Season 11 BONUS: Exploring the Potential and Ethical Implications of AI in Education

7:10PM Aug 30, 2023

Speakers:

Tim Villegas

Keywords:

ai

students

question

educators

teachers

essay

michael

talking

prompt

good

inclusive education

write

incentives

change

learn

understand

learners

idea

education

podcast

Are you ready for the AI invasion?

No, seriously, artificial intelligence will affect educators sooner or later, you might already have been affected. And so before we roll out our season to 11 premiere next week, I wanted to share a conversation on the potential and the ethical implications of AI in education. My name is Tim Vegas with the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you're listening to think inclusive, our podcast that aims to build bridges between families, educators, and disability justice advocates to create a shared understanding of inclusive education, and what it looks like in the real world. Michael bowl is a technology coach and educator who specializes in AI and its applications in education. He has a background in technology and has been providing professional learning experiences for educators on AI. Michael and I discussed the misconceptions about AI in education and how it can be used to benefit students. He emphasizes the need for educators to understand AI, and its capabilities in order to create a positive narrative around its use. Michael also explores the potential of AI in personalized learning and supporting students with disabilities. I think you are going to find this conversation. Very interesting. Also, make sure to listen to the end of the conversation, I'm previewing a new segment for season 11 called the mystery question. Don't miss it. After a short break my interview with Michael bull. Michael, welcome to the think conclusive podcast.

Dan, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

We aren't doing video. But if you were to see us, Michael is wearing a USC hat. And I'm wearing a Dodgers hat. Yet neither of us live in California.

Yeah, that is a little bit awkward, isn't it? It almost makes it worse show in the video. But you know, I have a great face for radio I've been told. So we'll just leave it at that.

That's fine. That's fine. Michael, I invited you on because I want to talk about AI. But some people may be wondering, What's your connection to AI?

Well, I actually invented it to that's now actually a big secret. And so now it's out on the podcast world. No, that's. So my background is mostly as a nerd, and that evolved into a technology coach. And then as a technology coach, you're like, hey, you know, you get to check out all the new things that come along and actually get paid for it. And so I do professional development nowadays for teachers. And so I'm always looking for like new things to learn about, and AI just jumped right into the forefront, because there's so much stressed concern and worry about it, especially after COVID That suddenly teachers are going to be less relevant than they even were then. And as the end of the world, the kids are just going to cheat, and on and on and on. And I guess all those things could be true for not careful. But that's probably what incentivize me to check it out. I just want to be able to share it with other educators so they can learn it, understand it, and then create and begin that narrative of how we're all going to use it.

So you provide professional learning experiences for educators. And AI is something that you talk about. So what are some misconceptions about AI that educators should know?

Gosh, that's a good question. But I think what's so new now that the concerns they have might become the reality, maybe it's going to take over the world, and maybe it's going to decide that we are going to make paperclips. And it's just going to force us into indentured servitude, who knows that that that might happen? I guess the misconception is gonna be the students will only use it to cheat that it's going to revolutionize revolutionize education in a negative way only. And that's where it's important now to be having these early conversations to help us understand how it works, and how we can revolutionize AI to be something that's going to benefit us that's going to be a positive to education, you can imagine a virtual tutor that we would all have. And so student regardless of their ability has this virtual tutor that's, that's helping them along that is there by their side to assist them. So they have if you're in a classroom of 30, you have one teacher and then 30 instructional aides right there helping. But in order to make that happen, we're gonna have to create the structures and change our lessons to be able to take advantage of that. And that's where we're in this flux right now, this disruptive, potentially extremely disruptive flux, where we don't know how it's gonna go. Maybe we're not clear of how to make it happen in a way that we want to. And then that's where the fear starts to take over. Plus all the headlines, you know, that that's the end of the world,

because I was one I just read yesterday about how AI is going to be reading news for us. So yes, yeah,

I read that too. I just think I just read it this morning. Yeah, like New York Times, and NPR and others are gonna have it helped generate new stories. Yeah, I'll take my writing. I'll put it in there. And I'll say improve this. And it's a lot better when it comes out. So I'm at a horrific writer, but I wouldn't consider myself an excellent one. But after, you know, AI, I'm pretty good.

