Michigan in early spring is magic….and rife with contrast. Frozen next to flowing water, sprouting plants next to dormant, wild temperature swings. It always feels like the beginning of something exciting – potential, possibility. I’ve started going on long outdoor walks, again. Walking has always been my best thinking time. I’ve solved plot issues, and outlined novels over the span of a walk. Lately, I find myself thinking about AI. I was fortunate to attend the MACUL conference this year where the majority of the sessions were focused on AI.
There were two points in particular, made by Dr. Sabba Quidwai at the keynote, that I can’t stop thinking about. The first, although many schools are writing policies that disallow AI, many businesses won’t hire workers unless they’re well-versed in the use of AI. This disconnect poses a significant problem that we need to figure out soon, in both K-12 and Higher Ed. The second, employees, now and going forward, will need to know how to supervise AI agents, or possibly a combined team of AI agents and human employees.
I get that this may feel overwhelming and scary, so I wanted to offer my advice – just pick one AI tool, experiment with that tool every day for a week, 5-10 minutes a day should suffice. Then, next week, pick a different one…and keep going. Maybe start with one of the resources in the last section?
Upcoming Event
On Saturday, April 12th at 11 a.m., I’ll give a STEM Storytime at the Ypsilanti District Library. Come make a Caesar Shift cipher decoder to take home, stick around to use LEGO spike and Ozobots for coding activities. Hope to see you there!
MACUL Conference Tools & Resources
Although certainly not an exhaustive list, these are some of the new to me, or most discussed tools and resources from the 2025 Annual MACUL conference.
Just about every session at MACUL at least mentioned Google’s NotebookLM, a truly powerful Google Workplace Labs project. NotebookLM allows you to upload content such as documents, YouTube videos and web pages. You can then use NotebookLM to generate a summary, timeline, FAQs, or study guide. You can even have it develop the uploaded content into a podcast.
PadletTA is Padlet’s new AI-powered teaching assistant designed to help with lesson planning, developing quizzes, presentations, text leveling, rubrics and more. You can use links, text, YouTube videos or documents saved in your Google Drive to start.
Gamma is an AI tool that allows you to create presentations, documents and websites without requiring design or coding skills. You can generate the content from a prompt or import a file/URL to kick it off.
LTX Studio creates AI powered storyboards which include character images, short clips of movement within the storyboard, and even a movie poster.
Google Read Along listens to kids read aloud and helps them when they get stuck.
Vurbo.ai turns voice conversations into multilingual translations in real time, currently able to translate 90+ languages.
I’d love to hear about your favorites tools, prompts you’re using that are working well, ways in which you’re teaching AI to others, or anything else you’d like to share! Tell me in the comments below?
