Episode 515: Computer Science Leadership: Incorporating AI

Looking to bring AI into your classroom with confidence? Join us with Amber Jones, a certified computer science educator and co-designer of AI for Georgia, to explore accessible tools, ethical considerations, and hands-on strategies for teaching AI to students.

TRANSCRIPT

Ashley Mengwasser: Hi, I am Ashley, your virtual assistant. How can I help you today? By the way, this is still Classroom Conversations here in the right place. Classroom Conversations is the platform for Georgia's teachers sponsored by the Georgia DOE and GPB, Georgia Public Broadcasting. Don't mind me, I'm just beta testing for today's conversation with a leading education consultant. Every season, we promise cutting-edge content to enrich your classroom instruction, but eventually we have to complete our seasonal arc. And this is that grand finale moment in season five, our parting gift about an exciting subject. We featured several episodes this season about various topics in computer science leadership. To close us out with peak computer science, let's discuss incorporating AI. Since AI has exploded into our lives and learning landscapes, many of you have been scratching your heads, feeling aloof. What is this thing? Yet, intrigued. How can I get a piece of that? Amber Jones has entered the chat. Amber is a K-12 certified computer science educator who works as an education consultant, will tell you about her role as co-designer of Artificial Intelligence for Georgia. That's AI for middle schoolers. Please welcome to the show, a proud computer nerd who teaches teachers to teach AI. She's an AI evangelist, Amber Jones. Hey Amber.

Amber Jones: Hi. It's wonderful to be here.

Ashley Mengwasser: I'm so glad you're here. Smiling from ear to ear. This is your first podcast, right?

Amber Jones: Yeah, basically.

Ashley Mengwasser: Okay. Basically we'll accept that. We love first timers here. Your love of computer science, though that's been existing for many years it is pre-programmed in you.

Amber Jones: And you say since 12, the latest, probably 12.

Ashley Mengwasser: And as a kid you said you thought about software in one special way. Tell me how you thought of it?

Amber Jones: When I discovered it, this was in the MySpace era. You could customize your pages and I started tinkering with the things that I would copy and paste. And it felt like magic to me that I could change these numbers here and there to change the size of things. Change, of course, the words change, the colors of things cause things to move. And then you get into JavaScripting and now you're making programs. And it felt like magic to me that I was making something out of just these magic words essentially, but it was programming and I didn't know that until I was older.

Ashley Mengwasser: And you followed that magic right into the education landscape. So talk about your arc in education, how you got started and how you ended up where you are today?

Amber Jones: I very much started when I moved to Japan and I was teaching English, and I really enjoyed teaching English in Japan. So when I came back to the US, I was like, I want to continue teaching. So I was trying to decide what I would want to do in the classroom. And as I said, I'd loved computer science since I was 12, and I continued to do it aggressively as a hobby. I really enjoyed it. And so I decided I wanted to take that, especially because I think computer science is an excellent thing.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yes.

Amber Jones: It's one of those skills that you really can take out of high school and get a very comfortable living straight out of high school. Definitely with a four-year degree you can get an excellent living with it. And so it felt not just like it would be fun to teach it, but that it would be a great benefit to any community I was at.

Ashley Mengwasser: And what about your role today? Tell me about what you've co-designed.

Amber Jones: About two years into teaching computer science, I got contacted to be a part of the AI for Georgia co-design team, which was really cool. I had never done anything like that before. Usually as a teacher in the classroom, you'll receive some resources, maybe the company will ask for feedback on the resources. It doesn't usually get beyond that. And sometimes you can tell there might not have been a teacher in the room when these resources got created. With the AI for Georgia curriculum, they invited us in to co-design me and a few other teachers to co-design the curriculum. And what they did first was give us basically a week-long crash course on the five big ideas in AI. So basically foundational knowledge of artificial intelligence. And then they asked us, "How would you guys, the experts on teaching middle schoolers give this information to a middle schooler? What do you think they can understand and how would you help them understand it?" And so we met weekly for three years. We just met weekly discussing what we had taught in the classroom, revising it, and just running it over and over again every nine weeks running that curriculum. So we've got this really well polished, totally free resource listed online now.

