Week 2 Blog: Web 2.0 Teaching Tools
Web 2.0 Tools: Teaching
Hello Again!
This week we had the opportunity to explore several tools for teaching. I had fun experimenting with various websites and creating some mock products. A site I will probably end up using as a current student is Trello. This could help me organize my schedule and decide how I want to allot my time in the coming weeks. The site I will be writing about for this particular blog post is Gamma because I had fun generating presentations and I think it could be useful in making visually appealing power points. Gamma is a tool that allows people (teachers, students, anyone with a business) to make entire presentations in under a minute using generative AI. Gamma
During my time student teaching, I was using a power point every day. One of my power points had over 100 slides because I added to it weekly for an entire unit. I found myself wanting to make my power points more fun to look at but didn't want to spend time learning a new platform like Canva in order to do so. Gamma could help me create visually appealing power point presentations and save me the time it takes to edit media together in Power Point or Canva. I asked Gamma to "make me a power point on the benefits of using Gamma in a Secondary English Language Arts classroom", and it generated an informative eight slide power point in under a minute. Below is a link to the power point I made on Gamma:
I do have a few critiques of Gamma that might keep me from utilizing it in my own classroom in the future: 1) the AI images Gamma uses are a bit silly and I wouldn't want to present them to a class of students who are very technologically savvy. By the time I go through and edit all the media and plug in the videos or pictures I actually want to use, I'm not sure i'd be saving myself that much time; 2) There are some limitations like not being able to integrate it with other tools like Google workspace and it costs money to get the more premium features. Included at the bottom of this blog is a screenshot of some limitations of Gamma Ai; 3) letting AI do things for me feels like a bit of a cop out and I fear the presentations would lack the depth I want them to have. There are also various ethical concerns of using AI (bias, transparency, privacy, job displacement etc.). I'm not completely against using tools like AI to make teaching easier, but I also want to model how to use technology responsibly and worry about cutting corners. What are your thoughts about using AI in the classroom?
Source: Goldman Shree, Is Gamma app the best AI tool? Here's what we found, 08 Agency, article link
Hope everyone is having a great week so far, thanks for reading!
Hi Hannah,
ReplyDeleteThat presentation was very impressive for being made in under a minute! Thank you for sharing your experience using Gamma Ai, I think my biggest hang up with using Ai is the depth of content. I often find that Ai content feels very surface level and generalized. I always want to save time, but similar to your thoughts, I feel I spend more time policing and adding to Ai generated documents. I love your stance on wanting to teach responsibility when using Ai, our students are going to use it so we should inform them about using it correctly.
Hi Jon!
DeleteThanks for your comments! It was pretty impressive how quick it generated slides and it was a fun tool to play around with. AI lacking depth is also one of the issues I have with it, I think it's great as a rough outline to be edited/added to.
Hannah,
ReplyDeleteThis tool is very intriguing. Thank you for your exploration and honest feedback, I found it to be very informative. I personally like AI and use it a lot, but completely agree with the fact that it lacks depth. AI is not very helpful or effective when left to its own accord, it needs an intentional, informed prompt for it to give a deep, meaningful response.
Is there a way to plug in course content, or even a textbook chapter for it to use to generate slides? Is there a place to provide dynamic instructions and specifications for teaching style or design? I will explore the tool as well, these are just the questions that came to mind as I considered this tool.
Hi Isabelle,
DeleteI have started using AI a lot more as of recent and I wish I had utilized it more during student teaching. Thanks for your question, I forgot to mention that you can paste notes, outlines, or existing content into Gamma and it will make you a presentation. If you generate a presentation the general why by typing what you want it to be about, you can include instructions and specifications for teaching style/design.
Hi Hannah,
ReplyDeleteGamma sounds like a fun tool to experiment with! I can see how something like this could come in handy for busy teachers who want their slides to look polished without spending hours tweaking fonts and layouts. I also appreciate your honesty about the limitations too, especially the part about feeling like AI can be a bit of a shortcut at times. Finding the balance between efficiency and authenticity is real, especially when we’re trying to model what positive digital presence is for our students.
Is there something you would do the check-in on students' use of AI with Gamma? For example, if your students were to use Gamma, would you have them first submit the AI-generated version as a rough draft, then revise and resubmit it with their own edits and ideas added in? Or do you think that would be too much?
Hi Jess!
DeleteGamma was fun to experiment with and incredibly easy to navigate. If you want an in-depth presentation it would still require some tweaking of images/photos/content but overall it would be a time saver! That's a great question...I actually really like your idea about having the AI generated version being a rough draft and then making changes before submitting the final version. I think this would help teach good habits when it comes to using AI.
Hello Hannah!
ReplyDeleteGamma is not something I am familiar with, but after reading your post I might look into it. I'm curious to use it and compare it to other AI services, specifically the ones that can generate images. There have been times where I needed to make a presentation for a class, and the most time-consuming part for me was making it look visually appealing with the layout and images, so this might be something I can play around with.
During your student teaching, did you try other programs like Gamma to create presentations? If you did, how did those others perform for you?
Hi BJ!
DeleteI will say Gamma is extremely easy to navigate and would save a lot of time when it comes to making presentations- it's worth checking out. The images it put into the presentation aren't images I would like to use so It might take time going back and changing them, but it's also very easy to change them by either uploading a photo from your computer or searching online for one. During student teaching I tried to use Canva but ended up sticking with what I was comfortable with (power point)- especially since making the cool presentations on Canva required a paid subscription and power point was free.
Hannah,
ReplyDeleteI love the set up of your Gamma page! It looks great and it makes me interested in creating my own for my ELA classes. If there were a specific aspect that you would change in Gamma to make it more user-friendly, what would it be? It's crazy that there are so many platforms out there that have so many useful tools but are incredibly expensive to purchase especially in low income area districts.
Hi Veronica,
DeleteThank you- I didn't do much, it was all the AI! haha. I think Gamma was fairly user friendly, it even has a page of tips and tricks for people to look at. My biggest concern with using Gamma is that it lacked some depth which would require going back and making changes.