Ixchell Reyes 0:00
Can AI be used effectively for feedback and grading? Jen Roberts is here to tell us how she does it.

Brent Warner 0:19
Welcome to the diesel podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, and I’m here, as always, with the amazing ishle Reyes is shell. How’s it going?

Ixchell Reyes 0:36
It’s going by the time you hear this episode, I will be running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get ready to travel overseas. That’s

Brent Warner 0:47
right. So I came back and settled in, and now you’re leaving. So here we go.

Ixchell Reyes 0:52
Yeah, but you’re teaching, you’re back in the classroom.

Brent Warner 0:55
I’m teaching and back in the classroom. So it’s good to be back talking about a lot of these things, about using, again, more using AI with students. And so today, I think both of us are very happy to have the Jen Roberts joining and telling us about how she uses AI with her students and feedback and grading. And so you shall. Let’s jump over to talking with Jen, jumping right in. Okay, so we are happy to bring on to the show. Jen Roberts, Jen, you and I know each other for a while, quite a while. I think time is disappearing on me, but, but through Q. But for anyone who doesn’t know, Jen Roberts is a nationally board certified high school English teacher with more than 25 years of experience teaching English language arts and social science in grades seven through 12. She is the author of power up making the shift to one to one teaching and learning and a Google for Education, certified innovator since 2011 So Jen, you’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. Interests include literacy, instruction, levering, leveraging technology to make teaching more efficient and effective. And the wonderful blog at lit and tech com is your your baby there, and it’s been a go to for a lot of people over the years. So Jen, we’re really happy to have you on the show. Welcome.

Jen Roberts 2:29
Thank you.

Brent Warner 2:31
So Jen, one of the things that we really wanted to talk to you today about we’re kind of jumping right in, is the AI conversation, and you had an article where you were featured from I think was calm matters, where it talked about you a few other people as well, but you were, you were kind of featured about using AI, both for feedback and for grading, and what that conversation looks like. And I know it’s kind of a hot button conversation for a lot of people, you know, some people are scared of some people are interested in it. Some people are totally unaware of it. But let’s just kind of get right into it, which is what’s happening in your class, right? Like, let’s get, let’s get that big picture here.