Well, yeah, so I guess we're all going to become great writers. I so I have four years since I was in even in the classroom, I subscribe to this service called Grammarly. I'm sure you've heard of it. And like, it immediately made me a better writer, it used to just do grammar. Now, there's like these AI tools built into the, to the application. So you can like write a paragraph and then highlight it and be like, shorten it, or improve it or whatever. And it's just become so much, so much easier to, to write. And that's something I mean, that's my job, like, my job is communications, anything that's going to help me do that better and faster, I feel like as a wind,

right, I mean, AI in its current form, is perfect for helping those of us that kind of already learned how to write have gone through it, you know, through college, or earlier than that, and we're ready just to be better at it. And then the horrifying feeling or worry or concern is that what about those that are still in the process of learning? Are they just going to put it down, and then that's just going to remove all the learning. And that is definitely possible today, students can do that right away today.

Yeah.

So if you're a teacher gets a lot of homework, and has kids doing stuff at home and aren't creating those structures in class where they do it step by step, that's going to happen. And the incentives are huge. So you know, if I'm a high school student, I want to get into a good university, I'm going to use those sorts of things. Those are those if I want to get good grades, my incentives are to get a good grade. Now, so I can have success later, whatever that might mean. But that's how I'm going to be thinking or feeling. Or if I'm busy, or this or that, as a student, I have massive incentives to use AI to help me. Do you see

a good parallel to AI as the calculator because I had a conversation recently with someone and he was saying how, like the calculator was, quote, unquote, dangerous when it first became popular, and people were using it so often, because the idea was, Well, kids aren't going to learn math. Now we have calculators on our phones. Like, pretty much so much. Yeah. Or or watch. Yeah. Or or Alexa.

Right, a calculator. Watch before they're, you know, in the old old days. Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. Nerd credentials here. But it's hard to hide that from the teacher. That's true. Yeah,

yeah. Is that a good calm,

kinda, I mean, maybe to help us feel a little bit better. But that was an isolated incident for a specific course. And so for teachers, it wasn't super difficult to change in order to accommodate it. So I mean, it's been a healthy change in that now we're talking more about the structure of maths, the algorithms of math that go into it, and understand the concept of math. And then we use those tools to assist us as we go down that path. But with AI kind of just does everything in such a wide scale, with super easy access. And we're on the laptops all the time already. So it's hard to tell whether students are using AI or not. So if we follow the model we use for the calculator. Sure, I think it's going to be great. But again, there's gonna be a lot of disruption initially, as people to start using things, and the teachers have to come to understand how it all works, it's pretty easy to understand a calculator, it's not so easy just to understand AI without jumping into it a bit.

Well, that's a, that's a good point. So what is the best way to understand what AI can and can't do at this point?

Well, the first thing to do is just get an account. So you can use cheap T, Google has their version, Microsoft has their versions. But those are probably the main three that you would use, and they have different levels of quality in them, and then to start asking questions, so like, for me, a lot of it's brainstorming, so come up with 10 names for this course. Or if I'm going to interview him, if they know something about you, if you're you're out on the internet a bit. So you know, research Tim and come up with five questions that I should ask him. So in that way, is going to make me a lot smarter and those sorts of things, then help me understand the ability of chat GPT. And then it's like, well, the see I've got, I need to do a lesson on dinosaurs. So give me a lesson for a second grader on dinosaurs. And it'll bring all that up. But oh, make sure you incorporate basketball into it because we're doing a basketball unit. Or in sort of the reverse of that is let's say I'm a PE teacher. And I want to have a cool game that involves dinosaurs because I know the second grade teachers teaching that it'll come up with a bunch of great ideas for it. And if I don't like those ideas, I'll just say hey, come up with 10 more. And they'll just keep generating more and more ideas and as you start to get get into and start to use them more you start to realize that the power that it has, and you just have to think of it as like, what am I doing today? Right now? Okay, maybe I can get to AI to help me with that. And often that answer is yet and often the responses are quite delightful. So it and perhaps maybe the biggest beneficiaries of this are going to be elementary school teachers, where students aren't so much on their laptops and don't really have a reason to use AI. They're gonna use it to be super creative and everything that they do.

What about things that they have you run up into things like that? Maybe AI can't do right now. But maybe people think that it can do? I don't know if that question makes sense.

