Keynote: AI in Education Webinar – A Teacher-Led Approach to AI in the Classroom

AI and Education: A Love Story… or a Horror Movie?

It’s been one year since Kelly Booz and Sari Beth Rosenberg took on the AI Educator Brain, geeking out over AI-generated images, sometimes being horrified at how bizarre AI-generated material can be… but more than anything, loving the real-time learning and conversations happening with the Share My Lesson community.

Over the past year, we've explored AI’s potential, challenged its limits, and asked some big questions: How can AI support—not replace—great teaching? Where does it help, and where does it fall flat? What do educators really need to know?

And now, here we are—looking at what we’ve learned and what’s next.

Remember when we were worried about students using Wikipedia for research? Or those classic yellow Cliff Notes books we all secretly used? Now, AI is here—introducing new opportunities, new challenges, and new ways to think about learning.

In this high-energy keynote, we’ll take a journey through the good, the bad, and the algorithm, exploring.

What You'll Learn in This AI in Education Webinar

• How teachers and students are already using AI (sometimes in ways schools don’t even realize!)
• A live “Creepy or Cool?” showdown of AI’s weirdest and most powerful moments
• How AI can actually save teachers time—from lesson planning to communication
• The ethical dilemmas we can’t ignore (deepfakes, bias, privacy—oh my!)
• What’s next? Where AI in education is headed and how we can shape its future

AI isn’t here to replace great teaching—but it is here. Let’s cut through the hype, explore the possibilities, and figure out what actually works for teachers and students.

This webinar is part of Share My Lesson's 2025 Virtual Conference! View all sessions here. 

Transcript for Keynote: The AI Educator Brain 

We are back. Not only that, we're giving a keynote today. What? On AI education? I know we're moving up in the world, Sari and Chris, but before I go too far into that, we got to take care of some important stuff. On behalf of the AFT Share My Lesson, I'm so excited to welcome you to our keynote, The AI Educator Brain, with my good friends Sari Beth Rosenberg and Christopher Penn. Before we begin, let's watch this quick video from today's sponsor.

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Okay, we're back. I am so excited to be doing this keynote with my friends to talk about AI and education and where we've been.

Before I push our first poll question, I want to share our methodology—crazy methodology—for today. If you can let us know in the chat if you've joined us for other AI Educator Brain webinars, let us know. We also love getting those emojis. So let those hearts or thumbs up or laughter shine.

But we're going to be doing a dive into where we've been over the last year. Sari Beth and I launched this crazy thing a year ago, which I'll get into in a second, but then also where things are with AI and where things are going with AI.

So, before I jump too far into that, I want to say welcome to my partner in crime to start with, my friend Sari Beth Rosenberg. Sari, you want to introduce yourself?

Yeah. So my name is Sari Beth Rosenberg, as Kelly told you, as it probably says on the screen. Does it say it on the screen? I don't know. It does. Okay, so that's no new info. I am about to—in a couple of months, I'll be wrapping up my 23rd year of teaching.

And I am so—Kelly will tell this backstory to AFT Educator Brain later, but I'm just so excited to be here. I love working with my two friends, Kelly and Chris. I also especially love seeing everyone in the chat from all over the country. But I see some New Yorkers. I'm from—I live in New York City. I work at a New York City public high school. Shout out to High School for Environmental Studies.

If anyone—I don't know if any of my colleagues want to see me tonight after seeing me all day. I—I'm a little—I'm a lot, but I see a lot of New York here. So shout out to New York, but shout out to everyone here and returning AI members who've been with us. And wait, someone's here from Rosenberg, TX. I need to visit. So excited to be here tonight.

And Christopher Penn, where are you from, my friend?

Hello, I am Christopher Penn. I'm the Co-founder and chief data scientist of Trust Insights.AI. We're a management consulting company in AI. I'm based up in the metro Boston area, but I'm about to embark on a six-week tour of all sorts of places, going from Phoenix to San Diego to Chicago to Wilmington, DE to Washington, D.C. to Toronto lecturing and it's—it's the spring tour. I don't have a shirt though.

Oh my goodness. And I am lucky enough that a few of us on our Share My Lesson team get to see you. And Sunday—I'll go. So fun. This coming weekend. It's moving fast and furious. Okay, so I'm going to put this first poll question up.

And I'm actually going to do this poll question now and then we'll do it at the end to see if there's any change in responses. So this should be popping up on your screen. Just want to get your thoughts as we start and jump into this. AI and education to you: Is it a love story or a horror movie? I should say love story: "This is the future." Horror movie: "End times."

And this is AI in education. We're not—there's a lot of other AI. Sci-fi? Sitcom? Strange but useful? Or "I need more coffee first"? Let us know in those responses. And if you also want to share any thoughts about this, go ahead and also submit in that chat box too because we are monitoring that.

Yes, I'm on—I'm all over the chat. I'm seeing people from all over, and I'm so excited that we have people from all over here. Lot of Texas. We love Texas. Houston, McAllen. Alright. Okay, so we've got some adopters, some not adopters, but maybe you guys will probably like our creepy cool segment that we do throughout this session.

So here's the thing, we're going to talk about the background, the lights, camera AI, and where we've been on this crazy AI roller coaster over the last year. How many years now since ChatGPT came out, Chris? Are we at two and a half years now?

Two and a half years.

Oh my goodness gracious. Where AI is right now. And then we have a little competition—AI prompt competition—coming up for you guys. We're going to have a lot of fun with this. If you haven't been to our AI Educator Brain, we like to keep it light and fun and also informative and learn and laugh and teach along the way. Because there are too many serious things that are happening in the world.

