How AI is Solving one of the Biggest Problems in Flipped Learning - Episode 42
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: In today's episode, I want to talk about how AI is solving one of the biggest problems in flipped learning. Stay tuned.
00:00:10 Jon Bergmann: I'm your host, Jon Bergmann on the Reach Every Student podcast here, and I've been a flipped learning pioneer for a long time, and I've been playing and working with AI for a long time. As you know, many times on this podcast that's the topic is AI. And today I want to talk about, uh, sort of a new thought that has just totally like, it's transforming my classes with AI. So let's have at it. Here's really the big idea. The biggest problem, or one of the biggest problems in flip learning, has always been that a student can't raise their hand and ask a question in the middle of a flip video, right? So a student is at home, they're watching a flip video, and they have a question and they don't know the answer. And they can't just that's that the beauty of that sort of lecture, discussion time that you have when you're live teaching and a student can raise their hand and you can ask a question, they can ask a question. It's just that back and forth dialogue. Well, what about I. So I got to thinking about this. And so I'm starting to train my students and say, you are going to be watching these cheesy videos that I make about whatever the topic is. I teach science, so it's physics, for example. So they're watching a physics video and they don't quite understand something. And so what I'm doing is I'm training them on how to ask the AI a question. And that's where they can have that spontaneous question during their pre-work time. Right? And that is important. Now, when I do this, by the way, I'm trying to make sure that I'm taking time. It's the beginning of the school year now to teach my students how to watch a video, but not just to watch it. How to, you know, Metacognitively watch it. I've talked about this before, but it's super important, by the way, to teach students how to watch a video. Now they can watch a TikTok video or whatever, but that's not at all the same thing compared to watching an educational video on a particular topic. And so big idea here is I teach them how to watch a video, but now I'm not just teaching them how to watch the video and how to take notes, and I'm teaching them how to then pop up I and have it ask a question. And I've taken this a step further too. And so now what I'm also doing is I. So my school has purchased a an AI tutor program platform. Uh Flint K12. Com it's a great platform, a big fan of it. There's probably other platforms out there, but this is the one our school has chosen. And so I've created prompts. And so here's roughly the prompt. The prompt is. So this is for the beginning of of class. Well you'll hear. So the prompt is this have students ask a question. Don't ask a question. I don't want the AI tutor to ask a question. I want the tutor to receive a question. Have the students ask a question regarding the uploaded PDF. So the PDF is the textbook section that my video was based on, and then have a conversation with them for six minutes, no more than six minutes, and then attempt to take them deeper once they ask a question. Make sense? And so what I'm doing is these are my bell ringers and the beauty of at least of the flint tool. I don't know if your tool does this, but as they're having their dialogue for the first few minutes of class, they, the Flint is telling me it's summarizing what their question was. So just yesterday we were studying mineral properties. So minerals are, you know, diamonds mineral gold's mineral feldspars minerals. So these different minerals you don't need to know the content. But as that's happening I can see student name I'm looking at the screen right now. Double refraction in minerals. So she asked some question about double refraction, which was one of the topics in the video that they'd watched the night before. Or another student asked about the effect of oxygen on mineral color. Another student asked about the mineral hardness testing method. So I'm seeing these pop on my laptop while my students are typing and having this six minute dialogue, and then I start class and say, Bethany, I see that you asked about double refraction. What? What did you find? What did the I say? So I'm asking this question for a couple of reasons. I want to hear her thinking and I want her to hear. I want her peers to hear her thinking. And I want to also hear if the I gave the right answer, because as we all know, I hallucinates and so far at least at the level that I've given. And I think it's been accurate and I think partially is that I'm uploading the PDF, I'm saying here is your source material I want you to use from. If I were to say do this, say in a geology class, and it just shoots out geology stuff and it's got PhD level geology stuff, you know, I got eleventh graders and I don't want it at a super high level. I want it at the level that's appropriate for them. And that means the textbook has the appropriate content. So I'm training the AI to only use my uploaded content. And then I say, hey, Camila, you, uh, you were asking about the magnetic properties of of minerals. Tell me more about that. And this is a this is we're doing this as a class. And so I'll pick on a number of kids and ask them to kind of share their dialogue. And what's happening too, is that I am seeing the more reticent kid, the student who is not the one who's going to raise their hand because they're all asking the AI a question, as if they're having an individual conversation with me or my AI assistant. I guess you could say, and they're learning something about that. But again, the big idea at the top of the podcast is I want to start training them to ask AI the question in the midst of them doing the pre-work when they're doing it on their own. So this is one of the biggest problems in flip learning is that spontaneous question. And that has been solved by AI. Now, as many of you know, I am not I'm not one hundred percent behind AI in general. I worry that it's going to stupefy our students because when students over rely on AI. There's research that's showing that it is decreasing cognitive function. ET cetera. ET cetera. There's lots of things to talk about there. We want students to go through the process of productive struggle. And the good news about how I'm using the AI in this, this bell ringer thing is that the students are struggling with a question, and the AI is tutoring them through it, and they're having to read and analyze. And they know that after they've done their conversation with the AI, that I'm likely to ask them a question. So they're paying close attention, and it's really helping them to actually think about thinking it's very metacognitive for them. And then also I'm trying to train them simultaneously that when they're doing the work at home, that they can still pull up the AI tutor and have ask it a question. One note, though, when I first did this interesting thing is our AI tutor must be rule based. And they asked a question and the student said it wouldn't give me the answer, it wouldn't give me the answer. So I had to actually in my thing, I said, please actually give them the answer, but then go deeper because there's a rule based thing, which is a good thing, by the way, if it's an a tutor that you want it just to, you know, snap, give them the answer I want it. You want it to help them get to the answer. And so anyways, uh, it's been a fascinating, uh, experiment for my students and for me to see real positive use of AI, because last year was a fail on AI. Uh, I had I actually asking questions and then what these students were doing same class with different batch of kids is they would go home and use AI to answer the AI, and they never really understood it. And me forcing them to do the AI activity in class. And again, it's a limited five or six minute thing that leads to a conversation. It's been it's been stunning how well that's worked. And yeah, so I is solving one of the biggest problems in flip learning. And I am just ecstatic that this is working. So I hope this technique will help those of you who are flipping your class, or even if even if you're not flipping your class, using whatever I tutor you have might be a wise choice to do a bell ringer, to have a conversation. You know, maybe querying their background knowledge about a topic that you're about to embark on or whatever it might be, creating these small little things, uh, five minute bell ringers is, is is a game changer and a very good use of I. Well,
00:09:01 Jon Bergmann: I encourage you guys to, uh, hit your like, on the podcast, share the podcast with others. I'd love to see more people listening and I hope that you find this helpful. So yeah, this is John Bergmann and I encourage you to go out and reach every student.
