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A podcast for homeschool families brought to you by Sequoia Grove Charter Alliance. Encouragement, tips & tricks, interviews with HSTs and curriculum help.
Rebecca: Listeners, today I am really privileged to have Trisha Brandow back with me as to talk more about basically, digital safety. So we had a conversation a while ago about digital literacy and safety with your kids, and Trisha is back to talk today about AI, which I'm super intimidated by. So thank you for being here, Trisha.
Trisha: Thank you for having me.
Rebecca: Go ahead and introduce yourself again for people who don't know who you are, are, and what you do at our schools.
Trisha: Okay. My name is Trisha Brandow, and I am the assistant Director of Educational Enrichment, which means I support Adventure Academy, field trips, parent education, and various other community programs. And I'm coming to the end of my homeschool career. I just graduated a son last year, and then my youngest is a senior this year with Sequoia Grove. Wow.
Rebecca: It's so true that when homeschool kids graduate, mom graduates too, right?
Trisha: Yes. I'm, like, looking around like, where are some more kids? I can help because it's been. I'm going to miss it.
Rebecca: Trisha, you are a lot more adventurous when it comes to tech stuff than I am. It makes me nervous, and I'd rather just go live with Laura Ingalls. So talk to us about AI and, I don't know, give us an introduction here.
Trisha: Yeah, no, of course. I'd love to. And I think it's interesting that you say that I'm adventurous with. With digital and Internet and all of these things, because I am personally, because I like to learn the things. And I, you know, I. I started on this adventure way back when we started jhva, and I needed to know more so I could support the parents and families in that program. But as a parent, I'm right there with you. I want my kids and I to be back on the prairie where it seems alike. It was a lot more simple. But that's not the world we're in today. So we're.
Rebecca: It's a little less deadly.
Trisha: Yeah, this is true. This is true. But, yeah, I started the, you know, I started learning about the digital literacy and Internet safety stuff, and that became kind of a passion of mine. And so when I first heard about ChatGPT was the first really AI technology I learned about, and my mind was blown. I'm like, what is this thing? You know, I. And then several months later, it became like everyone had access to it. And that led me to realize, like, as a school, we've got to get ahead of this. We need to learn what this technology can do, because even if we don't want to use it. Our students certainly will. So last November, I kind of dove in and learned all I could about ChatGPT, and I did a professional development for our staff. And even since then, it's only been a few months, it seems the technology has evolved.
Rebecca: It's everywhere. It is so fast.
Trisha: Yeah. And ChatGPT is just one program, AI. You're going to find it in pretty much any. Any company you try to contact, they're going to have AI assistance. All these programs are coming at us. So, yeah, it's a big topic, and I'm happy to, you know, shed a little bit of light on what I know about it.
Rebecca: So let's start with the positive. How is it. How is it useful? How is it useful to you and I or to our staff? And then we'll get into parents and students.
Trisha: Yeah, that's a great question. So I personally, I learn best by doing so. When I first started learning about ChatGPT, it was like I watched a bunch of YouTube videos about what are some things we can do with it. And then I just started testing it out. And, you know, from an adult personal life standpoint, and I say adult because I think, you know, the teacher in me, I. It's very dear to my heart the way children learn. Children are not just computers that we feed information to. So I feel like child development and the ways kids learn and all of those stages are really important. So that is something we can. We can talk about later. But as an adult, you know, I'm not in that phase anymore, so I feel a little bit more free to say, hey, ChatGPT, I need a meal plan. And actually, that just. It was this month, I wanted a meal plan, and I had this idea that I wanted to have a certain day of the week, have a certain theme, but I was just stuck. I'm like, I can't think of seven things, and I'm just in this rut. So I went to ChatGPT, told ChatGPT what I wanted it to do, and it spit out, gave me seven different themes, and it gave me meals for each week. And I didn't, you know, I didn't use all the meals because my family has their own preferences. But it really, like, it's a tool I use a lot to get me started on things. When I'm just kind of having, like, say, writer's block or I'm. I'm having a hard time getting started, I can go to ChatGPT and say, Help me with this.