Ashley Mengwasser: That you offer educators who teach middle schoolers?

Amber Jones: Mm-hmm.

Ashley Mengwasser: So, what is the format of the course?

Amber Jones: Middle school of course is nine-week electives or connections, right? They're nine weeks long. The course is structured into units with an overarching question. So unit one's overarching question is how do computers perceive the world?

Ashley Mengwasser: Interesting.

Amber Jones: So basically, how do they understand the world around them? How do they take in information and know what it means? You could take a picture with a camera, but that doesn't mean your camera knows what it's looking at. It just managed to render an image. How does it then take an AI agent and say, "Okay, I see a face in this picture." Or if you're using the Google software that lets you take a picture, or if you cash a check, how does it know the words are written on your check as opposed to just a picture?

Ashley Mengwasser: Right? Lots of different handwriting types out there.

Amber Jones: Exactly.

Ashley Mengwasser: Right.

Amber Jones: So that first unit is about that. The second unit is how do computers understand what we say? Why does Siri understand what you say sometimes? Why does she not other times? Questions like that. And then the third unit is how do computers make decisions? You might run into that and say, if you are using a streaming service and it's recommending you things, how does it know what to recommend you?

Ashley Mengwasser: All good stuff. This sounds really fascinating and I love that we're wrapping up our season with such a hot topic, but I want to know more about you off of your computer. Who are you, amber?

Amber Jones: I am, I think a very archetypical nerd. I like video games. I like comic books. I like superhero movies.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yes.

Amber Jones: I'm an anime nerd. I minored in Japanese because I was so interested in going to Japan, and then I got the job out there so I could work out there. I feel like I'm very, I like outdoor.

Ashley Mengwasser: How long were you there?

Amber Jones: Two years.

Ashley Mengwasser: Two years.

Amber Jones: I studied abroad for a couple months and then I worked there for two years.

Ashley Mengwasser: Would you share a Japanese expression with us? I'd love to hear.

Amber Jones: Speaks in Japanese.

Ashley Mengwasser: I'm entranced. That felt like magic to me. What did you just say?

Amber Jones: I said, "Don't be afraid of AI-"

Ashley Mengwasser: Oh, I like that.

Amber Jones: "... It's already everywhere."

Ashley Mengwasser: It's everywhere.

Amber Jones: "So you probably should learn it and if you learn it, you can probably do some cool things with it."

Ashley Mengwasser: Yes. And no matter where you are, what your starting point is as a student or as a teacher, because you gave me this very interesting mental model of what students were like in terms of their computer science mastery pre Covid and post. What were you teaching? What courses were you teaching with students in that mindset at those times?

Amber Jones: So pre-Covid, a lot of my students, I was in middle school, so this is sixth grade through eighth grade like maybe 10-year-olds. Pre-Covid I would have students come into my room for the first time. I had a computer lab with desktops, and sometimes students would not have ever used a desktop before. They're excited because they've never seen an actual desktop. Or maybe their parents have a desktop, but they've never gotten on their parents' desktop. And so they'll come in super excited about it. I remember it stands out in my mind so much. This was one of the very first of my teaching days. It might've been day three. And I was just like, we're going to open up Word and just write a quick about us. And a little girl raised her hand and she said, "How do I get to the next line?"

Ashley Mengwasser: Oh, wow.

Amber Jones: She didn't know Enter got you to the next line.

Ashley Mengwasser: Beginner.

Amber Jones: On a keyboard. Yeah. So pre-Covid I had students who I feel like we take for granted that a lot of kids know how to use a cell phone.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yes.

Amber Jones: Pre-covid, they knew how to use a cell phone or a tablet, but a desktop? No.