So if we can make this part of our time together fun, we will. And in addition to this, if you've been with us before, we always have Creepy or Cool. So wait for some poll questions depending on different things that Sari Beth or Chris or I share with you where we'll ask you to weigh in. Is that a creepy or a cool thing? So that will be coming soon to a theater near you—actually webinar near you.

Alright. So briefly, there's a reason I have these boots on this. I mean, you did say there are some people from Texas here, Sari Beth.

Yeah, we love Texas. We love Texas. We like—we like cowboy boots too, don't we?

Yes, yes. So a year ago, Sari Beth and I went to—this is when we were a little bit more professional, and the boots were not on. We went to South by Southwest Edu and we were on a panel together that had nothing to do with AI. It had to do much more with a serious topic of school gun violence and school gun violence prevention.

And so I was moderating that panel, but this is where I'm—this is—I'm also bringing Chris in. And Chris, I ran out of time, but I was going to go look through my photos from last year when I first met you because I think I have photos from you giving a presentation and I was going to—slides. Maybe—maybe later I'll do that.

So here's the thing. Over the course of last year, I went to a lot of different conferences, some in education, some not in education. That's where I met Chris, at the Social Media Marketing World Conference.

And it quickly dawned on me going to the education conferences related to AI, that people were still in education talking about the theory of AI and what it is, but not actually doing that aha moment of, "Wow. Holy cow." And Chris, I think in our last webinar you had those four uses—what were those uses again?

Well, you have to understand it first. So it's AI literacy. So we have to say, do you understand the technology? Is the first one. The second one for AI literacy is how do you use the technology? What are the use cases for it?

The third is uncover: What could go wrong? How could it be misused? How could it be misleading? And the fourth is unleash: What new capabilities or technologies or skills does it enable that you couldn't previously do before?

I still love that and we still need a brand that—I'm putting it on the chat. So here's the thing. I'm going back to the cowboy boots. So Sari Beth and I are—we're in—we're in Texas together doing this presentation. We get done with the presentation and we go out to listen to some live music.

And a lot of people are there for South by Southwest Edu and we're there listening to music. But I am just vomiting all these cool things of my big aha light bulb moments of things that have come off when I've learned about AI and like, "You could do this," or "You could do this." And we need to be thinking about this for education. And that's when we were brainstorming, "We should do a webinar series together on this."

And we'll learn together, and we'll talk together, and we'll share as we go. And then we were like, "What should we call it?" Should I take it up? And we were like, "What should we call it?" And we were like, "AI something... AI..." I—maybe this has become lore. Maybe this is not true, but I like to think that there was a band playing in the background and then we both, at the same time—I'm going to make this the story now, so just play along—we both exclaimed "AI Educator Brain!" so loudly that you could hear us over the band, which most people were there—unlike what we believe—we had—they were there for the band—literally turned their heads at us. This was loud. This was a loud place and we were louder.

We're loud. Have you heard us? We're loud.

Yeah. So we're loud. And the rest is—the rest is AI history. AI herstory. AI story. I don't know. Okay, I'll stop.

Yes. And then since then, we've done lots of different webinars and now we've hooked Christopher Penn in to come and join the madness that we do with the AI Educator Brain because he—Chris, I think maybe briefly since some people are new to this, but you've been in AI a long time. You've been focused on AI a long time before ChatGPT became in the public. So if you can share a little bit of your expertise.

So I started looking at AI and specifically machine learning back in 2013 when I worked at a PR firm. And the PR firm said, "Hey, we need to figure out the impact of this thing, this campaign they're running." But we have to figure it out with our clients doing all this other stuff, like ads and emails and all this stuff. How do we do this? And there are statistical techniques, but I had no idea how to implement them.

So I had to learn an old-fashioned coding language to do that. And that was my entree into artificial intelligence to say, "Huh? We can teach machines how to learn from data we give them and predict or understand what's happening." And so that was the start of my work in AI. And I remember the first time I saw a language model was back in the summer of 2021, a full year and change before ChatGPT was made available to the public.

OpenAI had its models out, and the research firm called EleutherAI published one that would be very poorly named GPT-J-6B, which is just a terrible name for a model. But it was the first one that could put words together that were coherent. 100% factually wrong. Everything it said was wrong, but it was readable.

And that was at that moment I'm like, "This is going to be a thing." If you have tools that can write, once they get to coherence, this is going to be a thing because there is not a single profession on the planet that does not involve communication in some way.

Thank you. Thank you for that overview. Yeah, it's 2013. I mean, how many? Anybody here paying attention to AI in 2013? Raise your hand. So—and my hand's low, way down.

Yeah. I'm like, "Where was I in 2013?" Actually, I'd just come to Share My Lesson in 2013.

Oh. Wow. Most stuff—I've been teaching. Back then. I'd been teaching for 11 years.

Yeah. So I'm going to prep this one. And so this is—I discovered today that one of our speakers has never seen the movie Pleasantville. If you have not seen the movie Pleasantville, I'm going to show you a quick clip because I think there are a lot of big aha moments that happened. Sari Beth, have you seen the movie Pleasantville? And this is where I give away who else has not seen—

Yes, yes, I have a long time ago, but yes.

Yeah. And so the premise of the movie is that it starts out, everybody is only seen in black and white. That's it. Nothing else. And then more and more characters then start to be able to see in color and do things in color. And they have these big aha moments to the point where this Pleasantville is so perfect. There's no rainstorm. It's so perfect that the weather is always beautiful outside.

