Glide Tutorial (app building, but tragedy strikes)

 

The first thing Glide will do is ask that you log in with Google. It will take you to this screen, select "new app". 

At this point, I knew I wanted to create a basic app, I pressed the "basic app" button. 

On the lefthand side of your screen, you'll see this black "+" button...

...pressing the button will give you many options, I chose to explore the AI "custom build" option

Begin by telling AI what kind of app you'd like to create and what you'd like your app to look like. Here you can see the prompt and the output. I knew I wanted my app to be clearer though and this basic version gave no place to input tasks. I refined my prompt (below) and you can see how it changed the app interface. 

Here I learned that it doesn't matter how many details you give the Glide AI, it can really only handle one task at a time-- the tasks that were listed under me asking for it to include a place for a link were ignored. 

Once I liked where my app was, I hit publish. You're able to change the URL of your app (as it's also accessible by website)

And here is where tragedy strikes! A knife to the heart-- I hadn't realized it was a pay based subscription. 

Regardless, there's your tutorial :)

Rethinking Popular Culture and Media: Stenciling Dissent

 Stenciling Dissent 

Political graffiti engages students in the history of protest for social justice

Andrew Reed 

Preface: instead of a regular summary, I decided to "teach" about this chapter using digestable answers to basic questions about the chapter. 

Who?

Andrew Reed and his students in his U.S history classes in an urban school in Wichita, Kansas. Many students of his are immigrants (either first or second generation*) and from lower socioeconomic households.

What?

Reed decided to create a stencil project-- a project where students would engage in research and use technology to create stencils to support their learning of an important person or group that was responsible for an important protest in the United States.

What does Reed believe?

Reed believes that history is a vehicle to learn what you're capable of-- that students can use their knowledge of history and of protest to internalized the importance of protest in United States history, especially the United States history of minorities. Reed believes art is an effective way means to reach out to other people-- especially public art. Reed believes his teaching should be culturally responsive and engaging-- that it should relate to his students and believes in teaching a wider view of United States history, more than the white-man's take on things. 

Why protest?

Reed understood and taught that protest served as a way to speak for those who couldn't "...dissent, strikes and protest have given the poor, minorities, and immigrants a voice when the vote hasn't". He recalled a time in 2006 when his students learned about a Chicano protests. His students learned that their voice matters, that protest does something and led a walkout to support immigrant rights rallies !!-- around 500 people joined from different Wichita schools. 

Why stencils?

Stencils are often used as a form of street protest throughout the world because "they're easy to make, quick to apply, and can be used over and over again."

What did students do with the stencils?

Reed bought a piece of canvas to use as a wall, students then spray painted their stencils onto the "wall." Later, Reed displayed the "wall" on a prominent wall in the school. Students also worked on a paragraph to be displayed near their stencil that detailed the most important details about their person or group. Having to take weeks of research and form one 5-6 sentence paragraph proved difficult for students but also meant students had to hone in on the most important parts of their research. 

What were reactions to the "wall"?

A lot of students engaged positively to it, going up to the wall, seeing graffiti figures and paragraphs of the impact and importance that these figures and groups had. 

Not all reactions were positive, some people came up to Reed and let him know that he was missing certain figures or groups-- but Reed poses this as a positive, the wall was making people think critically: "Who else should be up there? Who else have I learned about whose protest was important to U.S history?"

There were also (as can be expected) some negative reactions to the wall--  a staff member told Reed he wanted to get paint from his house and paint over the whole thing, some other staff members declared it was Anti-American. Some staff members also had strong feelings about graffiti being present-- due to their preconceived notions of street art being gang related.

Final take away-- quote:

"Especially in an urban school where students appreciate graffiti and other street art, stencils hold the potential to engage students. Youth can create something that might get them in trouble on the streets but an A in the classroom. And students can use stencils in other ways; to create their own shirts, posters, book covers, or postcards. Whether in a school or on the streets, stencils-- at least political ones-- can catch onlookers' attention and make them think." 

* second generation immigrants refers to the child or children of immigrants 

Final Project Ideas

 

I believe students learn through struggle, a healthy amount of productive struggle. I believe that learning should be made accessible (through scaffolding) to all learners so that all learners can engage in productive struggle (I'm using this to guide the idea that I have about my final project as I was struggling a lot in the brainstorm process).

I thought a lot about this in my Action Practitioner Research class where we were told to design a research question, my question was "What is the impact on students’ engagement with productive struggle in the classroom when the classroom community normalizes uncertainty through the learning pit?"