Ashley Mengwasser: That makes sense because they were probably using technology primarily for entertainment. And then Covid, we can thank you for one thing, you nasty virus, thrust us into the modern era with technology.

Amber Jones: Definitely.

Ashley Mengwasser: So, what about now?

Amber Jones: So now it's totally different. So as I said previously, I taught Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and then coding. I made sure that my class had a little bit, maybe like half and half-ish computer literacy and then coding. Now, I don't teach just about any computer literacy because post-Covid, all of the students have used Google's suite essentially. So they know how to make a PowerPoint, they know how to write up a document. They may or may not know Excel, but they can handle these things perfectly fine. I don't need to go over that. I can focus the full nine weeks on coding, designing a webpage, or coding a video game, or making animations, or in the case of recently just completely on artificial intelligence.

Ashley Mengwasser: Which to me feels so advanced for middle schoolers and it's truly amazing. So let's get into AI specifically. This is going to be fun. I hope you can help us form maybe a little algorithm here or a set of instructions to address that there are some hangups around artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Amber Jones: Definitely.

Ashley Mengwasser: AI assumptions, if you will. Amber, how would you instruct educators to combat some of these assumptions? Here's one.

Amber Jones: I think if you don't look into a thing just about anything can be scary. I think that's just the case. If there's some big topic or some big new thing, it's scary if you don't understand it. But one of the good things about the AI for Georgia curriculum of course, is that it's written for middle schoolers with the assumption that they don't have any prior experience. So I feel even as a teacher coming into those materials, if you look through them, they're made in a way that is very accessible and you can get an understanding of it. And also you can test some of the things out. You might hear that sounds scary, like Chat GPT gets in the news for some of handles with the cheating, but it's a totally free site. I highly encourage people to go to it and just use the chatbot a little and see how it works and how it responds and if you familiarize yourself with it. From teaching this class, I got more comfortable to explore things, and so I went to go figure out how Chat GPT worked and used a little bit because it wasn't out when we started making this curriculum, it came out in the middle and set a storm off, but I added a lesson on Chat GPT to my lessons because after playing with it with the background knowledge I had from this class, I was like, oh-

Ashley Mengwasser: This is a tool.

Amber Jones: Yeah. I get how this tool works now and it's not a scary tool. And I can talk to the students about how to use it ethically and not end up doing anything scandalous with it.

Ashley Mengwasser: Which we're going to talk about. So the answer to if you feel that something about AI is scary, the solution would be to go explore.

Amber Jones: Yeah, explore it. Not only is it not that scary, it's actually usually really fun, especially generative AI. Like the pictures, you can use it to make videos. You can use it to write stories. You can use it to help automate parts of your career or your life. It's really useful. It can be really fun. I think the scary is really just from not knowing, but you can ask Chat GPT about itself if you really want to know.

Ashley Mengwasser: Get to know one another.

Amber Jones: Yep.

Ashley Mengwasser: How about this assumption AI in the classroom is too complex for non-computer science educators?

Amber Jones: No, I think... Just no. I think like many subjects, if you are educating K-12, there's a base level of knowledge that's very accessible. I don't understand the chemistry to the degree that someone that majored in chemistry in college is going to understand it, but I understand some basics of chemistry. Sure. Solid, liquid, gas. I can handle myself. I feel like AI for Georgia does a good job of making that foundational information. I don't think it's scary or going to be too complex for someone outside of computer science because it's made to not have the foundation right.

Ashley Mengwasser: To meet you where you are.

Amber Jones: Exactly. It's for ten-year-olds. We don't expect them to have a computer science background.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yeah, it's for ten-year-olds. That's a great takeaway. How about AI in the classroom is expensive?

Amber Jones: No. Wonderfully, AI for Georgia is free 99 free. Free. So the lessons are all hosted on the AI for Georgia or AI4GA.org website.

Ashley Mengwasser: The number four?

