The Rookery

We are launching into personal project season and I spent time this past week searching for good on-line information for students' to use in their research. It got me thinking about technology and its role in our projects…a role that is changing rapidly. I'd love your input and ideas — where is technology useful? where is it a barrier? is there a role for AI in the process? (Should we make a role so that students learn how to use such a powerful tool responsibly and ethically?) Here are my thoughts so far:

Searching On-line

Fourth and fifth grade students have a very hard time reading websites effectively. They have few filters for the click bait that adults find somewhat distracting. I've watched students flick up and down a page and be done "reading" in ten seconds, determining there wasn't anything there (spoiler alert…there was.) And that's once they are on a good page – creating a search queery that gives them useful results is even more challenging.

I suggest these steps when working with kids designing their own searches (as they learn it's best that they work with an adult when searching) (Here's a video lesson, too):

If you are working with an adult, you may do your own searches. Some key tips for getting information that is reliable and useable:

• Use a search query that includes “information for kids” or “explained for kids” that will weed out many college level resources.
• Use only a few key words in your search and make sure they are spelled right.
• If a site uses words like “Top 10 Facts” – skip it. You need more than just bullet point facts to write a good article.
• If a site has so many ads that it is hard to read or if it has links to crazy looking articles at the bottom (aka “click bait”) – skip it. The person (or AI) that wrote it doesn’t have kids’ best interest at heart.

If you ask a specific question to fill in a research gap you have, beware the AI generated answer that will come up first. You can read it but you should click on the link of the source that is often provided to read more and then use that as your resource.

This fall, as part of our work for the gourd election, we read the excellent book Killer Underwear Invasion about disinformation. It had some very helpful guidelines for determining if a page's information could be trusted. This How_to_Evaluate_Websites_Flow_Chart by Kathleen Morris is very similar.Killer Underwear went a little farther and cautioned students to be aware of when people were trying to get you to re-act to something or when they were using terms like "some people say" instead of telling you which people were saying it.

Videos (again, from a trusted source) can be a great resource but kids need to learn how to take notes from them. It's an art to distill specific information from the flow of a video.

There are two points in research that kids may find on-line resources especially useful.  At the very beginning when they are learning enough to be curious and ask good questions. On-line overviews can provide vocabulary and context that help them understand books and articles more effectively. Then, at the end of the drafting process when they have a specific piece of information that they need or a detail that is missing from what they want to teach. That's when asking a specific question can help them fill in the gap.

Writing On-Line

We have 4th graders take notes on note cards which they can then group together into physical outlines from which they can write paragraphs.  I highly recommend this same process for 5th graders. Fourth graders write all of their paragraphs on paper and use the revision and editing process that we've learned in writing circles. Often, the revision takes a while because organizing paragraphs is really hard for kids. Making it a physical process helps.

With speech to text so readily available, students are often very, very eager to use it. Unless a child has an accommodation for physical writing, I've increasingly come to believe it is very important for students to develop their writing voice using pencil and paper. As a fluent writer, I use speech to text very differently from a developing writer. The average fourth or fifth grader will spew large amounts of conversational text without punctuation and, importantly, in fragments. People don't typically speak in complete sentences. But we write and read in complete sentences. Fifth graders often have long enough articles that it can make sense to have them draft on a computer – whenever possible, I would have them work with an adult who is doing the typing. The student states the sentence they would like to write down and the adult types it (sometimes adding revision ideas in the moment – a great teachable moment to share your thinking as a fluent writer). The difference between that and speech to text is that the child is writing sentence by sentence and the adult is acting as the intermediary, helping the child see when a sentence is not complete or when it can be made stronger.

After revision, I type the 4th grade projects for them (volunteers are welcome!). I type what they have written with fidelity but will often add comments on the side for possible further revision. I then print out a copy and they edit the typed version physically using different colors for the different errors. They make those corrections on the typed document themselves – many are learning about cursors and how to delete and add without having to retype the whole thing. They also use the computer to help them fix spelling errors and we teach them how to do that efficiently.  Fifth graders would do this same process, they just wouldn't necessarily have a hand written draft initially.

