Blog Journal 7 - Nathan Sanborn

For the assessment on teacher pages, I decided to look at the school I attended, which is Winter Springs High School. This website is cleaned up overall and not very hard to look at. All of the pages themselves have basic information, usually a paragraph or two at most about what the school offers. I looked at the curriculum tab as well, and it seems that they just forward you to the county website. The staff page is pretty basic and does not offer any information other than a name, what they teach, and an email. Although it is simple, I do believe it is good for parents to be able to easily find a teacher’s email. It does not appear that teachers are required to update their pages at all. I think it is important to mention that the IB programs page obviously has more effort put into it, which makes me question the difference in funding. It seems like they have seperate documents and tabs for everything involving IB. Overall though, the website isn't bad, its basic enough to have a general understanding but I can imagine the school gets phone calls with questions often. 

When it comes to being productive as a teacher, it is hard to say. I believe AI, as much as I worry about what it will do, can be very useful. I will always fear that it will end up doing more work than the actual teacher. I think using AI to proofread and create simple designs and formats would be the main way I would use it. I think that would save a fair amount of time while also saving students from my horrible design choices. I do think it is interesting to consider what AI platform will come out on top for educators. Also, as I have talked about in previous blogs, I believe using Google Docs, Drives, and Slides is an amazing way to get students to work together on assignments, and I expect to have most of my worksheets on a Google Doc so students can do them together.

On a similar topic, the lesson plan assignment showed the capabilities of AI. I believe AI did a good job at formatting and making everything look nice, and it did a good job at wording everything simply while also keeping it professional. However, I still believe that a human will always understand other humans better than AI, so using AI to make ideas is fine, but the teacher needs to understand the students in the classroom to truly know what will engage them. I believe a good lesson plan is something that I can look at for maybe three to five minutes and instantly know what I need to do for the day. Along with that, when I refer back to it, it should take at most ten to thirty seconds to refresh my memory. I do not think AI changed how I would do lesson plans. In fact, I think we would do them pretty much the same way. I would basically always just give a general overview and then continue to be very specific about what comes next, which is what AI does. Well, firstly, it is incredibly annoying and limited in what you can do. It does not have a truly quick way of communicating between group members, and it feels like it tries to format everything so much that you are locked into basic tabs. I would literally just use Google Docs because that is the best group-sharing tool.