Jen Roberts 3:19
So I’m actually working on a new blog post just about that, almost that almost that exact question, what’s happening in my class. So the AI for grading, I kind of think the grading part is sort of the third rail of AI, and I’m happy to talk about it, but, but let’s talk about the feedback part first, because I think that’s a little more interesting, and what it’s doing with my students. And, you know, I started using feedback kind of cautiously with my seniors. I figured they’re seniors, they can handle things that are a little more interesting. And I started with brisk and I had about 30 minutes one day to go through all of their final papers for first semester, and I wanted to leave them all some feedback, just because they were about to have about an hour of peer feedback and then another hour of final revisions. And I thought I would like to leave them some of my feedback before they get to those things. I didn’t have time, obviously, to do that in the traditional method, so I used brisk and I dropped AI feedback onto every one of their papers in under 30 minutes. And then they came in and they did their writing response group with their peers, and I sat back and realized that was a richer experience, because even though they’ve been doing writing response group with their peers for, you know, most of the semester when the AI feedback was there as well, their conversation wasn’t just about the paper they were reading. It was also about the validity of that AI feedback. And there they ended up sort of agreeing with some of it and disagreeing with some of it, and that was fine, but I just love fine, but I just love that. It added to that conversation. It also prompted them to have conversations about things that I don’t think they would have come to on their own. So because the AI feedback was suggesting certain moves that the writer could make, those that became part of the discussion in the. Group, and then they go to the next person’s paper, and they were using some of the feedback from the AI to the previous paper and applying that to the next paper to see, you know, would this work here too? So it upped the level of their conversation about the student work. And then the student writers themselves who got that feedback got a chance to process they all knew it was aI feedback. I labeled it really clearly. They got a chance to process what that AI feedback was telling them about their paper, and then they had one more hour of writing time to do some final revisions and submit that. And the feedback from my seniors was that was really helpful. They really liked that. So I then moved into putting some brisk feedback on my ninth graders papers and things like that. And that sort of ended up something like this. I’d sit down with a group of kids, it’s writing workshop time. People are all writing, and I’d say, Who’s ready for AI feedback? And a brave child would raise their hand, and I’d say, Okay, go. Here you go. Here’s your AI feedback. And I’d say, who’s next? And there’d be like two other kids who were ready, and two other kids who were like, oh, not yet. And one kid who was like, No, I don’t want that at all. Um. And so I’d move around the room, and I’d end up giving AI feedback to about half the kids, well, putting my own eyeballs on it as well. Like I had to open their paper, and I’d have to look it over and see how much they’d written, and see what direction they were going. And I’d spit out the AI feedback, and it would pretty much match what I would want to say, but I would, I would drop it on there, and I’d move on to the next student, and if at some point someone would say to me, is this feedback good? And I’d say, I don’t know. What do you think it’s your paper, right? Um, and that was kind of powerful. It’s like I wasn’t the one vetting the feedback. I mean, I was making sure that it at least, you know, it wasn’t completely crazy. And it never was. It was always, you know, very good. Brisk does a really good job making sure the feedback is actually applicable to what the students are writing. It might not always encapsulate everything that was in the assignment, because when brisk looks at the student paper, it doesn’t necessarily know what the assignment was, it could know what the rubric is. If I give it to it, and especially when I gave it the rubric, the feedback was pretty spot on. And what I would say to my students is, I’m not coming with you to college. You have to learn to read the feedback for yourself and decide if it’s valid for you or not, and if, and if you have a question, I’m right here, like, please, if you think the AI feedback is wrong, raise your hand. Call me over. We’ll look at it together. I would love to do that with you. And overall, students found that feedback was pretty darn helpful. The problem was I was still the gatekeeper, and that meant that I needed to be physically present with the kid. Well, not I didn’t have to be physically present, but the kid had to be ready for the feedback, and I wasn’t going to drop AI feedback onto a ninth grader who wasn’t ready for it. And what I found was they weren’t always ready for it when I was ready to give it. And some of them were kind of never ready for it. And some of them were like, oh, I want feedback, but don’t look at my paper. I’m like, Well, I can’t not look at your paper while giving you feedback, even with AI, and so that that was challenging. And then the by the end of the school year, magic school had released magic student, and I was able to say, Okay, here’s your feedback room. You know, when you’re ready for feedback, you click this link, you drop in your paper or what you’ve written so far, and it’ll tell you what your feedback is, and the participation went way up. They really liked that because they didn’t have to show it to me. Yeah, yeah. And that was kind of fabulous. It’s like, they didn’t, they didn’t like things they weren’t ready to show me yet. I try to be really non judgmental in my classroom, but there’s still that element of, like, I don’t want to show anyone yet. Um, they were going and getting multiple iterations of AI feedback, and they’re writing a better they really liked that.

Ixchell Reyes 8:50
So Jen, I want to sort of step back just a little bit. We do. We have, of course, talked about brisk and also magic school and on the show, but we do have several listeners who are probably going to be introduced to these tools for the first time today, as they’re listening to you. And I just want to make sure everybody knows that brisk is a chrome accession, correct? And I actually don’t know how long it’s been around, but I’ve recently discovered it, maybe half a year ago or so.

Jen Roberts 9:20
It’s been around. I think it’s going on at least it’s a year and a half, perhaps.

Ixchell Reyes 9:24
Okay, yeah, so for me, it’s brand new, and it’s, it’s blown me away. And then you also mentioned Magic School AI, and that is a separate tool that’s not an extension, correct? So you’re using both of those. Magic

Jen Roberts 9:37
School is a magic school. AI is a website. You go to the website. From there, you can click a button that says, launch to students, and you pick the tools that you want students to have access to, which is kind of fabulous. So I’ll use the feedback tool and the sentence starter tool and the idea generator, or whatever it is they need, because I want AI to lower the cognitive load for my students so that they’re able to produce writing. Work, and that’s different for every kid. So everybody needs something a little different. So

