Teacher Appreciation

Hello Friends,

Let’s talk about AI.

I was slow to jump on the AI bandwagon. Now that I’m on it, I will never jump back off!

If you have read my book, School Transformation Through Teacher Appreciation, you know that I like to model instructional strategies during my faculty meetings. For my first faculty meeting of this school year, I was thinking about what strategy I wanted to model when I remembered that I had 14 Connect Four games in my game cart that I periodically use for student lunches. That’s when the idea hit me: Why not use them for a review activity?

Two days before the faculty meeting, I dropped my agenda into ChatGPT and asked it to create 20 trivia questions based on the information we would be covering. It took literal seconds. I read through the questions and asked it to adjust two of them. Then I printed the questions on cardstock, cut them out, and had everything ready to go.

The plan was simple. Teachers partnered up and took turns asking each other review questions. If their partner answered correctly, they earned a checker to place in the Connect Four game. We played until we had four winners. I had $10 gift cards that had been donated by a local restaurant, so those became our prizes.

After we had our winners, I revealed to the staff how I had created the review questions.

But I wasn’t finished demonstrating the power of AI.

The night before the faculty meeting, I realized I needed to make a PowerPoint because of a few things that had been shared with principals the day before. I took my updated agenda, dropped it into ChatGPT, and asked it to create an editable PowerPoint presentation. I went through the presentation and tweaked a few things, but other than that, it was ready to go.

AI saved me at least two to three hours of work between creating the trivia questions and building the PowerPoint.

That was the real purpose of the activity. I didn’t want to simply tell my teachers about AI. I wanted to show them how it could make their jobs easier.

I challenged them to think about how they could use AI in their own classrooms and daily work. Maybe it could help create a review activity, generate discussion questions, develop a lesson, write a parent communication, create differentiated materials, or simply help them get started when they are staring at a blank screen.

I’m not suggesting that AI should do our jobs for us. I am suggesting that we should let it help us do our jobs better, and maybe give us back a little time along the way.

Check out my book, School Transformation Through Teacher Appreciation, available on Amazon, for more teacher appreciation ideas.

Join the Teacher & Staff Appreication Facebook Group to share ideas, celebrate our amazing educators, and spread a little extra gratitude with over 145,000 members. Let’s make sure our teachers feel the love all year long! https://www.facebook.com/share/g/17K84qs8Yc/

Bring me to your District!

I offer engaging, fun, and hands-on professional development for campus leaders designed to increase teacher retention. You can find more information about presentations and workshops on my webpage.

Bring me to your School!

Looking for fun and impactful professional development filled with amazing instructional strategies for your teachers or looking for a mentor to work with you and/or your administrative team contact me at Kathleen.Eckert@iCloud.com.

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Thank you for loving teachers,

Kathleen Eckert