AI and Projects

This is a brave new world for us. This will be the first year when AI tools are readily available to younger students like ours. It's a golden opportunity to discuss the ethical use of these power tools. As teachers, how we help students use technology ethically is always evolving. The more trusted adults who are talking to kids about ethical technology use the better. Fourth and fifth graders are at the perfect age for these conversations. They are very much building their ideas of right and wrong and they are still very open to adults helping them figure things out. So…

Documentation of any AI use is important. Normadale College has this useful (and brief) set of guidelines for their students and I thought it was very approachable. I will probably create something similar for our students in the coming weeks. We've already had some kids use AI to help the brainstorm and hone their topic. (I use Khanmigo from Khan academy when I work with kids using AI. It's set up as a conversation and it is a company I trust to put significant guardrails on the tool. In addition, it is easy to download and save the chat.) When it comes time for them to cite their resources, I will have them add an "AI Disclosure Statement."

AI can be used with this age group to find good resources (indeed, Google's searches are often AI assisted). AI could also help clarify a confusion that a child has about some information. Khanmigo has an especially compelling tool that I sometimes use to refresh or clarify my understanding of a concept – it asks questions and I respond as best I can and then it pushes on the parts I don't yet have a clear understanding of. It helps me know what I don't know so that I can figure that out. If I use that in the course of my writing or research, it would be important to let my readers know that.

AI and Writing

The other day, I had a student who really, really wanted to read an article about the Loons MLS team. I did a quick search but there weren't any general articles written at a fourth grade level out there (plenty of game overviews but we wanted something about the team as a whole and its history). So…I used Khan's article writing tool to create one. It enables me to set the grade level, length and with a few quick prompt iterations, the content (my first attempt had paragraphs explaining what soccer was…). I fact checked the article and fixed one error about the creator of the big Loon statue (he's not a local artist.) I added some pictures and captions. Then I wrote the by-line crediting the tool that wrote the piece. I now think that I should have added a brief disclosure at the bottom stating the prompt that I used and the tool version etc — as I said, we're still learning, too. Here's the article.

Honestly, it's pretty amazing to be able to put a just right article into a kid's hands and it's not something I would have had time to write from scratch. I can also model ethical use for the kids and explain why I chose in this case to have the computer write the article (but why I would never have it write this blog entry or one of the narratives I write about them.)

What needs to be very clear to kids (and everyone for that matter) is that asking a chatbot to create text for you and then passing that text off as your own is dishonest. And, of course, we need to be thoughtful about how we communicate the value of writing to kids. Writing from scratch helps you clarify your ideas. It helps you understand things more completely. It helps you see your gaps. Using AI to generate a "4th grade project on capybaras" (as I did here) could produce a solid final product but the learning of how to ask questions, look for answers, understand those answers and then communicate those answers would be missing. How to think would be missing. Kids understand that.

In math, we often talk about the levels of understanding something. A level three is when you can follow someone else doing the work. A level four is when you can do the work reliably. A level five is when you can understand well enough to explain what your doing and why it works (in other words, to teach it). I think the same system applies to writing and personal projects. Understanding an article someone else wrote is a level three — producing your own is a five. As the kids will tell you, level three feels awkward. Things go in and out of focus. You think you know how to do it but then it's gone the next day. A four feels great and a five…when you can help someone else understand because you understand so well, that's the best.

And that's the goal – to have students explore their passions and communicate that passion to others. Technology is a tremendous tool that can help kids reach that goal. But as with any tool, knowing how to use it well is key. We have a golden opportunity with our eager, capable young people; we can help them learn how to use technology to enhance their learning, not subvert it. I'm eager for you to join me in this work – it's going to be a team effort.