Brent Warner 10:05
Jen, I, I have something similar that I do in my class for the very first writing assignment that they do, which is, you know, we they do a writing assignment on day one of class, then I get it back, and then I give them the feedback. Now, I did mine a little sneaky, because the first time, because it’s part of the conversation, which is, I gave them a feed. You know, this feedback from, I think I did it through being, or, sorry, being, it’s co pilot, copilot and or chatgpt in one of these ones. So the idea was, let them look at the feedback, let them analyze that feedback, and then we kind of pulled back into the conversation of like, Hey, by the way, this is AI. Now, what do you think about it differently? So it was a little bit of a surprise, but also kind of introducing and opening up the conversation around AI. Moving forward, I will always tell them when it’s AI, but the first time was kind of like, you know, just like a trick and a little fun, but I’ll notice, I noticed that one thing interesting that happened, because I went on sabbatical for a year. The first time I did it in spring of 2023, there were quite a lot of mistakes on the feedback, and there were, you know, like, little things that were weird. And this time around a year. So fall of 2024, it’s like, whoa. There’s not much, not much wrong with this feedback overall. And so before it was opening up a conversation with my students, like, hey, let’s take a look at where some of the problem areas are. Yes, let’s analyze it in terms of your work, or you you kind of seeing what you understand from this. But I’m also a little sad that it’s as good as it is, because now I little worried that it incentivizes them to just say, Oh, well, I can just use this. Or, you know, I can just have it write these things and so are, how are you dealing with. I mean, it’s an interesting thing when it’s such good quality, right? Or and are you interacting with that same issue? And have you dealt with it?

Jen Roberts 12:11
I’m not having an issue with the feedback getting better. That seems to be very okay with me. I really appreciate that the tools allow me to upload a rubric when I add the rubric, and the feedback is tailored to the rubric that definitely helps my students and motivates them because they do. I mean, we would love for kids to just write things because they feel like writing, but we know that grades are a motivating factor and they want a better grade, and that’s a piece of that. And so what I appreciated about magic student the shift there was it empowered the students. It empowered the students to get their own feedback when they were ready for it. At the moment they were ready for it, four or five, multiple times if they wanted it. And students who would never have called me over and said, I’m ready for feedback. I found them putting their writing through magic school, 4-5-6 times, and getting better each time.

Brent Warner 13:05
On the back end of that, because I haven’t used it in a teaching context. I’ve used it, you know, playing with it alone, but not with my students. Can you? Can you monitor what’s going on from that so you have access to what’s happening? So

Jen Roberts 13:20
if I am curious about any particular students conversation with a magic school tool, I can go in and see every single thing that was exchanged between the student and the tool. In practice, do I review all of that? No, because, you know, I have 140 students, and if they’re all using magical, magic student four or five times, I’m actually, you know, what I want to spend my time looking at is their writing, not the feedback they got on their writing, right? So, but the the empowering piece of it is what’s really cool. And then this year, it’s it’s become less even it’s moving even earlier in the writing process. And my ninth graders were writing just last week. They had to write a piece about, you know, their name and what it meant to them, right? Like, no, that wasn’t the one. The one that they were writing about, that we ended up responding to was the single story. So we watched Chimamanda, the DTS fabulous TED talk about the single story, and we read a great art great essay, blanking on his first name, but Dr Stevens wrote about his single story experience, and then I asked them to write about a time when they had a single story about someone else, or someone else had single story about them, right? It’s just a narrative practice, because we’re in a narrative unit, and I gave them early access to a feedback room, and what I found was I have a lot of ninth graders, and ninth graders in the fall don’t have a lot of writing stamina, and so they would, you know, a student would typically, you know, write for some students who say, you have half an hour to write this, and they just spend 30 minutes writing, and they go, others are done in five minutes. They’re like, they get to get to the. Seven minute mark, and they’re like, I’m done. Like, oh, okay, interesting. And then I know my job as a writing teacher is I come over and I look at their writing and I interrogate it a little bit. I say, How are you feeling in this moment? Or could you say more about this piece? Or could you add some details here? And I do that. I totally do that, but I’ve also been able to now say, Have you asked the AI for feedback yet? Oh, no, I haven’t done that. Let me go do that, right? So they drop their writing in. And, of course, it tells them all those things I was just about to tell them, right? Like, let me say more about this. Can you expand more on this idea or that idea? And and then they go right back to writing. And it freed me up to spend my time with some of my second language students and some of my students and some of my students who have IEPs, because all the kids who are perfectly capable of writing more, but just kind of want to be done, they just want me as a teacher to come over and say, You’re right, you’re done. You can just play video games for the rest of the period, right? Um, but now the AI is telling them, you know, giving them the same advice I would have given them, and they go back in, and they go back in and they go back in. And that iteration and that revision that’s now happening, it’s just that piece. It says, but it would be better if. But it would be better if, right? And so instead of me running around like a crazy person trying to hit every single one of those kids who says they’re done, and tell them, you know, one thing or two things they need to add they can keep going back to the AI. And I loved that for them. It was really powerful for many of my students. And then it did, like I said, it allowed me to sit with one student who was kind of stuck, and we could talk through what was going on with him and what the issues were right so that that just sort of, I’d never considered AI feedback as a motivating factor. And it really was, it motivated them to keep going and write more and and one student was a little frustrated. He’s like, I’ve improved all these things. And every time register, when they put it back in, wow, you’ve changed this and this and this. And that’s great because of this and like, it’s responding to the exact changes they’re making, and it knows all the iterations. And one student said, I can’t wait till I put this in there, and it says, it’s great. I’m like, it’s never gonna give you feedback. No matter what you put in there, it’s gonna give you feedback. They’re like, it’s never gonna tell me I’m done. I’m like, No, it is never.