And so I'm going to show you a quick clip from Pleasantville. And I want you to think about when it comes to AI. What was your Pleasantville moment with AI? And I'm going to be asking that of Chris and Sari Beth, of what was your "life"? Holy cow, this is crazy.

And if you haven't seen this movie, that's fine. But what I want you to think about is what was the moment with AI? You're like, "Wow, there's something—there's something there, there," or "That's a little creepy," or "That's a little cool," but "Whoa, this is moving fast." And if you haven't had that aha moment yet, then maybe we'll give you that aha moment tonight. Alright, so here's that clip.

(Video clip plays: Dialogue from Pleasantville about rain)What was that?I don't know. What is that? What's going on?It's rain. Real rain.Yeah. You don't have rain either? Oh, of course you don't. Yeah, it's okay here. Come on. What's going on?It's rain. It's okay. It's fine. Nothing to be scared of here. I'll show you. It's rain. It's okay? Come on out. You see? Look. Come on. Come on.Good afternoon.

Okay. So it's totally fine. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend that you do see it. I think in addition to—I think—a lot of analogies to AI these days, most definitely a lot of analogies to things that are happening in our world these days as well. So I wanted to bring this up because I want to ask the audience and Chris and Sari Beth, when was your moment where you're like, "Whoa."

And Chris, you're dating us a little bit because you started this journey in 2013. I'm excited to share some of mine. But this quote, "It's rain." "It's okay. It's fine. There's nothing to be scared of here. I'll show you. It's just rain." And it's black and white. But then what's cool about this quote? Look what happens when you add just a little bit of color.

Yeah. "It's AI. It's okay. It's fine. There's nothing to be scared of." Well, maybe there is a little bit something to be scared of here. "I'll show you. It's just AI." Alright, Chris, you're 2013. So when was your first big aha moment?

Does he even remember?

I do. And it was the first time I did a time series forecast where you take a bunch of historical data and you forecast ahead what is likely to happen. And I remember we were doing some work for a company where we had some Google keywords—things people were typing into Google, and we had five years of back data because you could get that and forecast it forward a year. And I went, "Huh. This is amazing."

And then for a casino client, we took their daily slot machine revenue for a past year and forecasted ahead a quarter. We figured out when they were going to have revenue shortfalls in the coming year, told them they were able to put marketing plans in place. And then that year, they had a 29% year-over-year increase in revenue because we could figure out in advance when they were going to have bad days.

Wow. That's good business and a little creepy.

Yeah, really. That's wild.

Sari Beth, when? What was your big, "Holy cow, there's something there"?

Mine doesn't sound as exciting. It doesn't involve revenues. It involves maybe me maximizing efficiency a little more as a teacher. And it was basically, "God, I hate making rubrics." Not because I dislike making rubrics. They just—you can get really in the weeds with it.

And so I was doing a project—it was only a year ago, so not 10 years ago when we were early on. This was probably a month or two—we were like a month into AI Educator Brain. And I just typed it into ChatGPT. These were the categories. And actually, the kids are working on this project right now and they're using this very rubric.

And it was like, "Here are the four things I'm grading." That is what I'm looking for. I didn't even tell it what excellent would be, good, average, not hitting it. I don't want to say below average. That's not very nice. Forget what it is. And I'll try to share it with people if I can find it now.

And this would have taken me—not going to lie—hours, because it would take me time to do it, walk away, get frustrated. Within two seconds—I'm not making that up—it had it mapped out. And I still—I mean, I guess it's still new for me. When the kids were like, "Do you have a rubric for this?" I was like, "I forgot I made one last year." Put it in there.

And then I was walking around looking because they all have their computers open. And I was like, "Isn't that a good rubric?" They're like, "Yeah, you made it?" I was like, "Yeah, I made it." I didn't tell them how, but maybe I should. I don't know, but I'll share it with you all in the chat if you want. Let me—I'll call it up in a second.

I sound old. I'm like, "I'll call it up on the Internet for you." It sounds like the World Wide Web. I'm going to go on the World Wide Web and find it somewhere in my computer space. But no, it literally—yes, Magic School as well. But this was just fun for me to type in the data and boom, there it was.

And then just other basic stuff like, "Oh my God, I forgot to do a slide on the Holly Smoot tariff." Normally you'd be looking at their textbook. What did they learn? What can I add that they didn't learn? So I was like, "Hi, teaching a class on the Great Depression, APUSH. Can you make me five bullet points on the Holly Smoot tariff?"

I know the facts. So I could look at it and go, "Okay, this is right. Oh, they forgot this." Boom, put it on the slide, added some pictures, spruced it up a bit with my own human knowledge, but that AI knowledge a year ago—amazing. Now when you do it in ChatGPT, at least it shows you where it got the information from. That wasn't happening a year ago and that's amazing.

I'm like, I know. So to some of you, you're like, "Yes, of course." Yeah, Rubric Generator. Yes, Maureen, OG Rubric. I used to get excited about Rubric Generator until this, which is just ChatGPT. I'm going to find it right now on my computer.

Alright, Chris, remind me to come back to the exciting news at the very end of this about rubric generator type things and Share My Lesson. So we'll save that to the end. You all have to stay—stay put for a big announcement.

So my big aha moment—I feel like I have constant evolutions of aha moment. Just when I'm like, "Okay, I'm really mastering this new tool and it's super cool," it's like, "Hold my beer. Here's a new thing that's way cool." And I'm going to do this. But I think my first moment was really just goofing around in the backyard of my neighbor's house.

