Ixchell Reyes 0:00
How do we help students build their writing skills when AI can do the work for them? We’re discussing approaches to support students to do the hard work in this episode of the DIESOL Podcast.

Brent Warner 0:23
Welcome to the DIESOL 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 author of Ed Tech for Multilingual Learners, and I am here with the exuberant Ishll Reyes,

Ixchell Reyes 0:44
yay, a new adjective every time,

Brent Warner 0:47
although your yay was not as exuberant as I was hoping.

Brent Warner 0:51
Yay!! There you go, that’s exuberance.

Brent Warner 0:55
Uhh… sure (laughter) award-winning educator in innovation and professional development, all the good things. So, Ixchell, how are you doing?

Ixchell Reyes 1:06
Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. How are you?

Brent Warner 1:08
Nice. I’m feeling well. Yeah, we thought we’d talk today. We’re going to jump right into it. I think we’re going to talk about writing. We haven’t.. I don’t think we’ve done a sit-down episode for a long time just focused on writing, writing, yeah. And so you and I, over the years, you know, we’ve developed techniques and things that we like. Some of our them are go-to, some of them are kind of, you know, more newer things that we’re experimenting with, and always trying things out. I’m sure I’ve mentioned at least some of the things that I’m going to talk about. I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, but I figure if I can’t remember, maybe our, you know, the the DIESOL crew can’t remember either, needs a refresh,

Ixchell Reyes 1:49
Worth revisiting. Yep, same for me, same for me.

Brent Warner 1:52
Yeah, so, so we’re going to talk a little bit about writing, and I think it’s a good time here in the summer, so maybe people are on vacation, and maybe, maybe they’re doing the last episode’s eight week curriculum. You really didn’t like that. We called it a curriculum, yeah. But you know, like challenging yourselves to do other things, and so the one thing about writing classes, or if you’re actually teaching writing, is like you can have, you know, you really have to spend some time sitting down with it, mulling over changes that you’re going to make, so hopefully during the summer this is a little helpful to give you some extra time to think things over, if you’re planning on, you know, maybe applying some of these – some of them are real easy, some of them maybe take a little bit more practice and trying, but into maybe the fall semester, so

Ixchell Reyes 2:39
yeah, mine stick, mine’s taking a couple of iterations to get it to where I think I like it, but I’m sure it’s gonna change so…

Brent Warner 2:47
And let’s, let’s mention that too, because I don’t want anyone to feel like, oh, I gotta, you know, writing and working with students, and like, you know, we kind of tease this with, like, helping students, you know, understand writing in the age of AI, actually, before we even get into techniques, let’s talk about why this is so important, because I’m seeing a lot of students, and they’ve been so raised in a system that’s just so, you know, whatever country they’re coming from, but you know, it’s like, you gotta get A’s, you have to, you know, like, those grades are so important, and so, and then at the same time they’re in a system that itself totally focuses on output instead of process, right, and so we’re sitting here going, well, what’s your essay, right? What did you write? What is the final result of this thing? And very rarely are teachers in there going, let’s talk about how you wrote it. Let’s, let’s get through the process. I mean, this is what we’re supposed to be doing, right? But it’s like you kind of teach them those things, and then you’re maybe not as involved as they’re actually doing it, and then at the end you’re like, okay, the final result is proof of your knowledge or your understanding around these things. Now, there have always been issues with cheating, of course, right? Like, you know, hey, maybe they took (unclear)

Ixchell Reyes 4:03
And those will always exist.

Brent Warner 4:05
Those will always exist. And at the same time, I worry that the AI is driving students to misunderstand the value of writing, right? Like, the where they’re like, hey, one, I mean, if they say they don’t value writing, okay? Like, that’s its own side conversation, but if they’re saying, ‘Hey, I just want to make sure I get an A in this class, and it’s like, ‘How do we start shifting the entire conversation around your learning? Is the important part, the grade that you get for that is not important, and you know, how do we actually measure your real learning and not just a thing that you’ve given us at the end of all of this work, right? And so, or at the end of whatever time period that we’ve set, so this is kind of what we’re trying to deal with. This gets much, much deeper, and you know, we can have longer conversations all around this single topic

Ixchell Reyes 4:58
Reprogramming, the brain that’s used to output.

