Jesse’s website: https://www.mediatedreality.com/
This week our class had Jesse Miller come in as a guest speaker. Jesse does presentations in schools all over BC about digital citizenship (he came to my elementary school when I was in grade 6!). He talked to us about technology and how quickly it is advancing. As he pointed out – most people were and continue to be unprepared for these growing changes. He described things I wasn’t aware of – such as the programming of self-driving cars being the subtle byproduct of internet security checks. Additionally, Jesse told us that it is our job to teach children to use media responsibly – with the 4Cs of Digital Literacy. These 4Cs are: critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.
This presentation was very informative and interesting to listen to. It is incredibly important for us as future educators to learn as much as we can about new technology – because it is such a prominent aspect of our and our future student’s lives. These new advancements, AI being a big one, are not going to go away. No matter how comfortable of uncomfortable we are with this – we still need to help prepare our students to go out into the world and use the internet in a responsible and beneficial way. Jesse’s lecture was informative – and a good reminder that there is so much to learn about the internet and technology.
During L2P last semester, my partner and I had the privilege of teaching a grade 8 class a lesson about ChatGPT and spotting AI. Without realizing it at the time, we did succeed in working in the 4Cs. We encouraged critical thinking by showing different ‘tweets’ and helping the students evaluate whether or not they were written by AI – and brought in a collaboration aspect by having them work together to help them assess. Additionally, creativity was harnessed through a worksheet we gave them where we prompted them to create different questions to ask ChatGPT. This also brought in communication because we then asked them to refine their questions and see how they could make their conversations with AI more effective.
Going forward, I would like to continue doing activities like this when I go into classrooms. I will refer back to the 4Cs – because I think that when they are combined the lesses reach peek productivity.