Ixchell Reyes 17:15
There’s no such thing as perfect writing.

Jen Roberts 17:18
This may wear off, but but but right now I do really like that aspect of it, so

Ixchell Reyes 17:23
I like that to mention the fact that using AI to get feedback is a motivating factor, because just recently, well, just recently, Brent and I got accepted to present at TESOL and thank you. And then 10, 10% of their submissions get accepted, which is a pretty small number. And at the time of submitting our abstract, Brent was overseas. I was, of course, handling a bunch of other deadlines, and I almost, almost did not submit an abstract, because I thought, who’s going to have time to look at my abstract right now? So what I did, I uploaded the rubrics, and I asked, AI, I think I was using Claude, Claude. Ai, love Claude. I asked it, yep, I asked it to give me feedback according to the rubric, and I wanted some areas to refine. And sure enough, it did. And I went off that feedback, and I thought, Oh, well, you know what, if it doesn’t go through. It doesn’t go through. But again, it would have, I would have been unmotivated to ask another colleague, because most of my colleagues are busy, and you are required to have, you know, to have someone review it and give you some feedback. And that would have taken a couple of days, and it would have taken me arranging time with someone so I can see why. That would encourage students who maybe are reticent to go to the teacher or just, you know, and plus, it frees a teacher, because now I know, now I actually know. And now I have, you know, record of things that maybe my writing is weak and and I have to go back. And I obviously, as a more experienced writer, I can keep track of what that looks like for the next abstract that I write.

Jen Roberts 19:01
And of course, if you’re using Claude as an adult, you get to say, like, be more critical (laughter) You can say, tell me, this is great. So you can, you can tweak that a little bit.

Ixchell Reyes 19:15
I have a I have another question. So now that you’re you’re using AI feedback. Have you seen any changes in the student writing with AI feedback compared to traditional grading?

Jen Roberts 19:26
So you know, feedback is most effective when it comes during the writing process, but it’s always really hard to tell when during the writing process, right? When is that child ready for the feedback? When do they need it? Like you open 20 kids different 20 different kids, Google Docs, and they are each in a different stage of their writing, and you don’t know, you know who’s ready and who’s not, because if you give it to them before they’re ready, they’re like, Well, I knew all that. I was about to get there. And if you give it to them too late, they’re kind of done. And they’re like, Yeah, I don’t want to go back to it. So giving them the power to get the feedback when they’re ready has been really crucial. Important. Because the old way, I mean, ideally, we would always give kids feedback during the writing process, before it was due, before it was done. But when you had 140 or 180 students, you you don’t realistically get to do that. And so what’s, what’s happened is this sort of practice among English teachers of giving feedback as a post mortem, because that’s when you know, who cares if it takes you three weeks to grade all those papers and put feedback on all of them, because that’s really does what it is, what it takes. And so we would, we would put a score on it, and we would use the feedback kind of as a way, I think, to justify the score.

Ixchell Reyes 20:35
Yeah, that’s true. I remember the days of doing that,

Jen Roberts 20:38
and then they, they’d get the feedback two or three weeks later, and they’d be like, Oh, I gotta be, I’m happy with that. And then the time you spent giving feedback to a kid who’s happy with their grade was wasted time.

Brent Warner 20:48
Yeah, they’re never gonna look at it, yeah.