And we're just talking about AI and we're literally on our phones and pulling up bad work speak from an email that somebody sent or that could have been literally two sentences. And it ends up being a paragraph of just vomit words and then having fun having things rewritten. And so that was definitely one of the big ones.

But one of the things I love now—and I feel like it's my party trick. I'm like the total dork at the parties—is to use different tools in AI to create something and then see everybody's big aha moment. Two days ago, I was with my trainer and we were talking about AI, and I ended up generating a song for him on the spot using Refusion, and he was just like, "What?" So anyway, lots of things I love.

What are we seeing in the chat? There's a lot of people sharing different things of where they've—they're pleasant—

Well, I just shared my assignment and the rubric that ChatGPT made for me. Others are discussing Rubric Generator, how much they love it. Yeah, some people are saying they create a lesson with Magic School. I believe the ability to write lessons. Yes, also. Oh yeah, don't tell my AP if you're watching, you didn't hear this, but sometimes I don't have the most detailed lesson plans.

Twenty-three years in the system. You're like, "I know what I'm going to do. I don't need to write down 'Teacher's going to circulate.'" This is being recorded. Oops. You all know what I'm talking about. Maybe not. But anyway, I was like, "Oh my God, the AP, my boss is coming around and my lesson plan isn't—it's like it's a 90. It's not 100. Let me make it 100." Boom.

And I tell them it's an AP class. Here are the standards. This is what I'm teaching. I didn't even have to tell it the standards, to be honest. And there was my lesson plan just like that. Yeah. I mean, it was my lesson.

I think that—I don't think that you should feel guilt in that because you're using your human brain. I mean, Chris, I'd love to hear your thoughts, but if you're using your knowledge, your human brain, and saving some of the time that probably on something may have taken you a lot longer. And that gives you time to focus on your students and your teaching with the students.

I see it and I can actually spend more time grading. The other thing someone wrote was grading. Yeah, I forgot to use it for this round. I assigned an LAQ for APUSH and I've done this before where I just feed it the rubric, which is a six out of six rubric, and then could just literally feed it the—I saved. I could have—I was grading them on a Saturday night, which I realized after I did it, the kids were like, "You have a life?"

So Saturday I was grading these essays. It took me hours and I could have literally read the essay and given it better feedback because I could have had ChatGPT give it the feedback. Whereas I could have spent the time really editing it and doing the work, my brain work on it instead of the rubric. Oh, and Ellen—sorry, Elba creates visuals for my presentations. Kelly and I love making visuals on that.

Yeah. I mean, so Chris, just really quick before we move on, this—I feel like there's this natural human guilt to use AI when you hadn't been using it before and it's now saving you time. And that's one of the Share My Lesson goals that we want to bring educators together, save folks time. But what are your thoughts on this? Should you use it? Should you not use it?

Here's the thing. There are two major things AI can do: optimization or transformation. Optimization is bigger, better, faster, cheaper. Can we do something faster? Can we do it better? Can we do the existing thing better?

And yes, absolutely, you should use it to do things bigger, better, faster, cheaper. Because ultimately, the thing we care about is better educational outcomes for our students. The untapped opportunity with AI is the transformation side. What does it look like when you go past making the existing thing better and making something new and different that has not been seen before?

Because the tools can do that if you know how to ask for it. But it raises a fundamental question, and we'll talk about this later. What does education itself look like once you transform it from what it is now to what it could be? Fun, quick aside. In 1937, there was this company called Mitsuboshi that sold dried fish and seaweed as an export company.

When the Japanese occupation ended, the company rebranded into its Korean name and changed industries. It transformed. It is now called Samsung, and they do not sell fish or seaweed at all. That is what we mean when we talk about transformation. What does education look like when you get away from the industrial model formalized by Carnegie, Mellon, and Rockefeller in the 1920s? What does the true 21st-century education look like?

That's wow. I just had so many interesting thoughts with that, but I don't want to lose what Mary McGrath just said in response, which is, "Is AI going to take jobs away or help us to be better educators?" And I think that Chris is touching on that. So how do we use AI to—I think we need to completely revamp—really actually not even revamp, redo how we actually teach kids in the 21st century.

I think it includes just getting past the bell schedules and subjects, subject classes, and all that stuff that goes—Speaking of the early 20th century, that's the model, the factory model. So I think if we can rethink how we educate people, including ourselves, it'll actually not take our jobs away. I think it'll make our jobs even more important. What do you think, Chris?

Yes, because—

Before you answer, what I'm going to do real quick is I've seen a lot of stuff that's coming in here because you guys are going to jump into a rapid-fire thing and I want this conversation between the two of you. Yeah, but keep sharing within the chat box and love the different things that you've seen AI do this year or if you've been to the AI Educator Brain series, fun stuff that's there.

I do want to lift up one comment that I saw, and this is really one of the purposes of why we're doing this—constantly doing this series. Somebody said that there are so many tools and it's sometimes so hard to keep track of all of the different AI tools that are coming out here. And that is one of the reasons we're doing this is because we want to make sure that you—and we're going to have a little activity about that. So get ready after this philosophical conversation, rapid-fire conversation between Sari Beth and Chris.

But we want you to have the skills to know how to work with these models and don't get hooked into having to purchase something that's $20 here or $40 here. Because if you have some of the basic framework skills, there's a lot that you can do and create on your own as teachers. Okay. So rapid-fire time, Chris, I'm going to start with you. And then I want to get back to the education and where we are right now. So where is AI right now?

There are two things you need to know. Number one: there are two big families of AI models right now, reasoning and non-reasoning. So reasoning models are new as of the end of last year. These are models that think better on their own. And so you prompt them very differently. You prompt them like you're delegating to a junior manager and say, "Here's what I want you to do. Here's why I want you to do it. You figure out the how and then do the thing."