Brent Warner 5:03
It’s brutal. Okay, let me, let me tell you just a short story here, because it was happened last week. One of my students was like, so upset that, you know, most of my assignments are complete or incomplete, right? And then occasionally there’s like a group of assignments that are all together, and so in Canvas, because you can only give like points, like you can do complete or incomplete for one thing, but like I had like five or six that are kind of grouped assignments, like have you done all of this each week for everything, right? And so the way that I set that up in Canvas, I was like, well, that one’s kind of points because it is, you know, six different assignments that are all into the one category, and just as you’re doing it, you get the point for it, right? And so, anyways, this one student missed one point, and so all the rest of the semester she was doing great on these, like, you know, complete, incomplete, making sure she’s finishing all of her assignments, and then five out of six on this one assignment, and she was like, I need to get a six, and I’m like, we have been trying to break you of this habit of chasing points this entire time, and now, because of the failures of the structure of Canvas, you are now back right back in that loop, right, and like stuck in this conversation where we’re really wasting time, because she already had like a 94% in the class, like there’s no higher than an A in the class, right? And so it’s like, why are we having this conversation? Like, what value is adding to anything? Because it’s because it’s important. I said, well, why is it important? I have to have 100% you know, like I have to have these points. It’s like, and like, really, couldn’t you know, articulate it clearly, and so I was like, okay, I get it, I totally get it, because we’re part of the system, but also, wow, we got to break this, we got to get out of this,

Ixchell Reyes 6:54
Can I ask what ended up happening?

Brent Warner 6:58
Yeah, I went in and I showed her all of her grades for everything that she’d done up until that point, and I’m like, this is one point, like we’ve already spent. Yeah, basically we just talked about this. What I just said is like we spent 10 minutes just now talking about this one thing, and is it really important? Like, if we’re talking about grades, and at the, you know, the way that I, you know, assign grades at the end of the semester, does this all actually match with what your goals are for showing me your learning, and she’s like, okay, I guess not, I guess it’s okay, but like it wouldn’t have happened if she couldn’t see the numbers.

Ixchell Reyes 7:31
It’s anxiety, right, right, right, exactly right, yeah,

Brent Warner 7:34
and so I get it, like I’m not discounting her feelings or her position on that, because that is a false understanding of learning that she has been programmed, just like all the rest of us have, to understand that this is an accurate showing, and right. And then, of course, you and I know that, like, you know, when we do norming sessions, for examples, it’s like everybody has these totally different ideas, and one person’s A could be another person’s C, and it’s total, you know, like, so even with a pretty good rubric, like, you can still have vastly different understandings of the quality of work. So, anyways, it’s just a thing to be aware of as we kind of talk about this idea, so like, we have to be able to break that down a little bit for our students before we can talk to them about the value of writing, because it’s not just the final output with perfect English that is not really showing me what you’ve been able to learn, or the writing skills, or the thinking that you’ve been able to develop. It’s just showing me a nice product at the end, and, and how are, and so, like, we need to start opening more conversations about saying, like, what are we doing as educational institutions as educators to help our students in a world where they have been trained to give us that output that is perfect, right? And it’s like, well, hold on, let’s, let’s talk about that.

Ixchell Reyes 8:56
And so that’ll have to be another episode, because again, how do we set up a class to be more aware of process versus product?

Brent Warner 9:08
Yeah, that’s right. So we’ll, we’ll hold that for longer for a future conversation that’s a little bit more theoretical. We’re, we already got into it a bit, but, but let’s talk about some practical things to respond to it. So, are you ready? Surface, yes. Swim back up to the top. Alrighty. Okay. Alright. So, Ixchell.. my first topic here, my first suggestion is a non-tech way of doing things, which is I’ve talked about this before. You know that I love it. Go to the whiteboard, so you know, we have 360 whiteboards. We have 360 whiteboards. Get 360 whiteboards at your school if you can. If you can’t, put up posters around the wall, like you know, poster boards around the wall, or whatever else it is. But we have a few things that are important about this, and this. These ideas all come out of the. Building thinking classrooms, right. So it’s, it’s that’s like a, like a math-heavy conversation, but, but it’s true for everybody, which is number one, physical movement, right. Students are when you hunch over, and you’re hunched over a piece of paper, and it’s kind of private, and whatever you’re locking into this kind of protective physical form, and you want to have students up and open and moving around, and physically, like when you write on the board, you’re writing in bigger letters, all of those kinds of things. So there’s real physical movement. There’s a collective feeling whenever you see that everybody else is up there writing and producing something. You know what I mean? Like, you’re, oh, they’re doing it, I’m doing it, it’s okay, right? When you’re looking down a little piece of paper, you don’t know what other people are doing that they’re right, they’re doing the assignment, maybe they’re just kind of, you know, doodling, or maybe they’re just not paying attention, or whatever else it is, right? But when you see all the rest of your class around the room doing the work, then you’re part of that collective, and then this one is a really big one, because a lot of teachers are like, oh, well, I’m just going to, you know, have them write with a pen on a piece of paper that’s taped to the wall or something like that. The whiteboard itself is a big deal because of the temporary nature of the expo pens, or the dry erase pens, right? Because you make a mistake, you just take your fist and you can wipe it, and like, it feels like it’s not a locked-in thing, where when you write with ink, it is locked in, right?

