presentation to do based on my book Parenting and Teaching in the Age of AI. It started some excellent discussions and really is challenging for teachers and parents to think about what will truly valued in the next 20 to 30 years.
The final presentation I attended was from Courtney Carreon, it was nice to see that teachers are now talking more about assessing process rather than product in essay writing and also this concept of “defending your work”. i.e. To say how you made it and why it deserves the grades that it gets. This metacognitive process ensures true reflection on what you have made and how you went about it.
Inevitably with a conference where you are presenting so much yourself, you don’t get to see everything you wanted to, but what I saw was really good and I am very happy to have shared more understanding of coding’s role in an AI world and how we can get everyone to code.