Rebecca: Give me. Give me four different recipes for A Taco Tuesday?
Trisha: Yes, exactly. And then I mean it not to just stick with meal plan, but you know, people go on various meal plans. You know, I'm, I'm plant based, I'm keto or I need to have this many calories and I have to have this kind of, these kind of macros. You can tell ChatGPT and it'll come up with recipes. Now it's a computer, it's scouring the Internet. You know, it has, I think up into this point, it has information fed to it up to 2021. So it's not just making stuff up, it is scouring all the information it's been fed. So it will come up with things that generally are reasonable. But I mean, it makes mistakes. It comes up with things that you're like, no, I don't think that's going to be a good one.
Rebecca: I've tried to use it to generate titles and every single one I've ever gotten has had a semicolon. I even said, give me a title without a semicolon.
Trisha: And it.
Rebecca: And it still gave me a semicolon.
Trisha: I love it. We tried to use it to name our cat.
Rebecca: How can Chat GPT be useful for a homeschool parent?
Trisha: So on the homeschool front, you know, there are a variety of ways that you can use. ChatGPT is the one we talk about most because it's free and it's easily available. There's a lot of paid programs out there that use AI as well. But we'll just stick with ChatGPT because you can access it for free. One of the ways that I really like using it as a teacher and I could, and I actually use this as a homeschool mom. Both, you know, I'm HST and homeschool mom. I have high schoolers and my son wanted to use a certain math curriculum and I was able to go to ChatGPT and say, here are the I can statements. Here's the book I'm going to use. What holes are there in this book? Does this book cover all these standards? And you know, sometimes depending if it's a popular book, you don't even have to give it the table of contents. It knows the book. You can say, are you familiar with this textbook? Yes. Okay, help me compare this textbook to this textbook. Which one's better? So that's one way I've used it, like in high school.
Rebecca: So did you like copy and paste like the course outline or something? I copied yes.
Trisha: And copied and pasted the course outline. Into chat GPT and then I said use this course outline.
Rebecca: Go to, here's the book I'm using Brain is Blown.
Trisha: And as an hst I actually used it. I had a student that wanted to take Russian too and I wanted to get some suggestions for how to break it into units because his Russian teacher did not speak very much English. So I needed a way to communicate with the Russian teacher. These are the things we need to cover. And so it took me several prompts but I was able to say, okay, here's the course outline, here's what needs to be covered. I need you to break it into I think eight learning periods. What are resources? And I worked with it and then once I got something I was comfortable with, I said now translate this into Russian so I could give it to the tutor.
Rebecca: That's insane. It's amazing. Here I am just thinking, well I do how it like how it gives me a summary of the Google results. Wow, that's crazy.
Trisha: And then for younger students I think I really love the applications for younger students. Sometimes you're teaching a younger child a concept. Math is, is the most common. They're just, they're not getting it. You can go to ChatGPT and say we're working on this concept. My student is this age because you want it to know the age of your child. So it'll take that into consideration. Give me five hands on activities to practice this skill and then it'll give you five and okay, give me five more. You know I do a lot of that. Give me five more if I don't like what it comes up with. But you can ask it to explain, explain reconstruction to an 8 year old and it, it can give you a summary that an 8 year old can read. So another, you know, leaving math you can actually have it create grade level appropriate text. So sometimes the resources you have at home maybe are written at a higher grade level. And if you just want a blurb that you can give to your student to read, practicing reading informational text, rewrite this for a 7 year old. And then you, and then I will say this because we haven't mentioned it yet with the understanding that as the parent, as the teacher, as the user, you always need to look at what it comes up with it because it is a computer program. It can make mistakes but it can do a really good job. My husband's a history teacher and I had it write a few summaries on various points in history and he, he's not a huge fan of ChatGPT but he couldn't deny that the, the, the summaries were pretty accurate.