Ixchell Reyes 11:25
And then they focus on the error, it’s not perfect, that they become self-aware, and then it just sort of like shuts down their creativity.

Brent Warner 11:32
Yeah, and they don’t like crossing it all off, because that shows that the air, like, they can still see the air, all these.. so it’s like, so it’s really weird and interesting deep psychology around this.

Ixchell Reyes 11:42
The psychology of the blank slate!

Brent Warner 11:44
Yeah, exactly. And so, so my first one, if you’re trying to encourage more writing, get people up, get to get them moving, make it a collective experience up on the walls as much as you can. I do recognize that not everybody has the whiteboards, but we’ve talked about wipe books before. Wipe books is a great resource, and so if you can get your school to order a few of those flip chart versions of them, you can stick them on the wall, you can take them down, you’ll have like your own version of whiteboards all around the room, so that one can work a lot really well as well.

Ixchell Reyes 12:20
Very cool, so improving writing with chat bots would be more for smaller writing projects, and I have a couple I want to share. The first one is a text-based activity, so maybe you can select the piece that students select the writing piece, so authentic writing that students can use to draw an image. So, this would be a descriptive piece, and it would be something where they’re describing scenery, maybe they’re describing a person. And I’ve done a physical description of someone, and if you’re watching on YouTube, I am going to share, so that you can see, I’m going to share here somewhere, as soon as I find a share button, because…

Brent Warner 13:08
Good ol share buttons, they’re there somewhere.

Ixchell Reyes 13:12
It actually is not over here for me. There we go. Okay, so for this activity I have a selection from the book, The Most Dangerous Game, and it’s a description of generals are off, so students are to identify the descriptive language, and then they’re supposed to draw a picture of what they imagine the face would look like, so students identify the descriptive language, and then they draw an image. They share their image, and then they’re surprised, you know. They have fun showing their versions of what a what high cheekbones might look like, or what the face of an aristocrat looks like. But then we take exactly the same assignment, so the same assignment description of reading the paragraph, and then, based on the details, drawing a picture, we upload that to AI, and then we compare the results of students versus AI, and so then,

Brent Warner 14:17
So students’ own drawings versus AI, AI’s interpretation from the description.

Ixchell Reyes 14:23
Rght, and then we, we, for fun, we do different AI’s to see if it, if, if, if the images are similar, and there will be one that stands out most of the time, but then students now can be, we can take that image, either the image that students drew, take a picture or the image that AI came up with, so ask it now to give it a description in three sentences, for example, and then students compare. Go ahead,

Brent Warner 14:55
So you reverse the process, right?

Ixchell Reyes 14:57
Reverse the process, and then we take a. Can see what language match from the actual text and what was new language, perhaps very, so then, so then we can have, okay, now let’s let’s take a look at now, now you use those new words or those new phrases to describe, to describe that again, nice, so yeah, that is my activity,

Brent Warner 15:19
I love it, so good, and the image-based thing is, we’ve talked about this before, but, like, the image generation, when you’re talking about writing and describing, and all these things, there’s so many interesting possibilities around that.