Jen Roberts 20:51
So feedback with I mean, there’s actual, like, academic research that shows that feedback with a grade is less effective than feedback without a grade. So when you’re giving the feedback as a post mortem, and your hope is that, like, oh, well, now we’re going to go through this reflection review process, and then kids are going to keep track of the feedback they got on paper number one, so they can apply those things to paper number two, like, oh, how well is that working, please, right? So when they’re getting the feedback in the moment, because they’re ready for it, and they’re asking for it, and they’re, you know, and that they still ask me to sit down and say, Well, can you look at it too? I’m like, Yes, I can absolutely look at it too. But first you’re going to go through the AI. And if you’re and if you’ve taken, if you’ve looked at the AI feedback and it is no longer helpful to you, then you come to me. But if it’s giving you a direction that you think you should go, then go there first before you, you know, bring it to me. So I’m finding myself with, you know, better student writing coming in, so they’re getting a little less feedback on the back end, because they’re, they’re, don’t, they don’t need it at that point, their their writing got better, and now they’re, they’re, you know, if I’m scoring that that paper scoring really well on the rubric, I don’t feel the need to leave it a lot of feedback.

Brent Warner 22:08
So, yeah, this is, I mean, this is speaking to me very you’re speaking to my heart in the way that I, I approach, you know, interacting with my students as well. So this whole thing is super interesting, because to give that power over to the students, you know, like, by definition, it’s empowering, right? And then they feel the whole thing. But I’m also hearing too, and this is something I’ve been wanting to do more of, is that it allows for a better opportunity to do kind of a flipped learning classroom style, where it’s like, Hey, we’re doing the writing in class together, you can get that feedback, and I can watch you go get that AI feedback, but I can also come in, intervene as needed, and we can get the whole process done in the hour, hour and a half, two hours, whatever, of our class period. And that, to me, also alleviates a lot of the concerns that teachers talk about when they’re like, Well, I just think my students are just going to have chat, GPT, write the whole thing and then just submit it, right? And so

Jen Roberts 23:05
That is a whole other podcast, (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes 23:09
Which I’m sure it exists.

Jen Roberts 23:12
Yeah, no, the whole academic honesty, preserving authentic writing that that is, you know, another three hour workshop, um, but, but, yes, it does help. And the truth is, I’ve always had my students do a lot of their writing in class, yeah, because I do think homework is inequitable. And I’ve had one to one laptops in my classroom since 2008 and my students didn’t all have Wi Fi, so I just sort of adjusted, you know, they couldn’t go home and write on the internet because they didn’t have computers at home and and initially, at least those laptops lived in a cart in a cart in my classroom. So if they didn’t have a computer at home, we had to do all the writing in class, and that’s what we’ve done for, you know, 20 years now, and I’m okay with that. And does it help reduce some of that academic dishonesty, maybe, but the I’m not that worried about kids using AI to cheat? I’m really not. And someone asked me once, like, aren’t you worried that the students are really good writer, and then they’ll use AI to cheat? You won’t be able to tell and I’m like, then I’m not worried about that kid. They’re already a really good writer, they’ll be fine.

Brent Warner 24:15
So this kind of better problem? Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I know we only have a couple minutes left here. Jen, but, but we did want to talk, talk briefly about that controversial element, which is the grading. Like AI for grading, right? Can it be trusted? Can it be can it be used? Or is it something that we can wait for? Or what are your takes on the AI for grading?