It does. So one of the issues with AI because it's generative AI, it meaning it doesn't just go out and research the internet and produce the result. It generates content based on these massive algorithms that help it understand how humans work, and our human language works. So it doesn't really know what it's saying, as far as we know. It doesn't it's just fully. I'm not sure yet. So if it does, it'll just start making stuff up if it doesn't have a reference point from which it started the beginning given to the answer. So there's that concern, when you start asking it factual questions, you then have to fact check it, which is a huge pain. When you ask a creative questions, like come up with this lesson plan, then you're like, Yes, I liked that creative idea, or I don't. So on the factual side, it's definitely gonna hit a hit a wall there. And also, if you're ready to generate images, it's really not that good at it generating music, and it's okay. But these are all things are gonna get a lot better over time. Right, right. There's huge produce something that well, are you familiar with the

there is these AI generated videos? I forget the name of the the, it was on YouTube and tick tock and all that. These start the, like a Star Wars movie, or Lord of the Rings made in the style of a Wes Anderson film. Did you ever see this?

No. But I can imagine, oh, gosh, yeah, that was

fantastic. In fact, since we're talking about it, we'll go ahead and put some links in into the notes. But I love what a good Wes Anderson film and so and I also happen to love Star Wars. So when that first one came out, I was like, Oh, my gosh, how did how did they do this? And then I realized, Oh, it was a I know, I couldn't tell you how that works. But I know that it does. I feel like we're relatively at the beginning of this whole thing. So I can, I can't imagine what it's going to look like. And even, you know, one or two years, let alone 10 years,

I think, you know, just on the movie aspect. So I used to teach a film class, that I'll be able to tell us the iMovie make this film look like a Wes Anderson film. And it would do all the cuts and the music and whatever to look like that film. And then I guess as a director and artists, I can decide whether I like that or not, and where I can decide which artists I want it to represent. So when you think about editing that's going to come along as a redditor, or director, I'm gonna have that those options to just instantly convert something to see what I like. And then maybe I can use that to with more for my own creative endeavors. Yeah, those things are Yeah, definitely heavy. And then you hear about things where you you'll star in the movie. So it'll take you and put you it's one of the characters in the back, or something like that. In fact, I was just before I came on today, I was listening to a podcast called Hard fork. It's great for a lot of AI stuff there from New York Times. And they were talking about Netflix show that does a deep fake. And so it's one of those reality shows where they go in and then they watch their spouse cheating. And it's actually a deep fake of them cheating. Oh, they're not talking about this in advance. So then get all the reactions and all that. So thinking about a horrifying idea for a show, but

it's just like this black mirror episode is what it is,

is probably one of the best ways to understand AI.

Oh, gosh, yeah. Yeah, I think one of the one of the things that jumps out at me when I'm thinking about how people use AI, and especially about how I use it, is, I think there's a misconception that you can just ask it a question, or ask it to generate something, especially for an assignment or for you know, even for your job, and then you copy and you paste, and that's it. Like, I'm done. Like, it just took 10 seconds. But since I've been interacting with AI, a number of different tools. I've really not done that with hardly anything except it's just more of like a first draft. Right? So like what you were saying, you you know, create 10 titles, you know, for this course or 10 titles for this blog article I'm writing or helped me summarize As the contents of this podcast interview, and then you take that draft and like the director that creates the AI movie, they decide what they want to keep and what they don't want to keep.

Sure. Right. In addition to that, there's all the prompt into engineering around it. So when you get that first results, you're like, Huh, that's too long. So you tell it to make it because it understands what it just wrote. So make it shorter, make it punchy, or make it happier make it sadder, when examples I use for prompts specifically is let's say, there's the common app for people who are going to college you have to write that essay. And you just write out answer the common app question. I don't even know what it was, but Chechi b t does. And reference Elmo in it, make sure you mentioned that I was captain of the volleyball team that I did work with a lot of individuals with the diverse needs, and that I worked at an ice cream shop with individuals like that. And I have a massive collection. And so it'll it'll intertwine all that into a pretty good essay that pops out. Now that's just chat 3.3 point five, if you want to use chat, GPT 4.0, which you have to pay 20 bucks a month for it's going to be even better. And then from there, you're like, Wow, this is a pretty good essay. Now we'll just modify it. So that using that, you know, using the prompt to get the better answer out the gate, or just to encourage it as you go along at the end after you see it to make it better.

So is that cheating? Michael?