Ixchell Reyes 15:31
Oh, that’s just students have come up with stuff that I just think, man, I wish we had more time to do this, because you guys would write the curriculum

Brent Warner 15:39
That’s right. Yeah, cool. Okay, so I’ve got an AI one two here. I did this recently. I built out a little activity for students who are working on converting direct quotes to reported speech, right? And so I like this one because it was – it’s kind of short, right? It’s just like single sentences, and so I built a chat bot called Aliens Have Landed in Play Lab, and we’ll have a link to it in the show notes as well. So, if you want to play it yourself, or if you’re in Play Lab, you can steal it and remix it, and whatever you want to do. But the game is basically, they, it’s a chat, so you know they’re talking, talking to the chat, and then the premise is that the student, or the students, I had them sit together as a little two or three people at a computer, and they’re working in the newsroom, and they’re getting all of these phone calls where people are telling them about sighting, like seeing these like alien sightings around town, and so then they’re getting these quotes from these people, like this is the text that’s coming in, so right, it’s like, you know, Ixchell Reyes quote, I saw a flying saucer land, you know, in the hills above Irvine, right, end quote. And then the student’s job is to convert that into reported speech, so you know, “Ixchell Reyes told us that she saw, or she had seen, a…”, you know, like, so you’re doing the verb tense changes, you’re doing the pronoun changes, all of the different things that you’re doing when you’re moving into reported speech, and then it says, yes, good job, alright, you can take more phone calls, or no, this is wrong, like, you know, whatever else it is, and so it kind of builds as a little game as you’re going through, but it’s one sentence at a time, and it’s like a little motivation to hear what’s going to happen next, who’s going to call next, what kind of weird things that they see, and then at the very end, as they get to it, so your screen sharing, and so then as you get to the very end of it, what it does is it puts together a little newspaper article that uses their reported speech, so it gives a full newspaper article, but it ties in their reported speech into it, so it’s like they had, you know, made a game of it all, and it turned into a reported speech option for them, and so that now they have their newspaper article about the aliens that have landed in town, right? And so it’s light, it’s not too heavy, it’s pretty good. It gives them review of all the language as they’re going through, so saying, hey, like, you know, you’re sharing right now, yes, you hit the 10 pack shift, you missed the, you got the pronoun shift, you miss this thing, whatever else it is, right? Some, some of this is good, like not 100% perfect. Sometimes it misses little bits in it, but then as you get enough points, so as you play it over and over again, or as you keep going through, then once you hit the number of points that we’re looking for, then you either get the article published or you don’t, right? And so that is pretty cool. Yeah, so it’s like gamified. It’s not too heavy, because it’s like one sentence at a time. If they do really well, if they’re getting a few in a row, then it boosts their points up, so it like doubles their points, and so they’re like, okay, I have a better chance of getting to this final score that I wanted to do. So, so a game like that, you can either take it directly from, you know, from our resources, or if you want to just build your own type of chat game like that. It’s a good way to get students going. My students were quite engaged with it when we turned it on for them.

Ixchell Reyes 19:12
This is cool. I might use it soon.

Brent Warner 19:14
Yeah, take it, use it.

Ixchell Reyes 19:17
Alright, so my next activity is again using AI, and this, the last activity I shared, was text-based. So, you start off with the text. This one is image-based, and yes, it is using AI. So, you start with an image to glean vocabulary lists. You start with an AI image to glean vocabulary lists, so it could be a scene or something where students have to describe what’s happening, and then students would have to compare their version, and then again send ask AI to describe what’s happening in the scene, and then. Are the student version versus the AI version, and talk about what did AI do different? Were there different descriptive phrases in there? What kind of adjectives did they use, and what was the same? And then going into the, okay, let’s transform this into now a better draft. Let’s go into rewriting, and then incorporating some of the vocabulary that you have gleaned from AI. Okay, and so, so right now, if you’re listening, this is a scene of it’s a young boy. Looks like this is maybe in the 60s, I think. I don’t know, Bre helped me there. Yeah, could be, or in the South, maybe that’s what I think of when I see this image.

Brent Warner 20:48
Yeah, it’s definitely got like an image of a.. I already maybe even go earlier, maybe 40s or 50s.