The way that we've learned prompting is on non-reasoning models like the ones that are most common in ChatGPT, where you have to spell out the instructions like you're delegating to the intern and you have to tell them every single step. This is a big change. And when we get into the activity section, you will see a big difference between the two. But it's important to know that they exist, know how to identify them, and know when to use them.

The second thing is AI, in case you haven't noticed, is everywhere. Companies are stuffing it into everything. Microsoft Office has literally been renamed Microsoft Copilot 365 because they want you using that. It's in Google Workspace. It's in Google Workspace for Education. It's on your phone. Students have been downloading and running the Chinese model Deep Sync now ever since it came out because schools don't know how to block it.

There are so many different AI applications and tools and things that it is in everything. And it's not slowing down. If anything, the number of companies that are putting it into everything is going up. And one of the most fascinating stats—and this is one that's directly relevant to education—is that in 2024, the Microsoft Work Trend Index report of senior managers who were surveyed—66% of senior managers at companies surveyed would not hire someone who does not have AI skills. So if your institution is saying, "We are banning AI," you are making unemployable workers.

Wow. Yes, I mean, that is a big consideration that over the course of last year, we've really been focusing on more of the teacher knowledge on AI and making sure that educators have a seat at the table with these companies. And we're not going back to the time of social media where educators were not at the table. And now we've got a serious crisis on our hands in terms of students' addiction to these social media platforms and also mental health emotional reactions.

So in this case, we've really been working with companies like Microsoft, who's a partner of the AFT and Share My Lesson, and OpenAI to center teachers as part of the conversation to help solve some of these challenges like paper grading. I know we've talked about cheating or other misinformation, AI literacy. So more on that soon.

But Sari—Sari and Chris, how is AI right now being used in schools or how's it being used even if we don't realize it's being used? That's probably more of the Chris question.

You can get AI models now that run on your phone without Wi-Fi, without anything, and they're very good. Google just gave away its Jemma 3 model this week. Runs on an iPhone just fine. You can ask it questions, it will do things. And so assume that pretty much every student has access to a generative AI tool of some kind and that they know how to use it.

And that they know that in many cases the various AI detectors are mostly, as our Spanish friends would say, excremento de toro. They do not work well, they're highly unreliable, and they are causing enormous numbers of bad outcomes because people are being accused of cheating when they're not.

And so let's get back to the philosophical question of education as a whole and AI in this new era of AI. Sari, I know you have thoughts. Chris, I know you have thoughts.

I mean mine are more abstract because I've only been in the space for a year and I'm still learning, but they're connected to my overall ongoing drumbeat of a message. As someone who's been teaching for 23 years, starting with when those little flip phone type things became big. What were those called? Sidekicks or something like that—to now smartphones and everything else. I've seen it all, going from freaking out about Wikipedia to now ChatGPT.

But it all has left me with the same thought, which is the technology's changing fast. The workplaces are changing every day, it feels like, and the skills that kids need. And it's not rote memory. It's not following a bell schedule. The people who rise to the top in these companies now and different jobs, even academic—the Academy—are people who are thinking outside of the box and using technology as a tool to help them do that.

So how do we rethink and therefore—and then rebuild the way we teach kids in a brick-and-mortar space so that they can live in a world that's both brick-and-mortar and online simultaneously? And I don't think—this might be controversial—but I don't think it includes banning phones. We need to teach them how to have their phones in their laps and also concentrate on a conversation.

And it doesn't mean getting rid of ChatGPT as something to use as a research tool. It's teaching them how to use it as a research tool and not something that's going to just think for you and take away your human creative side. So how that looks day-to-day is a different webinar, but I have ideas. But that's where my brain is at with this.

With these tools, they are skill levelers. They give you access to skills you don't have, like writing music for example. I can't do that, but a tool can. So there are two things, two fundamental skills that students, employees, people need in the AI era. They need to be able to critically think, to understand and diagnose and know when they're looking at bullshit and be able to pull it apart.

And this is something that Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton said, which I thought was very insightful. As AI gets smarter, it makes smarter mistakes, which means they're harder to detect. So you need to get smarter along with them or you can't tell when it's wrong. That's one aspect.

And the second thing is that you have to have and you have to teach and inculcate actual creativity, creative thinking. Because if skill is no longer the blocking obstacle, then what will set you apart for success is who has the most best ideas? Who is the most creative? Who can say, "Hey, I think it would be cool if I built an app that did this"?

And then you write out a requirements document. Hand it to Anthropic Claude and push go. It writes the app, debugs it, gets it ready for deployment and things. And you're like, "I had this idea and now it exists." How do you get students and teachers and the general population to say, "I have an idea. I want to bring it to life."

I'm going to experiment with this a bit because at the end of the year, I always have them do a project where they connect the current day to something from the history class that they learned. Kids have done everything from comparing early battleships to modern ones and finding that some of the basic technology in the originals are still in the new ones. This is a robotics kid. He could have explained it better than me—to someone talking about the protest movements.

I'm going to have them all do this on Substack so that they can have the skill of that, and then I'm going to get Chris's help and Kelly's help in helping them use AI. So this is a creative project where they can use all these other tools to implement them.

So let's talk. So this is a great segue into our next section and I have a lot of requests for poll questions. So I just created a new one. So you all had a poll question to respond so you can get your PD credit, but this is going to be related to AI in just a second. This is Sari Beth and the skills. Have you seen the Great American Baking Show or the British version? What is it called? I don't even know. British Bake Off. The Great British Bake Off. Have you seen this?