I broke down my question into sub questions to be able to frame my research:  

• Does engagement with productive struggle increase when students are able to point out where they are within the learning pit?

• What other learning or environmental impacts does the use of the learning pit have on the classroom community?

Knowing that I wanted to lean into my action practitioner research (especially because I already have half of the research project thought out), I wanted to investigate the way that I could meld together technology and media with the learning pit.

I did in fact know that I wanted to use AI to help me ideate to be able to have a succinct project that I can fit into the next week.

Here's a link to the conversation that I had with Claude (more information on the prompt down below).

My idea is to build an app that students can access on their chromebooks at different checkpoints during a math unit. The app/ website will be very student (second grade student) friendly. The app will include an illustrated version of the learning pit with 5 tappable zones "I've got this" (signifying not yet having entered the learning pit), "It's getting tricky" (beginning to descend down the learning pit) "I'm stuck in the pit" (being solidly in the learning pit), "I'm climbing out" (the ascension out of the learning pit) and "I've figured it out" (out of the learning pit).

After students select a zone, data will automatically populate into a pre-made Google Sheet. You might at this point be asking yourself how this will help learning and it all connects to both practicality with me following my action practitioner research, aligns with what I believe about the relationship between productive struggle and learning but also at the same time normalizes the use of the learning pit by normalizing struggle (productive struggle). By attempting to remove a negative connotation from struggle, students can see struggle as something that at the very least is neutral or ideally helps them learn. Another feature of the app or Google Sheet set up is I can easily make a bar graph to show students that other people are also struggling at a certain checkpoint in a unit. Removing solitude in struggle will ideally not only create a bigger sense of community and community help (shout out to Wesch's idea of helping students up the staircase) but also will once again reinforce the normalization of the learning pit as a tool.

Amy's (2024) project inspired me not only because her project surrounded the idea of student engagement (and how to increase it) but also because she was using her work in the action practitioner research class that she took to set the scene for her research and project in this class (much like I'm doing)

AI and I

What is your personal relationship to AI? How do the arguments of Ferlazzo or Galland & Rettinger feel to you?  Do they resonate with you? Alienate you? Scare you? Excite you? 

NOTE: I used ChatGPT (purely for irony) to create these memes. I asked ChatGPT to "Make a meme based on this:" and then I copied in both the questions that were asked and my entire response. It gave me many memes all on the same photo, I then took snipits of the smaller memes to post into my post. Look at the full conversation (and the full mega-meme) here 

My personal relationship to AI feels like a Boomer trying to use the internet for the first time, typically saying the word "please" in what prompts I give it "please help me look over this email", asking AI for help with things I could have used other resources for "how long should I put my sweet potato in the air fryer for" and some things that I probably shouldn't be asking it at all *inserting a screenshot of a text exchange between me and my boyfriend* "What do you think his intentions were when he said this? Who is in the right?" (If there's one thing about AI though is that YOU are the product, it answers appeal to YOU, meaning when I ask it who is in the wrong... it's never me [but I could have told you that lol😂 ]). I use AI to help with academic tasks, especially when I can't think of a specific word-- using it to circumnavigate the word 

Me:"it starts with an n" " it means to disagree with"

AI: "negate" 

Me: "yes!"

AI also helped me A LOT with planning a science curriculum when we were given NO CURRICULUM AND NO MATERIALS. I've used the generative picture part of AI to design a living room space with specific furniture given specific dimensions, to help my sister decide if she wanted to get her nose pierced or not and more. I've used AI to help find academic peer reviewed sources (shout out Perplexity) and rebrand an entire document when TFA decided to change their branding (shout out Claude).

Despite my personal use, I also see the other side-- the robots are going to take over the world, I'm wrecking the Earth because of how much water ChatGPT needs to cool down its servers after each question, it takes away the thinking job of people, etc. perspective of the debate. One thing that really stuck out to me was Feriazzo said about AI being a modern tool: "

        “Ethically,” he said, “I just don’t think I ever could use it. It doesn’t seem fair.”

        I sighed. “Picture yourself when everyone is switching from the wooden plow to the steel.

        You say, ‘I just don’t think I can use this new tool that will save me hours of grunt work. It

        doesn’t seem fair.’”

I've heard a lot that AI is coming our way, whether or not we want it to, and that it'll simply be easier for us to be with it than against it (sounds a lot like a zombie apocalypse if you ask me) but I've been playing around with /using AI as both a toy and a tool. 

