Amy Mayer: Engaging Students and Driving Inclusivity with EdTech Tools

This week, we share Chris’s interview with Amy Mayer! Amy is the founder and CEO of friEdTech (https://friedtechnology.com/), a company that provides educational technology (EdTech) professional development for educators. Amy talks about her recent book, Beyond Worksheets, which provides resources for teachers to utilize EdTech tools and to inclusively redesign education for everyone! She and Chris discuss the impact of AI on education and writing, ideas for creating meaningful professional learning experiences, and more!

 

Before the interview, Rachel updates Chris about one of her clients, including how a fun collaborative creative writing exercise led to improvements in both his writing and spoken language! 

 

Key Ideas This Episode:

 

🔑  AI tools can be helpful for new writers trying to get feedback about their work, including reviewing for spelling and grammar. However, having a real person read and provide feedback about your writing may provide feedback from a broader view that current AI tools can’t provide.

 

🔑  Amy knows that educators often do not choose to come to a PD, but friEd Tech gets educators invested by designing learning experiences to solve problems that people actually have. Then, once people have talked about the problems they have, the group works together collaboratively to figure out how to solve those problems.

 

🔑  We need to have bigger conversations with students about the ethical use of AI tools. For example, some students never use AI tools because of ethical concerns, even though some AI tools could be used ethically to improve their learning.

 

Amy's recent book: Beyond Worksheets: Creative Ways to Engage Students 

 

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