I think it's cheating if you don't if you don't cite it. So

let's say for instance, I'm gonna take your example, you're reading a college essay, right? Yeah. Especially when it kicks out a good one on the first Exactly, exactly. You it you get, you get a pretty good first draft, but you modify it, and you're like, Okay, I wouldn't use that word, I would use this word, I'm going to add maybe another sentence or two. But I'm pretty much gonna use, you know, 8075 80% of what it spit out. And I load it in the common app, and I hit submit, but I do not say that. It was created by Chechi Beatty, or barred or, you know, Bing or whatever. So, how do we feel about that is that seems like an ethical thing. Now,

I think we can sort of rephrase or reframe the question, what if Tim, I asked you, hey, write me an essay. And here's the prompt I want. And here's the sort of things I want you to include. And you wrote it. And they gave it to me, and then I modified it, I kept 70 to 80%? Would I be a misrepresentation of my writing? And the answer is yes, because basically, Tim wrote it, I modified it, but it's not something that I could have written at that level on my own. So it doesn't represent who I am as a student and my potential least as an essay writer. So but the back to incentives, the incentive is massive for me to turn in the best essay possible, because I want to get into wherever that university is, and I want to get the scholarship or that scholarship. So that's where because the incentive is so high to misrepresent yourself, you were gonna have to change the structures, you're probably just have to get rid of the essays, because I'm sure all those people reading it. Now, if they see a good one, they doubt whether it's legitimate or not, there's always gonna be that nagging feeling and like, I hate reading stuff that I know is from chat. GPT. I'm just like, I don't like it now. Because before I was getting to know somebody now, I'm just like reading words on a page. So yes, I do think it's it, there's a serious ethical issue there. And I don't think we're gonna get rid of that if we can, if we have the incentives that will force us in some way students to cheat, I can say, Hey, be a better person or not get into, I'll say, USC instead of UCLA, or be a not as good a person and get into USC, like, what are they going to design? I'm gonna do it.

Right. Right. So do you think this is kind of like the major problem that we're gonna have with? With AI? You know, just like, yeah, how do we, how do we cite this? You know, is it? Is it ethical to use it? You know, and say that, we wrote it. I mean, I wrote the prompt, you know what I mean? So,

I don't know, it's not ethical to do use it, but students are gonna use it. So it's ethical, as long as you cite it, but you can't cite a friend or AI for your essay, it has to be your own original work. So how do we then create classroom situations where students are assisted as they go? Rather than told go right, this in the end? I know they're assisted along the way, but ultimately, unless it's broken down into pieces that are checked along the way, or are we just gonna have to get rid of homework, you're gonna get a lot of this. And that's not gonna change you can get along more election, more lectures that you want and that'll help somewhat So sure, let's do that. It's that's healthy for society to, to frame or to frame or foot guardrails on what's appropriate, inappropriate behavior that's we're supposed to do as teachers. But if if they come back and keep saying that sentence again, but again, the the benefit of far outweighs the moral, bad feelings I have, they'll do it. That's just human Intro

as far as how we can use AI to support learners with disabilities, or have you put much thought into how AI could support those particular learners?

Yeah, so I mean, I was preparing to develop a course specifically using an UDL model for helping students all across the board. Currently, you can take your writing, and they can put it in ask AI specifically to look for what sort of voice comes through here or look for grammatical mistakes, or can be suggestions for sentence structure, improvements. And so that'll help everybody. Regardless, those are the things that are possible now, but you kind of have to do it on your own. Now, there are companies that are starting to come out with things that will structure that a little bit better for you. And so essentially, the app will do the prompt engineering for years, you don't have to think about what to ask conmigo is coming out from Sal Khan from Khan Academy. And that the idea behind that is that it's a tutor along the way with you. So as you're struggling, it just pushes you and ask you questions, and you ask questions back and it helps you. And then you spit out your final product, but you've been assisted along the way. And then the instructor knows that you went through there, and that app is designed to help you. And it's really designed to help you cheat. It's designed to help do better. And then whatever work result comes out is the work that's it's your own work with help, you know, incredible help sitting right next to you again, back to that example. I think that's what's going to happen. I want to research this more specifically, like different use cases across different types of learners. But the potential there is just massive.