I've not seen any.

Okay, well, it looks like we've got a little mix. It's fine. It's a food competition. It's food. Chris, I know you don't watch TV. Have you seen these shows?

I've not seen it.

Okay. So it's a food competition. There are three different rounds that they have to go through where essentially they're competing on some of the basic stuff, like their signature dish, technical dish, and then something really fancy in terms of something they have to make. And there are a lot of times that some of it's good and some of it's crappy.

So this is what we're going to do today, my friends. We are going to play a game called the Great AI Prompt Off. The Great AI Prompt Off. And teachers—teachers, if you've been part of our other webinar, you guys are the original prompt engineers. You've been prompting students' knowledge from the very beginning. So while we talk about this fancy tool of prompt engineering, teachers, you've been doing this the entire time.

Educators, you do this on a daily basis. You ask a student, "Hey, you're an elementary teacher. Hey, I need you all to get in the line and be quiet." And then there's this kid who doesn't do it and you have to call that kid out and say, "I need you to actually stand with your hands to your side and be quiet." And so you continue to iterate on those questions. So we are going to go and have a little fun.

But the first one, the signature prompt. Alright, Sari Beth, I'm going to share my screen in one moment, but we're going to have you prompt to create a lesson plan. Just a very general lesson plan. And I'll do it since you had said that screenshot.

Was freaked out about—I thought screenshot. I don't know. I'm screen—with AI with screen share. I get nervous. And for this experiment, I am going to use ChatGPT. Chris, when it's your turn—fine. Okay. I'm typing for you. Go ahead.

I can't see any teaching lessons, any of the conversations, so let me know if there's—I'm about to teach—Don't shame me if you teach APUSH and you're ahead of me. I'm about to teach about the 1950s culture and counterculture for APUSH history tomorrow. Just write that. Make me a lesson for APUSH history about 1950s culture and counterculture with suggested primary sources.

So you're being a little bit—I'm going to go a little bit more general to start with so we can iterate.

Oh really? Okay, that's part of it. APUSH history on—what is the topic?

1950s culture and counterculture.

To use culture and counterculture. Okay. And so we started with that very first prompt, very general. Here are your learning objectives based on APUSH standards, which is nice that they're pulling that in already. Essential questions, material that you need. Yeah, DBQ standard. Ohio, that's what I have. Okay, good. This is good.

So this is good, but it's still general because we could definitely go farther. And so how, Chris, how would you amend this or enhance it?

So here's what I would do. I would start a new prompt with the exact same thing. Say, "Create a lesson plan for APUSH about the 1950s culture and counterculture." That's a good place to start.

Actually, you could just hit the pencil button there and just keep editing.

No, just hit the pencil button there and just hit edit. No, no, no, go back to the top. Right there you go.

We've learned. We're learning. Together. I didn't know you could do that. Okay.

Oh yeah. Now hit space and type this in. "Here is how to do this task. First, explain the intent of my prompt and what it is I'm asking you to do aloud. Second, what role should you take to answer the prompt? Use"—I'll wait for you to catch up.

Second.

"Second, what role should you use to answer the prompt? Use superlatives, awards, and high status recognition."

Jeez Louise, I should have typed this out so I could copy and paste it. This is a lot of work for me.

Okay, I'll put it in the chat.

You want to put it in the chat?

Yes.

What's the last—What? I don't—

Kelly, I put the whole thing in the chat.

Okay. Oh, of course you already have it. Okay, look at this. Okay. So just paste that after. This is—Okay everyone watching, this is blowing my mind even because I never knew to do this. Okay. Here we go. Now, hit send.

Send it. Let's see. Let's see what was in—I shouldn't think, sorry. Oh my God. Oh my God. So what we're doing is we're having it think aloud. So Step 2, we're giving it a role. Step 3, it's going to think through what it needs to do. What is—So what are the tasks that it should do to make a lesson plan?

We want it to give it some thought first. So the Step 3 is the overall actions, which is define the objectives, identify the content, primary and secondary sources, design activities. Let's keep going. Step 4. What does it know about this topic? What are the things that it would need to put together? Keep going down. Step 5—they're heavy lifting.

Step 5. Here's the action plan. How are you going to do this? So title, warm-up directory. Step 6. Lesson plan. Holy—Leave It to Beaver Meets the Title—The 1950s. I love it. Alright. This is a great title. I'm using it. This is a Pleasantville moment, people. It's a Pleasantville AI moment.

Well, I'm using this lesson tomorrow. Send it to me please.

I will. I will. In fact, if other people don't want—I just need to copy and paste it. Alright. I am going to—this is my Chris—What? Yeah, what? Amazing. Amazing. Okay, can you save that prompt and send that lesson plan?

I will send it and I can send it. I'll download the internal simple doc and add it to the Share My Lesson webinar page so everybody has access to it. But guess what? The title—the title is amazing. Here's more. So this is the time when we turn it over to Chris, the technical prompt person. And so he is going to—

Oh, wait, wait, wait. I got to do a quick poll question. So we just saw that first one. Did you guys think this was creepy or cool? Was that a creepy or cool example? Again, you guys have OG prompt engineers. Creepy or cool?

I don't want to bully you. I don't want to bully them. But that was cool. And if you say it was creepy, I'm going to be mad at you. I'm just kidding. That was crazy cool. That was like—you don't understand my brain. Alright, let's see what we got. Is it coming in? There we go. You better think it's cool.