Amber Jones: The number four. AI4GA.org. And we made great effort to use all browser based. So you don't have to download anything, you just have to have Google Chrome or whatever your school uses. Everything runs in the computer, all the hands-on activities run on the internet. If they can click Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge or whatever your school uses, you can do the activities for free. As long as you got a paper budget to print out some worksheets.

Ashley Mengwasser: That's all you need. How about two more, AI in the classroom is time-consuming?

Amber Jones: No, I don't think so. And if a lesson takes two days or so, they're always hands-on, right? Maybe you have a little bit of time of lecture, but then you're doing a hands-on activity and a hands-on project. If the kids are getting the content and enjoying it, that's fun to take time with.

Ashley Mengwasser: More time might be good. It might be more learning time, more engagement time.

Amber Jones: And on top of that, AI actually increases efficiency if you're using it right, you can automate a lot of tasks. One of the cool things that I really can't wait to see more in the classroom is personalized feedback for students. So whereas, a teacher might sit there with a giant stack of papers that they're grading and trying to give individual feedback to, if it takes you two minutes to go through 30 students, that's an hour. It took you an hour to grade one worksheet. And not to mention you might need to call parents, you might need a lesson plan, you might want to eat now and then.

Ashley Mengwasser: Every now and then.

Amber Jones: Now and then.

Ashley Mengwasser: Sustenance. Yeah.

Amber Jones: Restroom. With things like ChatGPT could conceivably have... You can put a paper into it and ask it for feedback that focuses on grammar, ask it for feedback that focuses on tone, and it can give you guided feedback. You can even say, "Can you give me this feedback at a sixth grade vocabulary level?" And it can do that, and all you have to do now is proofread it. You might cut down on all the time. Just make sure it is accurate.

Ashley Mengwasser: It can streamline some teacher tasks it sounds like?

Amber Jones: Exactly.

Ashley Mengwasser: And the last one, AI in the classroom is controversial.

Amber Jones: So, this one is funny because I feel like it is, right? It is controversial, but I think it's controversial because we aren't talking about it. We're worried about students abusing it, but we need to teach them how to use it correctly. A student can abuse a computer period, but that didn't stop us from making laptops one-to-one during Covid. It meant that we made protocols and policies and we taught students how to use them correctly. I feel like we need to do the same thing with AI. In my classroom, we talk about the social impacts of artificial intelligence, we look at what it can do, what it's currently doing, where it could go wrong, how we can keep it going right. It's a discussion I make sure my students have with each other because it's going to stay controversial unless we hammer out where we want it to go.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yes. A lot of good stuff here around getting acclimated, exposure. Let's dive into the real topical analysis of how you're teaching teachers to use AI. And let's start with why do you feel it is important to introduce AI concepts and machine learning basics to students in today's educational landscape?

Amber Jones: For one thing, AI isn't, it's cool to say AI is the future. AI is the now. It is ubiquitous. It's in every little thing we do. If you own a cell phone, it's running things in the background on.

Ashley Mengwasser: Absolutely.

Amber Jones: We have Teslas on the road that have self-driving mode. Even if you don't have a car that you assume is running on AI, if you have lane assistance, it's running on AI. This is omnipresent. It's omnipresent. And so I think students need to understand this thing that is definitely guiding their lives. It's definitely going to change the job market. I think we'd be doing them a disservice to have them wait until they're adults to maybe learn about it.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yeah, here and now. And in what sectors of society do you help your students recognize AI use? Do we see it in entertainment? Of course. But what about agriculture or logistics? Any other industries?

Amber Jones: Yes. So it's really cool how the concepts are applicable, constantly being used and then applicable to different industries. So you have things like self-driving tractors.

Ashley Mengwasser: Oh, wow.

Amber Jones: You have... One of the examples is a lettuce bot. And the lettuce bot helps the farmer know the exact distance to plant lettuce to get optimal growth of their crop.

Ashley Mengwasser: Wow.