Rebecca: That's really interesting. I actually, I think I heard somebody say they asked for a worksheet maybe for a specific, like they were looking for a sample and they, so they asked it to create a worksheet for a specific age at a specific topic so that they could use that to produce a sample. Obviously the child would fill it in. Not like.
Trisha: And it'll create, you know, if we're just talking about ChatGPT, the free program, it'll create something that you can copy and paste and then reformat. You can also say, make me a multiple choice test on this topic and you can feed it your content. This is the lecture that I gave my student. You know, this is the text. Please create a 10 question multiple choice quiz. Give me the answer key as well. You know, it can do that. You can also have it create like review games. I was just thinking of like a personal application. We, we were together with my family and we have many generations together. You know, my, my parents and then they're my kids, my brothers and their kids. So we have like three generations there. And I, and I sat there with ChatGPT and had it make a quiz game. And then we would say, oh, no, no, now you need to include music from the 60s. Okay, now you need to include music from the 90s. And it actually played the game. It would ask the question and wait for us to give a response and then it would tell us if we were right or wrong. So that's a pretty fun way to do it. You can have it play a game with you.
Rebecca: How interesting. So where did. So far, what we've talked about are things that like, we as the parent are generating and giving to our student. At what point does a student get involved in AI?
Trisha: Really good question. Not a super easy answer. Because as with our discussion on digital literacy and Internet safety, the answer to this question depends a lot on the parents. What is your family? How much technology do you allow your students to have access to to begin with? And I think that's a really good guide into how you would approach AI technology with your students. So let's start with, we'll start this conversation with ChatGPT and then I'll talk about some other programs that are available to students. But I recommend, I do not, I don't think I recommend putting young children in front of ChatGPT. I mean, they could have a ton of fun with it. But I just, I'm not sure that's One of those instances is the juice worth the squeeze. I don't know if the fun they could have with that at a young age is worth introducing them to that yet. And that's my own personal value coming in.
Rebecca: What do you mean by young age?
Trisha: Yeah, that's a good question. Well, and that's where, okay, I do think middle school, high school, we've got to be having these conversations with our kids. We need to. We can't pretend it doesn't exist because at this age, they have access to it. You know, I mean, yes, you can have restrictions and you can block things, but really, you know, going back to the heart of how I would recommend parents approach Internet safety, it's coming alongside your kids and learning together. So even in my home, I've got older kids. I don't just give them unfettered access to AI technology because I think it's unfair to tell a high school student, hey, you can't do this thing you want to do until you get your homework done and then leave a tool like ChatGPT right there tempting them to, you know, if you just use ChatGPT, you can get this done and go on. You know, I think that just sets them up. It's a lot of temptation. So in our family, my kids know we can. You can. There's times I'll let you use it, but I'm not going to let you use it to do your homework. So we just. You're not allowed, you know. But how could you use it? So the first time I introduced my kids to it, again, they're high school. It was. Neither one of them knew where they wanted to go to college. And so I showed them how. I described each. So I took one kid at a time. And, you know, my son Dylan, he's my oldest, and I told it all kinds of things. He likes these kinds of activities. This is what he wants to major in. This is. This is what he's looking for in a school. This is the price range he wants. And please generate a list of 20 colleges and give us the names of the schools, the estimated tuition, and it gave us a list to start from. And I showed them how I did it. You know, I gave it a lot of information so it could generate a good list. And then I did it with my other son. He has different. Different personality, different things he wants. Gave him a list, and then it gave them a resource to then go research on their own.
Rebecca: That's an interesting way of. Yeah, boy. And I. And you, I assume you could even Narrow down the location.
Trisha: Oh yeah. Well, because one of my kids was adamant he's not leaving California. And the other, the other was like, I don't care. I'm more like price range, you know.
Rebecca: So you could give it. Can you tell it priorities like. Oh yeah, like top choice would be yes, you know, about location and then price and then major and then.
