AI Essentials for Educators; one step closer to reality
I love a good digital story—that’s the teacher‑librarian in me. So when Part II called for one, I went big. I split the module into three chunks: a gentle, non‑academic primer on LLM limitations; Shannon Vallor’s short talk on AI as a mirror; a practical on‑ramp via a choose‑your‑own‑adventure (CYOA) story; and then some hands on AI tool interaction. My audience (Senior Years teachers new to gen‑AI) was not going to read Crawford’s Atlas of AI or Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, so I let Clippee do the ranting instead.
I actually started in Twine, but Edsby doesn’t play nicely with Twine embeds. Google Sites would have worked, but I wanted to model inside the LMS they already use. So I pivoted to Canva. That constraint forced me to prune eight branches down to four core scenarios. I think this was ultimately a blessing, because it sharpened the key myths I needed teachers to bump into. Guided by Bruner’s claim that “practice in discovering for oneself” makes knowledge more usable in problem solving (Bruner, 1961), the branching story lets teachers feel the pitfalls before I name them. In Bruner’s “hypothetical mode,” learners aren’t “bench‑bound listeners” but co‑constructors; every click in the story and every prompt revision in the lab puts them in that role.
Multimodality mattered too. The New London Group’s push for multiliteracies (1996) and UDL principles nudged me to balance text, images, and short audio clips. I recorded voices in CapCut (yes, shameless self‑promotion—I want invites to co‑teach CYOA projects). Vallor’s mirror metaphor (2024) shaped Clippee’s tone: he “magnifies” what the AI quietly distorted, echoing Crawford’s critique of data extraction and Noble’s warnings about encoded bias. But in a much more accessible way.
Within the walls of my module, H5P’s paywall (thanks, D2L) pushed me to CurrikiStudio for the formative checks. That choice wasn’t just budget—Curriki is something teachers can actually replicate in their own Edsby pages tomorrow, without approvals or fees. Peer interaction is Edsby’s Achilles’ heel, so I farmed discussion to Padlet. It’s clunky to add another tool, but the final course task also lives on Padlet, so repeated exposure helps. I even seeded sample posts so no one stares at a blank board.
Overall, this module blends hands‑on pragmatism with just enough theory for what my audience needs: useful, not heavy.
References
Bruner, J. S. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31(1), 21–32.
Crawford, K. (2020). Atlas of AI. Yale University Press.
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. NYU Press.
Vallor, S. (2024). AI is a mirror of humanity [Video]. Institute of Art and Ideas.
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