Hurdles of a Teacher

 For this discussion, I chose to learn about Diffit, an AI-powered tool that helps teachers create and adapt instructional materials. Teachers can begin with a topic or existing resource and generate materials suited to different reading levels. They can also adjust vocabulary, translate content, and add visual supports. As a GED teacher working with Spanish-speaking adults, I was interested in how these features could help me make lessons more accessible while maintaining meaningful learning goals. Engagement Diffit could support motivation by helping me provide material that challenges students without overwhelming them. CAST’s UDL Guidelines emphasize choice, relevance, and a balance between challenge and support. My GED students bring different levels of reading experience, so giving everyone the same passage may create unnecessary frustration. I could use Diffit to prepare accessible versions of a reading while keeping the same central concept. For example, a science lesson ab...

  The learning environment I investigated was IXL Learning, which is an online platform that supports students through skill practice, diagnostic assessments, and personalized recommendations. Its diagnostic tools identify students’ current understanding and recommend skills they are ready to work on next. As a substitute teacher, I can see how this approach could be helpful because my some students come to class with different educational backgrounds and learning needs. Some need to review foundational skills, while others are ready for more challenging material. So seeing this being used in every classroom I go and substitute for made me curious into how helpful is this online tool. How does the learning environment facilitate cognitive presence? Cognitive presence involves making meaning through inquiry, reflection, and applying what we learn. I think IXL can support this process by providing targeted practice that helps students work through gaps in their understanding. Its per...

For this activity, I decided to compare Canva and Gamma to see how useful they could be for creating instructional materials. I chose Canva because I have used it before for work and for some of my college assignments, but I had never really used its AI features. I chose Gamma because it was completely new to me, and I wanted to see how it would create a presentation based on information I provided. Both tools were able to create a presentation fairly quickly, but I noticed some differences in the way they organized information and allowed me to customize the content. The prompt I used for both tools was: “Create for me a lesson plan in the form of a PowerPoint for my GED classroom to introduce them to learning about AI. Include learning objectives, key concepts, discussion questions, and an assessment.” One of the biggest strengths of Canva was how easy it was for me to use and customize. Since I was already familiar with Canva, I did not have much trouble putting the prompt into the ...

  For this assignment, I explored the trustworthiness of privacy when it comes to using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a generative AI tool that can help users learn, create, brainstorm ideas, and solve problems. The AI Nutrition Facts label I reviewed identified several privacy features, including data deletion, human oversight, guardrails, and a 30-day data-retention period. First, ChatGPT does not claim ownership of the data users input . According to OpenAI’s terms, users retain their ownership of their input and their outputs. However, educators should still be careful about entering private or sensitive student information into an AI system. Second, there is a clear way to opt out of having conversations used for model training . Users can change their settings through the Menu and turn off the option to improve the model. ChatGPT also offers temporary chat, which provides an additional privacy option. This gives educators more control over how their information is handled. Final...

Keeping students engaged and motivated is one of the biggest challenges educators face, especially in online learning environments.One model we learned about that I found interesting was the ARCS model, it involves attention, relevance, satisfaction and confidence and it all goes towards learner motivation. The article "Exploring VoiceThread Using ARCS Instructional Design Approaches" by Whitney Kilgore, Leah B. Mangrum, and Jennifer Miller explains how John Keller’s ARCS Motivational Model can be used to improve student motivation and engagement.  The first component is Attention, which focuses on capturing and maintaining students’ curiosity. The article explains that attention should not only be gained at the beginning of a lesson but maintained throughout instruction. Using different forms of media, such as text, video, and images, can help create variety and keep learners interested. This is particularly important in online courses where students may easily become distra...

  The diagram demonstrates this process by showing the progression from examples → numerical representations → learned patterns → contextual prediction → generated text . This simplified model helps explain why an LLM can produce new sentences that were not necessarily copied directly from a particular source.  Artificial intelligence has become increasingly important in education, especially with the development of AI tools that can produce text, images, summaries, and other forms of content. One of the technologies behind many text-based AI systems is the large language model (LLM). Understanding how an LLM works is important for educators because it helps us use these tools responsibly rather than treating them as if they think and learn exactly like humans. An LLM is trained using very large collections of text. These collections can contain books, articles, websites, and other sources of language. During training, the model processes enormous numbers of examples and ...