Amber Jones: It'll tell, "These are too close, these are too far apart, etc." There's, what is it? There are robots that can make pizza. They're automating the pizza task. They're smart and can handle all the ingredients and the baking on their own.

Ashley Mengwasser: The food industry.

Amber Jones: The food industry, there's where else? It's everywhere.

Ashley Mengwasser: So where can teachers find these examples and talk about the stuff with students?

Amber Jones: Definitely AI4GA.org. Yeah. Number four, all of the lessons, unit one, two, and three are on there and we're continuing to add things. So we're going to go for unit four and unit five. The lessons have a lecture portion that lets you introduce it. They have videos, they have hands-on activities. They have links to other information, like they're very robust.

Ashley Mengwasser: A wealth of resources. Well talk about some foundational AI concepts that educators can incorporate to give students a comprehensive understanding of AI?

Amber Jones: Foundational concepts in AI are things like, so the course itself is based on these overarching questions. These questions are those concepts. And for example, how do computers perceive the world? Focuses on things like sensors. So if you want a smart machine, it needs to be able to sense the world. And the good news is a lot of students do have a foundational amount of knowledge. Most of us do have an idea. How do computers see? For example, how do you think computers see?

Ashley Mengwasser: Yeah. So we've got a camera on the computer.

Amber Jones: Perfect. You use a camera. How do you think computer's here?

Ashley Mengwasser: Oh yeah, microphones.

Amber Jones: Microphone. And so most of us have this base level of knowing how a machine sees and hears. And the next step is just saying, "How do you take that information and have a computer recognize what it is seeing or hearing?" And that's where the AI comes into play.

Ashley Mengwasser: Got you. Okay. So you're pointing out things that are already existing in the real world, knock on wood that are here.

Amber Jones: Exactly.

Ashley Mengwasser: That students and teachers can identify and use that to springboard their learning. What about specific terms that sound really scary when you're teaching AI, like algorithms, neural networks, data analysis?

Amber Jones: So, algorithms are a set of steps to finish a task, right? An algorithm can be how you tie your shoe. An algorithm can be how you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Every recipe is an algorithm. It's just a set of steps to do something. And a program, when you're programming, it literally just means you are writing these steps in a language machines can understand, right? You could give me steps that I could handle, but if you give them to me in German, I'm not going to be able to do it.

Ashley Mengwasser: But if you get them in Japanese, you're good to go.

Amber Jones: Give them to me in Japanese and I'm great. That's exactly what programming and coding is. You literally just write out the steps, but you do it in a language computers understand. So when I taught programming, I was teaching a language course.

Ashley Mengwasser: There you go. And data analysis, what is the data piece? We have sensors. So they're going to be collecting information. Right?

Amber Jones: So, the data piece is that information. You can give a computer all sorts of information as long as you can make it into some values. So you can give it pictures of images and it can break each pixel, each little piece of the image, essentially down into color values. You can give it sound and it can take that and turn that into the wavelengths. And again, put it into number values. And then once you have basically tables and tables of data, the data sets, you just train the computer on it. You let it look for patterns in those numbers.

Ashley Mengwasser: And I know this is written for middle schoolers, but how are you making it accessible and engaging for students of all ages and diverse academic backgrounds?

Amber Jones: Yes. I guess part of that is good teaching, but we've built in, there's a lot of accommodations. Me and the other teachers that worked on it have very different classrooms. And we met every week for two, three years to discuss how we gave it in our classrooms and then how we would adapt it to our classrooms. So the lessons, for example, some of my lessons, I had a classroom where a good portion of my population was Hispanic and ESL. And so a lot of my lessons, I would have the definitions and then have them again in Spanish. And then other things that help those students is proper grouping. Some of these are just teaching strategies. If I have a student that doesn't have a strong English but has Spanish skill, I have another student with Spanish skill and strong English skill, I might put them together. That way if they run into an issue, they can definitely rely on each other a little bit. I will take materials and use a site. Some of the resources you can change between different languages on the site, because a lot of these education sites recognize that at a really diverse country, it'll have different languages listed. And so we did things like that to make sure it was accessible in many ways. Some of them, you can have it read the text on the screen to the students. So if they have struggles reading-

Ashley Mengwasser: We have accommodations for that.