There are some people think it's creepy. It's okay. It's okay. We're all in our different places. It's your color. I'm not mad at you. You may not see—you seen the color. I love all of you, even if you thought it was creepy.

Okay, Chris, the next one is the technical prompt, so I am turning to you.

So the technical prompt, I believe you said you wanted to take the lesson plan that we just did and I believe you said from a technical perspective scaffold it for ELL students. Is that correct?

Is correct. You want me to copy and paste everything? Or do you already have it?

No, no, I did a version in Gemini. I'm going to be using Gemini in AI Studio. It does not matter which tool you use. ChatGPT is fine. I just did this in Gemini because I'm used to it. But it does not matter the tool you use, as long as it's a good foundation model.

Sorry, Chris, that's a good question. How was the first prompt not technical?

So this is again—I think fair enough. I'm trying to have a little fun off of the Great AI Prompt Off fake show thing. But yes, we're trying to—what we are trying to do right now is build from that initial lesson plan to really building off the lesson plan. And now Chris is—let's get it to another step of, "Okay, this is cool. Now let's try to differentiate it for an ELL student."

Right. Here's the thing. I'm not a teacher. I don't know squat about scaffolding lesson plans for ELL students. So let's review the process of how I could get AI to do that in a way that is safe and in a way that is intelligent. One of the things that all the vendors have come out with recently are these deep research tools.

This is one called Gemini Deep Research, where you give it a prompt like, "Hey, you're a researcher specializing in English language learning, such as Advanced by Colder in Colorado. Build a research report containing definitions of the levels of English language learning, strategies for teaching them per level, scaffolding techniques for instructional design per level." Because I don't know this stuff. Prefer academic resources: published papers, academic journals, peer-reviewed publications, and accredited educational resources.

You give it that and it comes back and produces this nice guide that's 19 pages long of ELL instruction: proficiency, skill levels, scaffolding techniques, educational techniques. Very useful. Now, we'd never trust one AI company. So what we do is we run the same exact prompt in Perplexity's deep research tool. This one's also free. You get three a day on the free plan, and you can do this in several different places.

What do we do with that? Well, when you have three of these things sitting around, you then take a technique that we call merge. And I say take all three reports and merge them together into one Franken-report. And the Franken-report is—you're going to figure out what is useful in these reports and create a master document of what it means to teach English language learners with this information.

Now I know what a level 2 ELL is and I know I have the background information. I can now say, "Restructure this lesson plan on 1950s APUSH history for a Level 2 ELL learner following the guidance in the attached document." And now I'll provide my combined research report of all three ELLs here, which is—how long is this sucker? This thing is 12 pages that summarizes the different levels of ELLs.

And now I'm saying do it for level 2. And based on this, it should now be able to think through and think aloud what it would take to do this. So ELL 2 is emerging areas. Identify areas for modification in the lesson plan. Apply strategies: visual support, simplified language, sentence frames, repetition, and modeling. Maintain AP level content as appropriate. And then it processes this and comes up with a much more structured, scaffolded ELL Level 2 lesson plan.

Chris, I love you—and I have a husband, that's fun—but this is so awesome and it's so geeky. And now I need to create the yellow Cliff Notes version of what you just showed us to break it down and slow speak. I think that is so great.

Okay, we got one more round. I know we're getting closer to time, so we're going to go fast. And Chris, I feel like maybe I want to—I'm a little scared. But the showstopper prompt, this is where you take something fun like a game on Minecraft or Taylor Swift lyrics or a civic engagement activity and build off the lesson to create something. So I don't know if your juices are flowing. I don't know if it's lyrics to a song that would go with the lesson plan. Actually, lyrics to the song might not be bad, or an image or something like that.

And as you're kind of creating something, I'm going to do again—you guys have another chance. That last round, Round 2, the technical prompt. Was it creepy or cool? Or I should have added, "I need the Cliff Notes." I'm bringing back yellow Cliff Notes. It's happening. So let us know.

Do you have something already for your third?

Yeah, so in the interest of time, what we did was took the pre-existing prompt for generating lyrics in—again using Google's Gemini—just tacked on to the end of the chat and said, "Make me some lyrics." There's a built-in scoring rubric that it also generated to what constitutes good lyrics and it comes up with a very nice variation.

Now this set of lyrics can go—this is again 1950s culture and counterculture. If we go to Kelly's new favorite friend, which is Refusion, we put the lyrics in and—let's go with Broadway ensemble as the prompt. Those lyrics go right into the tool and then in about 90 seconds you get a working Broadway musical out of it from that lesson plan. So if we look at the lyrics here, they're pretty decent. So "Picture perfect wonder, is it all I see?" "Got to break free, got to reach for the sky," and so on and so forth. This is actually pretty catchy.

I think that's Reagan. Of course, I don't know if you can log in Refusion on your phone, but what we've found is sometimes the audio won't play if you try to play it directly from your computer.

Yeah, I don't have it on my phone so we'll have to table that for another time, but we only got five minutes left anyway and I know there's some other stuff we want to talk about.

Send me the link or put the link in the chat that people can use and we can play it that way.

Sounds good.

Alright, so this is super cool. So this is the showstopper prompt. Okay, so again, let's do this again. Is this creepy or is this cool? Creepy or cool? Let us know, people. What do you think? No, wait. I think that was the old creepy or cool.

I tell you what, while we're waiting for—we're going to be moving on. Not that one, sorry. Vivian saying it's all moving fast. Sorry, this is the poll I wanted to put up. Sorry. Which AI-powered feature? So this—we're coming back to this in a second, but as I'm getting a new creepy or cool poll up about that last one, we have some exciting stuff that's coming to Share My Lesson in terms of AI, and I'll get to that soon.