Ixchell Reyes 20:54
40s or 50s, yeah, based on the dresses,

Brent Warner 20:57
The dress and the clothes, and then like there’s a tornado in the background, an old wooden church, so it gives kind of that image, yeah, like you said, an image of the South, uh, huh,

Ixchell Reyes 21:04
Yeah, so there, yeah, so there’s a tornado, and now I ask students, answer all of the WH questions, who, what, where, when, why, how, and give me three lines, or depending on the level of the students, some students can write a little bit more, or they actually get into it because they start thinking, oh my gosh, this is, you know, I see a siren up there, and by the way, this image was was made to to try to get students to elicit particular vocabulary, so there’s particular items in there that I wanted, and then we talk about the different versions that students came up with, and then we ask AI to describe, so we do the same thing, and it’s a lot of comparison, but we compile a list of vocabulary, so that we can incorporate again and reuse it. Usually, we post it around the room, and I’m going to show a couple more activities here. You could do this at the sentence level, so a sample sentence might be a young boy walking down the street, but then I asked students to make that sentence into a better sentence, and so now I have examples here of actual student work. Student A said, a light-skinned, chubby, youthful boy with curly hair trembled down the street, and Student B wrote, the boy walked down the street, he is an adolescent, obese with wavy hair, pimples on his face, and he looks shy, but then we fed those to AI, and we said, okay, let’s see if what you imagine was what AI imagines based on your description, and so now I’m revealing the different images, and then what students did right after this is, oh my gosh, that is the boy, the same boy, but he grew up, and now, and now, and so they started naturally wanting to tell a story. Now you can ask them, okay, now I want you to sit down and tell me what is going on here and what’s going to happen, so maybe more of a creative, creative writing, and it does focus on the process, it’s not just a sit down and write for 10 minutes and then we’re done, right?

Brent Warner 23:13
Yeah, like it, that’s that’s very cool, and I could see, you know, and again back to these images, right, it’s like when you have pictures tied in, it makes it so much more engaging, even if it’s just one thing. It’s like, oh, okay, it’s not just like this abstract thing that’s all just text. You’re like looking at it, and you’re kind of thinking, and then you’re processing through. So, I love it. I’ll just do a very short one, a little extra one here, which is using a chat bot to build sentence stems, right, so you can give students a quick little simple prompt, right, and depending on their level, but you could say something along the lines of, like, you know, give me 10 sentence stems to talk about, and then it’s whatever their favorite subject is, right, so if a student loves, you know, baking, then they can put in baking. If a student really loves, you know, soccer, they can put in soccer, right? And so then it can give them all these different sentence stems, and then it’s just things for them to start practicing their language and kind of recognizing what’s going on with. And you can also have them just say simplify it, or give me simpler sentence stems, or give me harder sentence stems, but again, that same thing, where it’s just like you can put that onto the students, they can then kind of recognize what they’re wanting to say about things, but they just get a little bit of a kick start from having those stems provided, and then you can do whatever you want with them, right from there. You could say, hey, print them out, let’s do some stuff, let’s do some writing on the walls, you could say no, let me practice sentences, and then give me feedback on whether or not I’m doing well, but just the ability for them to get a few structural points in place that can really help them out a lot as well.

Ixchell Reyes 24:51
Very cool.

Brent Warner 24:52
Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes 24:58
All right. This is just a moment to remind. You, that we are on YouTube, you can watch us. Please head over to diesol.org/youtube where you will find all the episodes, including this one.

Brent Warner 25:09
Yeah, give us some thumbs up on videos.

Ixchell Reyes 25:12
Yeah, comment, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of, oh yeah, they’re well more, they’re giving us more comments than on Instagram or any other platform, so keep them going. It helps people find the show. It really does. It actually affects the algorithm.

Brent Warner 25:25
That’s a big one, right? I was like, people leaving comments on things.

Ixchell Reyes 25:27
Comment, just leave a comment.

Brent Warner 25:29
Yeah, just say, say hi, thumbs up. Awesome. All right, Ixchell, I’m gonna keep this last one here, I’ve talked about how I do this before, but I think it’s worth bringing in, because again, that writing process, right, when students, when we’re talking about bigger writing, right, like doing an essay, doing a paragraph, doing an essay, right, like not just a couple of sentences, but really kind of trying to push your more advanced writing, this feedback cycle, or sorry, this peer review cycle that I use with my students. I’ve used it for many years, and I fine-tuned it as AI came in, and all these different things. But I do want to share it, because I just think it works really well for my classes, and I hope that it works for other people as well. It’s been a consistent for me for many years at this point. So, if you’ve heard it before, see if you can make your own adjustments to it to make it work for you, but I am going to share, so you know, of course, you do your pre-writing, whatever else it is you need to do to scaffold the project and make sure people are prepared for it, but here’s how it goes in my class, and you can sort out your timing as you need this, you know, depending across multiple days or whatever else it is, so the first draft for students, I have them writing. They’re just writing based on the prompt, doing the best that they can. No points are going into any of this. This is just, you know, as they’re going. But the first round, after they’ve done their first draft, then I do AI feedback with Brisk, and so I tell the students I’m very, very clear. I say, “Hey, you need to have.. you’re going to get AI feedback. This is not me telling you any of these things. It’s just going to be instant feedback, like as soon as you turn it in in class, I’m going to click on the button, and you’re going to get it back with this AI feedback.