Yeah, I like how you frame that because number one, we have to change, what kinds of things we're expecting our learners to do. Like if it's writing a 500 word essay on the topic of the Civil War. And that's all the instructions, they're given that, that could be a problem. But if you are already expecting some baked in help, whether it's through AI or something else, then that seems like it's a more more helpful assignment. And there will

help figure out where the student is. So I have 30 students in the classroom with different learning needs, I probably don't know specifically what the different learning needs are for all those students. If it's a math class, and let's say it's one that needs more support, I know how much students need more support math, but I don't really know, this kidneys here with addition, this one subtraction, and so I can't modify and get real granular as far as what their needs are. And AI can do that, and will be much better at doing that in the future.

Yeah. And the second thing I wanted to say was, you mentioned as a con Miko as, the more, I'm imagining that this particular I'm not sure what you call it, program assistance, something like that. And then you have, you're going to have additional ones to choose from, that could potentially bring the this idea of personalized learning a little bit further into the mainstream of education,

which we've talked about personalized learning, I think we all agree it's great. But it's almost impossible to scale. We can't just yell at the teacher and say you need to work harder and smarter and make it happen. This could be potentially the way to Yes, make it happen at scale, where you push a button that says go out and assess the students and figure out where they're at and help them along the way. And then you just are monitoring and managing all of that. And figuring out what's working, what's not working. And then you know, to have like a dashboard of knowing where all my students aren't what their ability levels are at. And then I can create fun games for the whole class to go that might benefit 10 students specifically that, you know, because I do it in the form of a song I know those 10 are gonna benefit and the other 20 are like, this is fun. We're singing, you know. So I'm creating community at the same time. There's all these things that can happen once I have that data and that information. And I think that's exciting those possibilities for teachers, how fun would that be to know how your students will learn and then to be able to come up with a bunch of creative ideas to help them that would be very satisfying.

So something came to mind when you were talking about, like personalized learning, and this program or application, knowing the students enough to offer suggestions either to the teacher to the student, that's already happening right now, with the data we give to social media companies, I was just thinking about that it's a different application, but I'm scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, and I get ads for audio and video editing software or like musical instruments or it's like it is

on how to be a better husband, that's my wife or husband or something. But yeah.

And I don't remember I think it was just a meta thing. I remember taking a survey and it was like asking me if I likes personalized ads or not. And I have this like really mixed reaction to it. Because on one hand, I actually like that, oh, I'm I'm, I get I get to see ads for audio equipment instead of seeing ads for like something I don't want. But on the other hand, I'm like, I don't really like that it knows me. I know, I don't know.

I mean, it's, it's saying, Look, we're going to collect all this data on you, and we're gonna know you no matter what, by the way, do you want personalized ads that kind of demonstrate that we know you? Or do you just want us to not really let you know that we really know you? And we'll be more subtle? Obviously, yes. Because it's not like they're going to turn the switch off. They're just going to modify what that is true, you're comfortable, where I might have said, Yes, and I get, I get all the ads that I want. Anyways, so yeah, I mean, but they're there, their goals are to make money and to compete for your attention and get you addicted to screen time. And to constantly be picking up your device. That's our whole goal, and incentives behind everything they do. And that's why outrage, for example, just releases like cortisol on your system, when you see it that keeps you on those things. But hopefully, as educators, that's not our ops, our goal, our goal is to make you the best person you can be and be the most effective learner that you can be wherever you were at. So we have a much more noble goal that So collecting that same data in a large aggregate scale, and then be able to scale it to multiple the same middle school where I can scale that across five or six different teachers like that is awesome. That is awesome. That is also a study of as I serve up useful things. Do you

see a time in the future where educators could, based on their student profiles be able to schedule out like a whole year's worth of lessons a curriculum?

Hopefully not. Because even if I have been with a student for a month, I don't really know what they're going to be like in six months. So I think I would have goals of where I want students to get to, based on whatever their abilities are, or whatever their grade level is. And then artificial intelligence is going to help prompt along the way to get to that it's going to assist along the way to get to that point. So let's say music class, for example. So maybe I'm terrible at eighth notes. And so AI can listen to my plane, and then produce exercises for me to help me along the way until it gets better, and then I'll move on to something else. And because it's AI, it's pretty creative, it can maybe use songs that are fun for me. So I'm going to learn things in a way that I enjoy. But at the same time, I'm picking up the skills that I needed. And so that's so much better than a band teacher who has 150 students in front of them doing the same sort of music for everybody. Probably getting a lot of people maybe 50 60% of the class, but you saw that other 40% that needs more specific help. And there's just the can't scale that an AI can.

