Melissa Warr and I were in Denver earlier this week for the ISTE 2024 conference. We were there to receive the Outstanding Research Paper award from the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, for our paper TPACK in an age of ChatGPT and generative AI. Specifically, we were recognized for publishing

…the single article from the prior volume year with the highest possibility to advance the field of teacher education, based on the criteria of potential impact and contribution, innovativeness, and generalizability or usability.

We also had a chance to present our paper to a wider audience. You can read the full paper (and if the entire document is too long – we have 2-page executive summaries in a range of languages as well) and view the slides from our talk below.

The next day we led a hands-on workshop titled Stranger Skills: Critical Practices for Generative AI in Teaching and Learning.  In this session the participants explored the tensions inherent in incorporating generative AI tools in teaching. Participants engaged with a variety of prompts designed to spark critical discussions around equity, diversity, and difficult conversations in educational settings. They experimented with prompts that touched on culturally responsive teaching, simulating difficult conversations, and addressing scientific misconceptions in. The session emphasized the importance of human-directed AI use, encouraging active engagement, metacognition, and skepticism when interacting with AI tools. You can see our slides, view our handout and some photographs from the event below.

As a part of our workshop we described what has been called “AI’s hotness problem,” namely the fact that AI generated images are often too perfect. To demonstrate this Melissa took a picture of our audience, uploaded it to ChatGPT and asked it to describe the image. She then fed that description back to ChatGPT as a prompt to create an image. Within minutes we had a clear example of the point we were trying to make. (This is not to say our audience was not prefect but just that they had not stepped out of a stock photos catalog.)

One of the most fun aspects of ISTE was meeting up with many friends and making some new ones. Here are some images from those two days.