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Showing posts from April, 2021

101. The Transformative Power of AI

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Folks, let’s face it. Our classrooms are going to look a little different this year. AI, specifically ChatGPT, is going to change the way we design learning experiences and assess student mastery. I’ll be honest, when I first explored the ChatGPT platform I was terrified. As I have dug deeper into the technology and its capabilities, I realized that while it does pose significant challenges — it also presents us with some pretty amazing opportunities. In this series, we will explore what AI is capable of, its implications in the classroom, and how it can benefit both teachers and students. Let’s start by examining where we have been, where we are currently, and looking forward to where we are going. Whether this is a trip you wanted to go on or not, the AI train has left the station and it is time for all of us to jump on board. From Card Catalogs to Artificial Intelligence I belong to the micro-generation called Xennial. Xennials are considered to be a “bridge” between Generation X a
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#50. Review Strategies That Work in 2021 - Concept Webs & Hexagonal Thinking

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This is the 3rd post in a series about review strategies that work for both online and in-person learning. This week's post will take a closer look at Concept Mapping. I love concept maps because they require students to engage in effortful processing by requiring them to identify the connections and relationships between concepts. They also require students to "chunk" the information . Chunking is a strategy that breaks up long pieces of information into smaller chunks. These chunks are more easily retained than unrelated pieces of information. I use concept maps when the students are learning new information and when reviewing old information. I provide the students with the following guidelines when creating a map: A concept map usually stems from one main idea. The main idea branches into related general concepts. General concepts can be subdivided into more specific concepts branching from them in several tiers. Specific concepts are elaborated by example. Rela
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#49. Review Strategies that Work in 2021: Dual Coding using "Draw That"!

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This is the 2nd in a series of posts about how to design effective review opportunities for online, face-to-face and hybrid students.   In this post, I will share how I adapted an old-school, in-person vocabulary review for AP Psychology to  to make it accessible for my remote learners. The AP Psychology Exam is content-driven and the students need to have mastered the proper terms and definitions in order to apply it to human thinking and behavior. This learning activity helps students master and apply the terms that they need to know about social psychology . This assignment requires the students to combine words and visuals. This process is called Dual Coding . According to the Learning Scientists,    The idea is to provide two different representations of the information, both visual and verbal, to help students understand the information better. Adding visuals to a verbal description can make the presented ideas more concrete, and provides two ways of understanding the presente
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#48. Review Strategies that Work in 2021 - Free-Response Carousel

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On March 13th, 2020 I said goodbye to my students and told them I would see them in two weeks. Little did I know that I wouldn't see many of them again until the next spring! As the weeks of quarantine wore on, and the AP exam drew closer, I wanted to ensure that the students had the materials to prepare for the AP exam if they wanted to do so. Therefore, I adapted many of the review tools that I had used in the past for a remote learning environment. I had no clue that I would still be in a similar situation this year.  This post is the first in a series of posts about designing effective review opportunities for students that will work no matter your current learning model: Face to Face, HyFlex or Remote. The AP Psychology exam consists of two sections: a 100 question multiple choice section and a 2 question free-response section. In this post, I will share a simple strategy that I use to help my students prepare for the written portion of the exam. There are two types of que
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