Jen Roberts 24:40
So I read a great study, and I can get you the link to it for the show notes, but I read a great study that showed that on criteria based grading, like using a rubric, the AI matched the trained teachers. On feedback, the trained teachers were better slight. Actually, and this was using 3.5 chat chipoty 3.5 so it’s, you know, as you said, feedback has gotten better. So the but, of course, the economy of scale. When you know the teacher takes 20 minutes to give that feedback, and the AI takes two seconds. You you can’t argue too hard with that. But if you do, you know in in teaching, sorry, in grading, there’s this thing called inter rater reliability, right? If you have 10 teachers grade the same essay, will they all give the exact same grade? No, we know they won’t. We know there’s going to be variation in that the AI falls right in the middle of that variation, is what the study found. And so the it’s accurate on a rubric, if you give it a rubric and you give us in writing, you know, yeah, there will be times when the AI and I might be off by a number. Part of why this does work for me when I’m doing it is, I’m using a four point grading scale. I’m using standard based grading. So that helps, because I have a co teacher, and I sometimes have student teachers, and I sometimes have teachers and AIDS, and we’re all evaluating student work, and I need to make sure those four adults are on the same page. And so if I’m using a 10 point scale, there’s a there’s less iterator reliability than if I’m using a full point scale. So if I want to make sure my co teacher and I are giving the same grade, if I want to make sure the teacher make sure the teacher down the hall and I are giving the same grade, I want to use a four point scale. So, you know, excels, proficient, basic beginning, right? And now, when I hand some of that off to the AI, and I typically use writable for that, because my district is paying for it, and they have aI assisted grading. So writable has my rubric, the four point rubric, it suggests a score. The student work is right there. I’m reviewing the student work, I’m reviewing the score, I’m reviewing the feedback and making sure everything matches the way I want it to. And then I’m clicking, you know, submit next, right? So if my ninth graders, all right, a paragraph, it used to take me, you know, if I had 140 of those, it took me 10 days to, you know, a week to get all of them back to them right. And now do that in three or four days, um, you know, depending on how many sections of ninth grade I have that year, this year, it’s going to be faster, because I only have two sections of ninth graders. Um, but the the the review and approve process is faster and easier on my brain than the decision process. So when I have to decide what score something is getting, I go slower than I have to like, go, Yes, I that matches. I see how this lines up. Now there are, you know, 10 or 15% of the grades that I’m like, No, that’s a four, not a three. What were you thinking? Right? So I am changing things here and there, and sometimes for the you know, sometimes up, sometimes down, but I am still the final arbiter of what that grade is. But it’s pretty darn accurate.

Ixchell Reyes 27:54
It’s like, you’re, you’re – you’re employing the aid of AI, and you’re just norming it as you would another teacher, right, right?

Jen Roberts 28:02
And the thing is, like we would do this unit with with our ninth graders, where they’d write a series of three analytical paragraphs, and I was using writable and the AI feedback to give feedback on each of those paragraphs. And my writing partner, my teaching partner, sorry, my teaching partner, who said, you know, she said, Well, I give a lot of really detailed feedback on this first one, and that takes me a while. So they don’t get any feedback on the second one, and then they apply the feedback from the first one to the third one. I’m like, okay, so they write three paragraphs. They get three chances to practice, but the second practice is blind, right? Because she can, could not physically have enough time to give them all the feedback they needed before they got to that second paragraph in the curriculum. And so my students are getting more feedback faster, and that’s improving their writing faster. But here’s they’re also getting more writing assignments, which is

Ixchell Reyes 28:57
What, yeah, what I was thinking is me as a student. I remember back in the day before AI and before all of these tools, once you submitted a draft, you could sort of rest, because you didn’t have to work on that draft again until you got feedback. And if you had no feedback to work from, then no need to look at it. And so now, if students are receiving continuous feedback, as you said, they’re constantly, you know, upgrading their writing or refining it, and it’s a continuous process all the way until the final draft, or whenever it’s due,

Jen Roberts 29:27
And they’re getting the feedback from me while it’s still in their head, you know, it’s not three weeks later, it’s a day later, you know, two days. So

Brent Warner 29:34
it helps, yeah. And then one, I’ll do one little of my own add ins here, which is allowing students to come to you and challenge the grade is another part of the conversation, right? So if you say, Hey, if you think this is wrong, you better come tell me and we’ll we’ll talk about it, right? Because that is something I’ve always allowed students to do. And say, like, hey, let’s do this. But now, if we’re going to say, hey, there’s going to be some AI inside of here to get it back for you fast. Faster. But like, you know, I mean, there are possibilities, just like being human in regular life, like I might miss something if I’m scanning over it, or whatever else too. And so really making that a student centered option for them to say, like, Hey, I have more control over the conversation where this goes or how this ends up, is, you know, from my perspective, a really powerful way to to, again, give them the power in the in their own writing. So absolutely, I’m really excited about all these possibilities. How are we doing?