As an educator, I also have to think about AI and my students, I'd rather teach them responsible ways to use AI rather than them being unsafe with it. This leads me to important arguments by Galland and Rettinger, especially regarding motivation and the story of the student named John who retook a class that he previously did not so well on. The authors describe that John had a lot of intrinsic motivation, motivational orientation, mastery goals, that pushed him to want to take the class. The piece itself talks a lot about "cheating", why students would do it and what the implications of it are. One thing that I'm wondering is how the use and normalization of AI subtracts from productive struggle, therefore also reducing the satisfaction of working through it, working through the learning pit. I worry about how the use of AI, especially with young people, give students an "out" to be able to not just reduce but eliminate all struggle. When we don't have the dopamine hit of working something out, I can see that directly relating to the decrease of intrinsic motivation for students. How do I negotiate the space between understanding and knowing students have AI at their fingertips and also feeling very passionately that they need to be able to do it alone first (the same reason that we need to know how to do basic arithmetic before we are able to use calculators) ? I'm nervous about what AI means for us both as a humanity and as educators... 

Shout out to Stella (yes, the one in our class) for being on TFA's billboard !

Digital Native? ... Problems with Pan-Generational Labels

 What do you make of the (divergent) positions of Spiegel and Prensky?  What do you hear each of them saying about who youth are?  Where do you stand on the “digital native” terminology?

I hear and understand what Spiegel and Prensky both argue, however, I think both fall into a pattern of attaching a specific label to a pan-generational "group" (pan-generational derived from the idea of pan-ethnic, as in, it can be dangerous to apply specific labels to pan-ethnic "groups"). It's a natural human condition to look for patterns and try to group things, people, etc. so I can't necessarily blame Spiegel and Prensky and in regards to who I agree with more, Spiegel's argument resonates with me more because it speaks more to the way that teachers and students would both be considered "digital natives". This is why I bring up the point of the problem with giving groups pan-generational labels, all generations will have differences as the world changes, technology modernizes, etc.

Granted, Spiegel tries to fragment the label with micro-labels of "creator", "socialite", "gamer" and "worker" however she does retain the assumption that all youth still fall under a digital native category.

The generation of women working in Massachusetts as Lowell girls were different than a generation of young women who stayed in their houses and it would not only be unfair, but also inaccurate to label every woman in her early twenties who could be a Lowell girl a "factory native" (nevermind the danger with using the terms "native" and "immigrant" but I digress). Young women in states or places within the United States that didn't have access to working in factories would not be able to match the conditions described by being a "factory native". The same is true for "digital natives", how do we account for young people in a digital native generation who either do not have access to or are not allowed to use technology (I had a friend who was not allowed to use technology and in 5th grade, didn't know how to put a cell phone on speaker). My friend, Amy, is still among the generation of digital natives, however, she's not a digital native by experience, but she is by birth year. This is a problem that comes up in Spiegel's argument as well, an assertion that digital natives ( who need to be explicitly taught how to use technology nonetheless) populate classrooms period. The truth is much more complicated and nuanced than that.

In addition, Spiegel describes the classroom being a microcosm for the real world and uses this as evidence to support why she should increase technology use (like games for example) in her classroom. I think there should be a different argument used to support increasing tech use in the classroom-- like supporting all learners or UDL. If the classroom is a microcosm for the real world, which in many ways it is, it also is not because in the real world, there isn't so much attention to detail in regards to what technology isn't being used. I can name more careers that have minimal of technology (or would fall into the techno-traditionalist category) than careers where increasing technological game use or the specific analysis of videos would be more beneficial than being able to analyze a source for reliability and writing an essay (especially because most peer reviewed, "reliable" sources are in fact written -- and however, we should still consider funding and bias when analyzing these texts)-- which may go to show what I know about the modern career field but anyway...

What I hear in both Spiegel and Prensky's argument is an idea that youth are either similar or dissimilar to their teachers and that teachers need to approach teaching youth in specific ways. What my argument has in place of theirs, is it considers the nuance and issues with a pan-generational label.

Intro!

 

Hi! My name is Lexi and I work at Achievement First Iluminar. Last year I was a third grade reading teacher but this coming school year I'll be second grade teacher focusing mostly on math. I recently started pottery classes (about 2-3 months ago) and I'm really excited for the summer because I'm very much a beach lover. The calico cat is my little teeny tiny baby (Callie) and she's almost one (!!!), the tortie is Willow and both Callie and Willow love each other very much and play all the time.