Ixchell Reyes 27:19
Remind us what Brisk is.

Brent Warner 27:21
Yeah, Brisk is a little tool that you can, well, I mean, not little, it’s, it’s pretty impressive, but it sits inside of your docs, or whatever else it is. And then you can, you can click on it, and you can have it give different types of interactions, AI interactions for students. One of the big ones is feedback, right. And so, but they do have ones where you can like do activities, or you can help build, you know, whatever else it is. There’s lots of things, but I really like that feedback feature, so it just goes and plugs in feedback based on the rubric that you’ve uploaded. So I give it up, I give it a rubric, click on a button, and then it just plugs that right into the Google Doc, that’s what I use with my students, but they can then take that and they get the, you know, basically it’s in a table with a couple things, so it’s like the categories of the rubric, so content, grammar, you know, whatever else it is that’s going in, and then they get that feedback, and I tell it to give them two to three pieces of feedback on each category. I tell them I tell it not to tell them what to change things to, but to point out things that might need a little support. And so then what the students do is they then go in and they highlight one point out of those three from each category, and they are going to respond to it, and they say, “Hey, I like this feedback. I’m going to use it. This is how I’m going to apply it to my paper, or I don’t like it for this reason, and therefore I’m going to ignore it. And they have to think about their reasons for it, right? So then they use all that, and then they start using that feedback for their first round of updates. So they go through the update process, you know, take it home, they’re working on it, they’re making the adjustments, then we come back into class again, and we do a peer review. So, in the past, I used to do this on paper, and I still actually prefer paper, but these days it’s just a lot of work to print out everybody’s individual things, and maybe they’re ready for it, maybe they’re not, maybe they bring it, maybe they forget. So everybody in my class, anyways, has a computer, or they can borrow a classroom computer, and so, so then they pass around the computers. Now, at this point, which is kind of wild, but they pass, they sit in a table, groups of four, they pass the table, they pass the laptop around, and we do one round of each category, so you can choose your categories, but in my class it tends to be grammar first, and then structure, and then content, and I’m going to have to deal with the grammar now, because with so many students using AI and Grammarly, and all this stuff, I’m seeing fewer and fewer grammar mistakes, which is grammar is obsolete, it’s such a bummer, it’s. Such a bummer, like it’s, it’s anyways, and we have to have those again, tying back to that beginning conversation, but anyways, so they have these different ones, so they do grammar, and then they’re reading each other’s paper, looking for grammar issues, they’re going to give that feedback for about 10 minutes, then when the time changes, then we rotate the computers, and everybody’s looking at the next paper, but they’re not looking at it for grammar anymore. Now they’re looking at it for structure. Are you showing me that you know how to write an introduction paragraph? Is there a hook inside of there? You know, is there a clear thesis? Does the thesis guide the purpose of the paragraphs, right? Whatever else it is that they’re looking for inside of the body paragraphs. What are the topic sentences look like, etc. That same process, then again, you finish the 10 minutes to pass around the computer to the last person, and then you’re doing just big content. Read the whole thing, see what you understand, give praise where you think things are great, talk about problems or questions that you have, things that you were unclear about, share all of those things. And I always tell my students, make sure to be honest with each other, like a lot of the students just say, ‘Hey, I want to.. I just, you know, oh, everything’s great, they’re really good. And I said, ‘Well, if you just do that, I’m giving.. yeah, yeah. And I say, ‘If you do that, then when they get the feedback from me, they’re gonna.. they’re gonna feel real good in the moment you get it from them or they get it from you. And then they’re gonna go, ‘Wait a second, like I got all these bad feedback marks from Brent. What happened? It’s like, well, you gave them a false sense of security, so actually what you did was you did them a disservice by being too nice to them, right? And so we have little jokes, like, you know, don’t be rude, of course, don’t say you’re stupid for writing this, but like, you’re, but at the same time, like, hey, I don’t understand what this is, or I don’t, what, why, what is this supposed to mean, or whatever else it is, right? So, so they get pretty good at that, and then, and then it goes back to the original person, and they all get to look at all the feedback from all their classmates, and they’ve gotten the chance to read all their classmates, or a group handful of their classmates’ papers, so it’s a really positive cycle all the way through. There’s a lot of learning going on in the whole process, and only then does it ever come to me, and that’s finally when I, the first time I’m going to look at it, is after they’ve done all of that work, and after they process through everything, so, so it really cleans up the papers a lot by the time it gets to me, but it’s also like it works out to be a pretty high value add, and they work through that process pretty well, where they recognize they could do it with AI, but like, then what are they giving to their classmates to look at? What are they thinking about, you know, like they’re recognizing not always and not perfectly, but they are seeing, like, oh, hold on a second, if I don’t do this, why am I doing any of this right, and so, so it can be a pretty good process there as well. So that is the last one there for some things that you can do to help your students hopefully find a little bit better ways to deal with writing than having AI write it for them.

