⚖️ The right balance of human and AI

🎉 Join me at Indiana ICE on October 10!

Indiana and Midwest friends: It’s not too late to register for the Indiana Connected Educators (ICE) Conference. I’ll be there and would love to see you!

📆 Date: October 10
🕚 Time: 8:30am to 3:30pm (EDT)
📍 Location: Franklin Central Junior HS (Indianapolis, IN)
📢 Keynote Speaker: Jon Corippo (EduProtocols)
🎙 Featured Speaker: Matt Miller (that’s me!)

Register here // Session schedule // Conference website

PS: Want me to present at your school, district, or event? Email [email protected] for details. (We respond really quickly!)

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

⚖️ Getting the AI balance RIGHT

NOTE: I shared this originally in my AI for Admins newsletter / community … and I thought it was fitting here, too. You can join AI for Admins, too — it’s for anyone (admins, teachers, librarians, tech coaches, etc.) making decisions about AI in schools.

First half of the post below … read the whole thing here!

This is going to be crucial, fundamental issue we’ll wrestle with for the rest of our lives …

How much AI use is the right amount?

• How do we balance our humanity and the powers of artificial intelligence?

• How do we augment what we can do with humans in the right amount so we don’t squander the preciousness of our humanity?

It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot recently.

As educators, I think we NEED to wrestle with it …

… and we need to wrestle with it out loud with students. They need to SEE us wrestling with it — and hear why it feels like wrestling (and it’s not just easy).

If students are going to understand how to get this balance right, it needs to start with us. They could use some guidance from a trusted adult.

So … what does that look like?

I noticed this balancing act in my own life a few times just in the last week …

1 — The “Pink Out” Script 🏐

My daughter’s high school volleyball team had a “pink out” night to support breast cancer research and awareness.

My wife, one of the coaches, realized they needed to make an announcement before the game started explaining the purpose of the night.

“Matt’s a writer,” she thought. “He can come up with something good.”

And she’s right! I am a writer. And I knew I could do a good job.

But I didn’t have much time. So, I considered … what if I let Google Gemini write it for me?

I actually went to Gemini and started writing a prompt. But I realized something …

If I took the time to provide all the necessary context in the prompt, it’d take me longer to write a good prompt using Gemini than to actually write the script myself!

(Or I would take more time adjusting a bad AI response than I would take to write it myself.)

So I wrote it myself. Took me a few minutes. I was really happy with it. And it got a great response from the crowd.

MY AI BALANCE LESSON: Don’t ask AI to do something you can do quicker and better.

2 — Making TikTok Videos 🎥

I’ve started getting into the TikTok / Instagram / short vertical video game.

(Because, let’s be honest. Twitter, my go-to social platform for years and years, is a dumpster fire these days. I’m ready to try something else.)

I have struggled getting traction with my videos, so I invested in an online course on creating great TikTok videos. I LOVED the course — asynchronous, fun, engaging, lots of practical points.

So I decided to create an AI TikTok assistant using Google Gemini.

I made a “Gem” — a handmade AI bot with custom instructions. I plugged a bunch of the tips and strategies they gave me about making TikTok videos into the Gem as instructions.

Then, I used it to plan out new TikTok videos.

Holy smokes. The advice it gave me was AMAZING!

I was coming in with ideas for videos — even the creative ideas that would make it stand out. But each time, the AI helped me with several small adjustments that took the video concept from good to great.

(I used this to create this video about Google’s NotebookLM with almost 150k views!)

I wasn’t mindlessly asking AI to do the work for me. I was working with it.

MY AI BALANCE LESSON: Use AI to elevate your humanity, not replace it.

That’s #1 and #2.

Want to read #3 and #4?

Read the rest here.

🎯 QUICK TEACHING STRATEGY 🎯

🙊 When student choice leads to overwhelm

Giving students choices can be motivating (Deci & Ryan, 2000), writes Andrew C. Watson in his book Learning Begins.

But too many choices can be a bad thing. Sometimes our best intentions can lead to overwhelm, overloading our students’ working memory.

He writes:

If my student says, “I know that this is an awkward sentence but I don’t know how to make it better” …

I might respond with a helpful list: “You could …

• choose a stronger verb

• reduce the number of prepositional phrases

• use parallelism to strengthen the logic of the argument

• subordinate the quotation in an appositive”

By providing so many options, to a student whose cognition is already under stress, I am likely not to solve the problem, but to push my student into Lord Vader’s arms.

Instead? Consider shortening that list — or explaining how a certain choice will make the student’s work stronger.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!