Amber Jones: ... We have accommodations for it.

Ashley Mengwasser: Nice. And I know we've talked particularly about AI for Georgia because you co-designed it of course, but there are other resources and platforms that you love and get behind when we come to teaching educators to teach AI. And the one you mentioned is Inspire.

Amber Jones: Yes.

Ashley Mengwasser: Tell us about Inspire.

Amber Jones: So, I love Inspire because Inspire is this one-stop shop for K-12. Right now it has K-8 on it, but it's going to have 12 in the next couple months before the school year starts.

Ashley Mengwasser: You go, girl.

Amber Jones: That's what I'm working on. And so it has resources, some of the lessons, it has lessons, and then teacher training resources and videos and all kinds of great things. Some of the lessons are handmade. So maybe I sat there and handmade them myself or some other teacher sat there and handmade them themselves and gave them to me, or someone at the DOE we review them and we add them in. And then some of the lessons are links out to other free sources, and all of them link to free sources.

Ashley Mengwasser: Great.

Amber Jones: So, you might look through a lesson it gives you on Inspire. You might look at a lesson and it will tell you what it's about, and then it'll give you the link so you can go to the website and work on it with your students.

Ashley Mengwasser: Again, free 99.

Amber Jones: Yes.

Ashley Mengwasser: That's what we like to hear. And is there a place for PBL for project-based learning in this to help bring this AI curriculum to life?

Amber Jones: Yes. So throughout the AI for Georgia curriculum, but especially in unit one. With unit one, one of the overarching parts of it is this project where each step you learn, right? You learn about sensors, and then you learn about how some of those sensors get from just taking a picture to actually understanding what's in the picture. You learn how maybe navigation works. You learn what makes a robot autonomous versus just a toaster, or makes the toaster autonomous.

Ashley Mengwasser: Respect to all those toasters out there. They're working hard.

Amber Jones: Some of those toasters might be autonomous. I'm sure we have smart fridges, so we might have smart toasters at this point, let me not talk bad about them.

Ashley Mengwasser: We love smart appliances. By the way, that could be a whole episode.

Amber Jones: And so, we have the overarching project for that unit is to take each of the lesson topics and to create your own robot step-by-step. Okay, what sensors will your robot need? What is it going to be able to notice? How is it going to navigate? If you have a robot that assists with the dishes, how's it going to know what it needs to do? How's it going to know if something's clean or dirty? How's it going to know if I need to be soft with it because it's fragile or if I can really scrub it? All of these different things culminate in the project at the end of that unit.

Ashley Mengwasser: So yes, there is a place for PBL in this, and you keep alluding to this, so I really just want to hit it hard. The responsibility piece of using AI tech, the social, ethical, economic implications. How can educators foster that critical thinking piece along with ethical reasoning as part of this?

Amber Jones: So, one of my favorite things about AI for Georgia is that each unit ends with a case study, and the case study usually touches on that social and societal impact. And one of the things I like to do in my classroom, because you can just do the case study and you'll discuss a topic of where this thing might go right and might go wrong. For example, in the first unit, you touch on self-driving cars because they have so many sensors, so they're good use to talk about all those. By the end, we talk about people abusing the technology. You're not supposed to take your hands completely off the wheel and go to sleep in a self-driving car, but people do it. And we talk about what goes wrong when people do that.

Ashley Mengwasser: If you do that.