Ixchell Reyes 30:33
I have one I have one more question. We’re like running out of time. But you mentioned writable. You mentioned we talked about magic school, AI and brisk and I’m wondering if you have any others that, any other tools that you want to throw out there for people who are either thinking about trying AI for feedback and writing, or if there’s anything you just want to mention that are maybe your favorite tools,

Jen Roberts 30:55
You know, Brisk and magic school are two real go tos To me for for student feedback and and writeable is the only one I use now for grading. I don’t want to put student work into chat GPT. I don’t think that’s fair or equitable, you know, I don’t like their policies around training on user data. So I want to keep my my student work within something that is, you know, at least, at least outwardly sanctioned by my district, although one of the one of the news reporters sort of attacked by board members and said, How dare you vote on this thing that, you know, provided AI grading. And when we, when we dug into it, we found out that the board voted to approve paying for writable in 2022 before AI grading was a feature, you know. So like things change rapidly in this world, but I love that AI is becoming an integrated part of quizzes and formative and all of these other great ed tech tools that is just going to lighten the load for teachers. And I don’t work any less. I really don’t. I’m still working just as much. I’m just doing more in that time, and that’s really benefiting my students. Love it. Very cool.

Ixchell Reyes 32:07
All right, it is time for our fun finds, and this time it is election season. So I have rediscovered the active vote app. Um, if you’re not quite sure about who you’re going to vote for, on what, what you need to learn. The app is free, and you can take a quiz, and it’ll give you feedback on everything, every candidate. So I just really want people to go out there and vote. So active vote. Awesome. Awesome. Brent, what do you got?

Brent Warner 32:37
Mine? I’ll just go – They opened up an ice cream place near me, which is, I guess, a nationwide chain, Strickland’s ice cream place. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it, but they only make, like, two or three flavors a day, and so they they have a very limited handful. It’s all handmade in shop with a couple of selections. And then they have a menu for the month. And you can like, Hey, if you want your mint chip, you better come on the 28th whatever it is, right? And so they have their vanilla by default, and then that. The rest of it is everything else but really good quality ice cream. So if it’s around your neighborhood, if you find one, it seems to, I think it started in Akron, Ohio, or something like that. But Strickland’s ice cream will be my fun find. Jen, what do you got? Well,

Jen Roberts 33:20
mine is also, mine is also food related Brent, and I think we’re on the same track. Um, I about a year ago, a friend turned me on to the Too Good To Go app. Do we know about that one? No, Too Good To Go is an app that connects with local restaurants and bakeries and they put out like surprise bags. And you check the app and it says, There’s a surprise bag for a bakery near you, and you say, reserve. And then when you go pick it up in the like the pickup window, it sort of it saves food from going to waste. Just the idea, nice, nice. And my husband and I got this, you know, for 10 bucks, we got a great bag of gourmet food from a local restaurant, and it was sandwiches and salad, and that’s what we had for dinner. It was fantastic. Great idea. That’s

Brent Warner 34:00
really smart. I like that a lot.

Jen Roberts 34:01
Too good to go.

Brent Warner 34:03
Is the name of the is it the numbers, or is it the words “too” it’s 2t

Jen Roberts 34:06
I’ts “too” – t o o, G, O, O, D, T O, no,

Brent Warner 34:11
They’re not trying to screw with us with the with the spelling. (laughter)

Jen Roberts 34:15
They’re not trying to screw with you with the spelling. No, it’s, it’s, it’s 2o and then one. Oh,

Brent Warner 34:19
yep, awesome.

Ixchell Reyes 34:23
For the show notes and other episodes. Check out diesel.org/ 109, we are on the social medias, most of them. I am @Ixy_Pixie, that’s I X y, underscore p, i x, y,

Brent Warner 34:38
I’m at @BrentGWarner and Jen. Where can people find you?

Speaker 1 34:44
I am still on the Twitters. It’s at @Jen Roberts1 and on threads at @theJenRoberts

Brent Warner 34:52
awesome. And we’ll make sure –

Ixchell Reyes 34:54
that, yeah, that was gonna say the blog, the articles, the other, podcast episodes.

Brent Warner 34:59
Oh, yeah. All the things, the show notes, will be there for you all. So Jen, we could have definitely kept on going. There’s so many parts of this. It’s so much fun, but we really appreciate this. And everybody, please go check out Jen’s work and maybe a further explanation of what’s happening now in your classroom at lit and tech.com I’m super happy we finally got you on, Jen, there’s just so much interesting stuff you’ve been doing over all the years. And so thank you so much for joining us.

Jen Roberts 35:30
Thank you for having me.