Blog Journal 10 - Nathan Sanborn

Since education began, lectures have always been at the forefront of teaching. If you had taken a course like this in 1987 when PowerPoint was released, I'd imagine it would have been a popular topic in that class. Even with the dawn of AI, PowerPoint is still quite prominent and is actually enhanced by AI. Although I've made several hundred PowerPoints before, so it's hard to say whether I have gained new skills or not, I do believe this assignment was useful. I think simply having the experience is important, but I also experimented with things like alt text and the designer, which I never messed with before. Overall, I think this assignment is incredibly important because it's something all teachers will use at some point. 

I want to teach at the college level, so I believe Qualtrics can have some good use. I think surveys before each main module to collect data on how students perceive that portion of history (I wish to teach history...) could be incredibly helpful in giving me an idea of what to cover. There are also student teacher evaluations, which, of course, most students have taken before. Those are very useful because it's an anonymous way for a teacher to gather info on whether or not they did a good job at teaching the subject. With the correct questions, it can allow you to figure out what you need to improve on, whether that be yourself or the course. Most students would never directly walk up to a teacher and tell them what they did wrong, so those surveys can be useful. 

For a technology-related smart goal, I'm going to have some fun with this and say A.I. I think it's probably the option that develops skills for a teacher but in pretty much every field. Creating worksheets and discussion questions and creating/grading tests can all be done by AI. My SMART goal is to practice AI (in an academic way...) every week and slowly become more comfortable with it. One of the most important parts of using AI is having good prompts, so learning to use those will be good. By the time I finish my bachelor's, I think it will give me a reasonable amount of time! The key concerns are making sure I develop ways to use it ethically and make sure I build good habits around it. Overall, I think AI allows you to be much more time efficient, so I'm going to have to practice with it!