Amber Jones: We talk about how they're managing to do it. Is it the company's responsibility to keep people from doing it? Who should get the fine if something goes wrong? Does the company get the fine or the driver get the fine? I have my students do a Socratic seminar. Basically, they sit in a circle before it. They generate questions that we're going to put up on the board. They do their research about the answers to those questions. We talk about job loss from self-driving cars, and then I step back for that 45 minutes. Someone else is the facilitator and their job, their grading for that is to engage it with cited sources. So if you're going to say "It's going to take jobs." You need to cite a source that you got that from. If you're going to say, "Actually, it'll create some jobs, you cite a source where that comes." And so they have a full class period where they just discuss. And it's not a debate so much as it's like an open table of putting your two cents in.

Ashley Mengwasser: Right? A Socratic circle.

Amber Jones: I think Socratic seminar. But it is, it's a circle. It's a Socratic circle.

Ashley Mengwasser: I love this method, and we want to leave teachers with something really applicable and hands-on that they can do to connect AI learning in the community with industry professionals, research institutions, even organizations who can just help them really enrich their AI education initiatives. So what can you offer or suggest in terms of real world mentors and partnerships for educators in schools?

Amber Jones: So, one of the things I think is to first reach out to the DOE, because what I have realized is a lot of the... Reach out either to whoever in your district is over computer science. And if your district doesn't have someone over computer science, reach out to the DOE. Because what I've found is there's a lot of resources in general, not just AI, but just in general. There are a lot of computer science resources that I didn't know existed because I didn't know who to ask. But the DOE has the computer science specialist and the department there to get access to those resources, and people will contact the DOE specifically looking for teachers and classrooms to put their resources in.

Ashley Mengwasser: Good point. Yes, absolutely. So use that resource.

Amber Jones: And then also your institutions, Georgia Tech has information on AI. These local institutions also want to be a part of AI and give computer science to students. So different colleges will have workshops, different colleges will have conferences. They're definitely out there. They're hard to find. I guess probably because the computer science teachers are hard to find, right? But they're out there and if you contact, I don't want to... Not, the worst they can say is no. But to be honest, a lot of times they want to say yes.

Ashley Mengwasser: Yes. I think those CS teachers are going to come forth in waves because you've started a movement here. You've made this accessible and safe and feel good. And you're right. A lot of our institutions have actual education outreach departments-

Amber Jones: Exactly.

Ashley Mengwasser: ... Educators in schools can use. So definitely tap into that. Thank you, Amber, because you're showing educators how they can confidently and joyfully incorporate AI into their learning. You're basically a powerful computer wizard. So you tell that to your anime content. How can schools connect if they want to work with you? Is that a possibility?

Amber Jones: It absolutely is. If they want to work with me, I have a LinkedIn, but apparently Amber Jones is hard to find on LinkedIn.

Ashley Mengwasser: I can imagine.

Amber Jones: So, I use my email, AmberElyseJones@gmail.com. So it's just my full name, AmberE-L-Y-S-EJones@gmail.com. And I'm always open to talking about this. Always. I go, I do these conferences, I put that email on there, and I encourage people to shoot me an email anytime they want to do an activity. If they're looking through the lessons and they don't understand something, they can shoot me an email on that and I'll sit down and talk to them. This is my baby that I've been working on with everybody for these last three years. So I am always excited and ready to talk about it.

Ashley Mengwasser: Like I said, powerful computer wizard. Thank you so much for being here today.

Amber Jones: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Ashley Mengwasser: Audience, this chatbot is now exiting the chat of our fifth season session. It's an honor interacting here with both a panel and audience of educators. Teacher Talk is now my favorite variety of conversation. Until next season dawns, just remember, you're a great teacher. I'm Ashley Mengwasser saluting you and shifting your attention to unheard episodes. The other ones that came before this. Yeah, now's the time to go and listen because oh so soon you could fall behind as we advance into an all new season six. How about that for good news? We've got more enticing educational content coming your way. I'll see you in S6. Goodbye for now. Funding for Classroom Conversations is made possible through the School Climate Transformation Grant.