Ixchell Reyes 32:58
Great. All right, it is time for our fun finds, and I recently found pixieomagnetic blocks. My students are very much into fidget toys, and I have a lot of Rubik’s cues, different types of like brain puzzle fidgeting toys and pixel magnetic blocks are just little blocks, little magnetic blocks, and you can build with them. They’re pretty light, so you can, I guess, you can travel with them if you’re a traveling instructor, like I am. Sometimes they’re fairly affordable, so that you can have a set in your class, and that’s another thing that students can can use, and then you’re not using up like the one only Rubik’s Cube or two Rubik’s Cube, you can actually have a few of my students do take and build things with them, and it just releases a little bit of energy, plus they’re a lot of fun, I think, and you can find them in lots of different, different color palettes, so if you, if you, I think some people go crazy, all crazy, and then they build like pixel versions of different things, and it comes with challenges that students can can attend, but yeah, they’re they’re pretty cool, they have them in many sizes too,

Brent Warner 34:20
I get it. Yeah, so they’re all little, little magnetic blocks, and each one of them can just, yeah, they’re pixels, right? So, so when you build them, that it actually does look like pixel art inside of there,

Ixchell Reyes 34:31
Yeah – like Minecraft in 3D!. Very cool,

Brent Warner 34:36
Yeah, Minecraft in 3D. Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Um, alright, mine is quick and short, so I just.. I was at the post office recently, and I had to get new stamps. So, if you haven’t bought stamps for a while, I just found

Ixchell Reyes 34:49
You’re in for a shock!

Brent Warner 34:51
Yeah, they’re 78 cents for a stamp now. Anyways, that’s the world we live in. So, Bruce Lee stamps, though, they’re guys like, ‘Hey, so I’m like, hey.. Need to buy some stamps, like, well, we’ve got flowers, and we’ve got, you know, you know, they were all like the kind of these ones that were boring, and he’s like, oh, and I’ve got this Bruce Lee one, I’m like, yeah, give me the Bruce Lee, so it’s like this cool stamp, yeah, does well, yeah, who knows, like, you, I can never judge all the stamp collectors out there, make it, maybe could judge better, but it’s cool to have this Bruce Lee one. He’s doing that kind of classic flying kick pose, so if it might not be at your local post office, but you can order it from usps.com and if you’re in need of some stamps, go pick up some of those Bruce Lee ones.

Ixchell Reyes 35:36
Very, very cool. Yeah, so for the show notes and other episodes, check out diesel.org/ 139 You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram at Diesel Pod.

Brent Warner 35:49
That’s right, you can find me on the socials at @BrentGWarner

Ixchell Reyes 35:54
and me at @ixy_pixy_ that’s I x y underscore p i x y underscore.

Brent Warner 36:00
Thank you all so much for listening to the DIESOL Podcast. We will see you, or for watching, or or for putting it on YouTube and listening while you’re doing other stuff around the house, whichever it is you’re doing. However, you, however you live with us, and however we live with you, thank you so much for listening. See you on the next episode. See you next time. Bye bye.