Yeah, yeah. It's going to change how schools are run. Because I'm thinking about the reason I asked about the planning a whole year is we're recording this in the summer of 2023. But you have educators at home or in pre planning, and they're scheduling out their year. Okay, it's September, and we're going to be talking about this and it's October, we're going to be talking about this, we may not have all of the everything planned down to the minute, but there's basic structures. But what I'm hearing you say is that maybe we won't need to do that maybe it'll be more responsive to the needs of the students,

I think it can be question is whether we do that. So if I'm a math student, and we're learning about quadratic equations, and we learn on that, learn about that just for April, and it comes me and I'm like, I still haven't learned it, well, tough luck on we go to the next thing you're just gonna have, right? Or you got to work harder, or let's get you six more tutors at home and add to the stress levels you already have. So if we can as educators, and not maybe individually, but as a system, understand that, if we were to leverage something like this, then we can individualize back to that personal learning. So that we could create mastery, the goal of actually mastery of learning something, and then students might be this is stuff that Khan Academy has learned that students might not be so great at certain thing like quadratic equations, but they might be much faster somewhere else, and they catch back up. So sometimes you just need more time in one area and less time in another. So instead of wasting time, because look, I get it, can I just move on, I just got to hang with the whole class. And so I think we have to, they're gonna have to divorce ourselves essentially, with that whole idea of, we do a certain thing in April, a certain thing in May, and we do it by topic. Sure, like we're gonna cover Civil War During May, and we do whatever sort of learning we want, but AI can help us if we were learning euphemisms, or some sort of writing conventions, you know, the month before when we're studying this sort of Revolutionary War. Why can't we just carry that on into the Civil War, but not everything could be individual time. We also have come together as groups and do things so we don't want kids just sitting at their screen. With the AI nagging them all the time on how to do something, we want to work cohesively as a group as well, and understand our role in society. So, yeah, it's gonna be a big disruption, like, we won't get it right. In the beginning, for sure, we're gonna make a lot of mistakes, if we can just look at it that way, like, Hey, we're gonna do it, we're gonna get, right. We like to, say, a minimum viable product that's good enough with the assumption that it's not actually going to be good enough. And that as people use it, we're going to learn and we're going to, we're going to change it and improve it along the way. But you can get backlash from that because people don't get a lot of fear from that. And they'll say, I just want to go back to basics, which is something I understood, but it's kind of like, can't we just turn the internet off? Okay. No, you can't just say lead. Blocking AI, just go. Sure. Go ahead and block it. Students will get around it, maybe not at school, but they'll do it at home when they have no guidance.

Oh, so. Gosh, so I subscribe to Education Week, and I must show you this headline. I'm gonna have to describe it. So do you see this? It's a invasion.

There you go clickbait on actual paper. I made you want to read. You know, I could use chat GBT right now and come up at least 15 better title ideas on that one? I can't believe they didn't. Or they asked the best one they came up with Forget it.

I don't know. Yeah, I haven't read the article yet. So it's a invasions schools way benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence.

Just talking about fears, I'm sure half of people are excited to have her right. Yeah, a quick summary in the end about what we should do.

Right. Right. You know, maybe I wrote it, you never know,

probably, maybe generated that paper now. Sorry,

it's very to the journalists at Education Week, but

it's not so much that they would use it so much is that later they made up, they're afraid that some AI is going to write it instead of not need them. They say with AI, like there's going to be teachers or lawyers who use AI. And there's going to be teachers, and lawyers who don't use AI, and they're all going to be unemployed.

We've talked a lot about benefits and the challenges of AI, and how AI can be useful to learners with disabilities or all learners. We have a lot of educators that listen, what's the big takeaway that you'd want for them as they listen to this conversation?

I think when you look at AI, the best thing you can do is to learn it, and start using it, then find a cohort of people who are in the same situation and are the type of people that look, let's create ways to use this to benefit us, let's help create that narrative, and help education move along and use it in a positive and beneficial way. But let's know that in the beginning, we're going to be terrible at it. And it's going to do things we don't want it to do. And kids are gonna use it in ways we don't want them to use it. So we just have to be ready for that and be prepared for that and see that as normal. And then we're going to adjust as we go forward. And if we don't have that sort of open minded concept or philosophy that in our mind as we do it, then we're going to maybe succumb to fear is and try and stop and block things. And then it's going to move forward without our guidance. So let's guide it rather than letting it go on its own.