But we'd love to hear from you in terms of what are some different tools that would be helpful for you as an educator? And if you've used Share My Lesson or other tools, what would be helpful for you? So why don't we go ahead and respond to that?

Kelly, maybe we should do a workshop at an event though these days.

Yes, oh, all of yes, yes, yes, yes. We're going to be doing more webinars and stuff like that. And so let's hear—Chris, did you send me the link to that song? So maybe I'll close this out with that.

I put it in Slack.

Okay, got it. Okay. So I'm going to leave this poll up just a little bit longer because this is actually a helpful data point for us to get. So thank you for that. Okay, so let's see what you guys said. This is going to be interesting. Alright. So modifying lesson plans for IEPs or customizing a lesson for ELL/ESL students, supplementary materials—that goes to that rubric thing that Sari Beth was talking about—state standards.

Alright. And then yes, if there's something else, let us know in the chat. And Sari Beth, is there anything else coming up in the chat?

Yeah, just said it was moving fast. But yes, we'll do a workshop. Oh well, what does a teacher do when a student's work is generated by AI? Is that cheating? Everyone wants a workshop, including Linda Cross. Vivian wrote, "Where should I start? I'm 75 years young." Yes. She said old, I said young. And Vivian, that's amazing. ELL, yes. Okay, that's awesome.

Thank you guys for sharing this. So I know we're getting close to time. There are just a couple more things I want to share. So the—we already talked about the future of education itself. That was during that other one. But one of the things that I think is exciting that I'm excited to be able to soft announce is that Share My Lesson—the AFT is already partners with Microsoft and we've been doing great webinars with them, which is awesome.

But one of the things that is really exciting is that we are also now going to be working directly with the team of engineers from OpenAI to develop AI tools directly into Share My Lesson. And so we're so excited for that. Chris is an advisor on this project and a lot of those questions that you just responded to is stuff that we're going to be looking to engage.

One of the strengths of Share My Lesson is the community and the human-created content. And we don't want to lose that, but we could take some of that content and enhance it or find those rubrics, create a rubric because someone created a good lesson plan. But to Sari Beth's point, "Gosh, that would be really helpful if I have a rubric to go with it." So we're very excited about the future for this.

And yeah, and then the other thing I want to announce is that—I'll send a link to this as well. But if you can't get enough of AI, AI Literacy Day is happening this Friday, March 28th. I'm going to drop that in the chat and encourage you to check it out. There are a lot more webinars that are coming up directly within the space as well.

Alright, so here's the literally rapid-fire. You get to say some of your favorite tools. Alright, so Chris?

Any reasoning model. So my favorite tools are Gemini Flash, OpenAI, or DeepSeek-R1. Any of the reasoning tools that can think things through are incredible. The new Anthropic Claude that can code really well can build apps start to finish by themselves. They are really amazing.

Alright, Sari Beth, your favorite tools?

I just still keep using ChatGPT. I'm the—I feel like Chris is the advanced and I'm like, "ChatGPT is so cool," but I'm going to start using those other ones now for sure. And POE—you got me into POE, but I feel like there are other ones that Chris is mentioning that I need to really explore for sure.

Yeah, no, it's funny. There's a lot of different—yes, they all want to know what different apps we're doing. And so I will also take that as my follow-up to pull those lists together of things that we talked about to share out of the different stuff. And Andy is also saying, please join our AI community because we're going to keep building from there. But you guys are the first to know now. Thank you for being part of this keynote that we've got some cool AI features coming to Share My Lesson and aiming to launch at our AFT TEACH conference this coming summer.

Which brings me to this is the human in-person TEACH conference that you can come join us in July. We are going to have some sessions directly on AI. Some of the Microsoft folks are going to be there. The OpenAI folks are going to be there. So please feel free to join us for that.

And as Andy was saying, do please rate and review this webinar. So there should be a link that he's putting directly into it. You can go onto Share My Lesson just like those fancy Facebooks or whatever. We have our own special algorithm on Share My Lesson. So resources that get read and reviewed elevate through other educators as well. Although we are not a billion-dollar corporation by any stretch of the means.

You can also get your certificate as well. You should be able to download that if you've answered all the various poll questions. And we still have a couple more days left of winning an Aura ring. Talk about AI and health and all that stuff. You can join that here.

And then with that, okay, I'm going to play the song. I haven't listened to the song, so hopefully this comes through over my phone. Here's the song that Chris generated as part of that last bit. And of course, it's the—We'll see if it works now. It's not loading. Okay, here we go. I don't know if it's loud enough. Can you hear it? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that one landed, Chris, but we have the—it's a Broadway musical. We'll see.

Sorry about that. You could let us know how your seniors in high school deal with that one.

You slap the slide out of your face. Pretty awesome. I'll let you know.

Victoria thinks it's Chris. Okay, Victoria has the final word. Sounds like Carrie Underwood. Exactly.

Alright, so this is kicking off night one of our Share My Lesson virtual conference. Please be sure to join us tomorrow night. Our president, Randi Weingarten of the AFT, is giving the keynote on the state of public education. And my goodness, there's a lot to talk about these days. So please be sure to join us for that keynote.

And then we close things out with the keynote on Thursday with Mary Pope Osborne, who's an author, children's author on her books. And we've got so many incredible webinars in between. So please be sure to take advantage of those as well. Alright, Christopher, Sari Beth, you guys are the best. Thank you. And to everybody joining us and all your excitement. Alright. Take care everyone. Have a good night.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Thanks for coming.