Yeah, that having an open mind, I think is so important. Because the things that we fear and the things that we try to stop, just ended up having a life of their own. Yeah,

it's kind of like, if there's a flood coming slowly, slowly, it's like, well, maybe we ought to build a boat or do something to help our students by raising the height of the school or whatever, but it's a slow trickle in and you like it, but that's gonna change how I teach. That's gonna change how I do my classroom. Yes, it is. But that water still coming. So what are you going to do? You can you can resist it and be fearful of it for a while. Ignore it, but at the end, it's gonna get you.

Right, this has been a really fascinating conversation. Michael, I do have one more question for you if you're up for it. So this season of thinking cluesive I have been doing something called a mystery question. Are you up for a mystery question? Oh, of course. I can't say no. Yeah, cuz if you want to be on once, yes. No one said no, yet.

My goal, maybe I should just tell me what to

do know. So I have a stack of cards here. And they're all prompt cards, and I'm going to select a card and we'll both answer the question. Okay. Okay. So here we go. The question for today is a rough I like this question, but I think it said but then would you accept a fatal mission? In exchange for a lifetime support for your family? This is an awful question. This is the worst question I've had so far. So Michael, congratulations. You're welcome.

No, I wouldn't because I'm hopeful, maybe arrogant enough to think that I can help my family survive. I haven't do well going into the future so I don't need to kill myself to do it.

Yeah, I don't like this question. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I would not accept a fatal mission in exchange for a lifetime of support. So there you go. All of you. You kidnappers out there. Don't even try it. Okay, let's go on even try it. Man, that was awful. I don't like that one.

I have to go through them next time.

I know, I know. Well, you know,

cheapy to get it, but I couldn't log in and time. Wouldn't it? Probably that wouldn't wouldn't give a very creative answer for that one.

Unfortunately, oh, well, I wonder if let me see if I'm gonna pull up jet chat GBT right now. And then I'm gonna say write a random. I don't know if I'm ever gonna prompt engineering. So ready to read a question to ask my podcast? Guest? Let's see what it comes up with? What has been the most profound or transform transformative moment in your life? And how did it shape the person you are today? LGBT, said that's a

good one. So I have a son, my wife and I have a son with profound autism. So that is probably been the biggest change in our lives, I would think so it's caused us or benefited us to change how we learn our lifestyle and how we help both him and his sister to go forward in life and keep ourselves sane as well. So I think caused me to be or us as a family to be more creative than perhaps we would have intended to be. So I think if I hadn't had him, maybe I'd just be bored to death.

But now you're not.

Well, in fact, as far as my career goes, you know, I wanted to be a therapist, like a counselor, a family counselor, I went to school to be a got my degree in psychology, and I was planning on getting my masters and everything. And out of college, I ended up becoming a behavior therapist for young children with autism. So, three, four and five year olds, had no idea what autism was no clue, you know, just completely oblivious. And I was like, this seems like a fun job. And I ended up working with these families and these in these children. And I was like, I love working with kids. And I love working with families. And that is what just pushed me over into education. Because again, I had no, no desire to be a teacher didn't realize I wanted to be a teacher or anything like that. So just having that exposure and working with children on the spectrum. It was just it was it was transformative. So So yeah, that's mine. Well, thank you.

Thank you for making those choices and continue to do this work to benefit the community. Yeah, of course. We need you. We need you.

It's my pleasure. It was my pleasure to have Michael Ball on the thing conclusive podcast, we appreciate it. Thank you, Tim.

Thanks for listening to this preseason bonus episode, I've dropped some links to specific things Michael and I talked about in our conversation. Can't get enough of thinking cluesive Become a patron and find out what you've been missing on patreon.com/thinking cluesive podcast. Finally, follow us on the socials. And if you follow us on threads, I'm going to post some dad jokes written by AI. Let me know what you think of them. Find us on the web at think inclusive.us And if you want more information about inclusive education, or how MCIE can partner with you in your school or district, go to mcie.org/contact We'll be back next week with our season 11 premiere. Enjoy the rest of your week and remember, inclusion always works.

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