Trisha: Yeah, yeah. So that, you know, that was my introduction with my high school kids. With any age kid, I think really it's sitting down together, you know, when you can think of an appropriate application, whether it's okay. I just thought of another, another use case that I think if this is not the only way you write. But this is a sometimes thing. There is a. Do you know the book? It's like you read, I read. Or there's. There's like this turn taking where the kids read a sentence, the parent reads a sentence. There's a taking turns. There's some kind of kids book out there like that. You can actually do that. With CHAT GPT, you write, I write. I need to write a. I want to write a story that takes place in the gold rush days. And then CHAT gp, you know, you write a sentence, then I'll write a sentence. So Chat GBT gives you an opener and then your student comes up with the next sentence and then ChatGPT writes the next sentence. There are times where I think that could really motivate a reluctant writer. It gives practice. It's motivating. I don't think it's the only way a kid should write, but it definitely has a place.
Rebecca: And you would want them to be careful not to think like, well, when it's hard, I just go to gt.
Trisha: Right, right. And that's the thing, because we know that through struggling, that's where we get so much brain growth. But there are times that that could be a thing. So that could be, you know, maybe on Fridays or maybe at the end of a unit, you could do it together, you know, supervised. You know, so you're. Again, I think they need to be supervised when they're. Because you don't want to. You don't want them to become overly reliant on it. That is one of the concerns with AI technology is that you don't want students to bypass the development that needs to happen for them to learn.
Rebecca: Just in the last couple of days with the Olympics, I saw a commercial that was advertising an AI service. I don't remember which one. And it was, you know, like a dad saying, hey, help my daughter write a Letter to whichever Olympian it was she wanted to write a letter to. And I had a very strong reaction to that commercial because what a great learning experience for his daughter. You're highly motivated. You want to write a letter. And so instead of telling AI to do it for her, help her learn how. And you could maybe put the letter in AI at the end and say, is this a clear letter? Is this understandable? Or could this be stronger? And maybe ask AI to help you sort of edit it or beef it up a little bit. But the idea of asking AI to help your daughter write a letter was a little heartbreaking to me. Like, that's their advertisement.
Trisha: Yes.
Rebecca: And now we're. And those. That's the kind of thing I'm. I'm afraid of for AI on a smaller. Except to me, it's not small level. I'm not talking about, is AI going to take over the world? I. I'm not qualified to answer even to even ponder that question. But the idea of we don't have to learn now, we don't have to think now, we don't have to talk to people now. Which is something I wanted to come back around to later of. Like, I love your idea. You mentioned earlier before we were recording something about, you know, looking for a party idea, and I will probably use it for that. But on the other hand, part of me thinks, but ask a friend, because then you have a conversation. And so, like, there are these moments where, like, I just need to get this done and I'm going to take care of it, but other moments where a person could do that, and that's where I get nervous about AI. So let's jump into the negatives of AI.
Trisha: Yeah, well, interestingly, I've been working with Claire Walker, who is the director of Virtual Academies, and we've been working on some guidance on using AI technology for our schools because, you know, we recognize it's here. And so we were actually just yesterday doing some research. And one thing that I did not know is, okay, so some of the main concerns are privacy. And I'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. Bias. So it has been shown that AI has bias because it's using what's on the Internet. So you. It can perpetuate stereotypes, it can perpetuate various bias. And I didn't know that even some of the AI detectors have a flaw that will bias towards certain groups, flagging them for plagiarism, for use of AI technology, when indeed it's just the way they're constructing their Sentences. So, and then the over reliance on AI technology, especially for students, is highly concerning because again, like I say, with child development, all of those stages we go through are so important for brain development. And I think you kind of hit on it with this question. Well, with the idea of AI writing a letter, right. What are we bypassing if we go to AI? Like, I think that's a really important question for parents. If we're going to let our kids use this technology, what are they missing out on? Right. If they use it. And like I said, I do think there is a place for them to see what it can do because it's here and they're going to discover it one way or another. So I'm a fan of let's discover it together. But then we have those conversations. So one of my sons, before we developed guidelines about when and when they're allowed to use it, I, he needed to email his manager at work. And I saw the email sitting on his computer and I'm like, you did not just send this. It was like, dear so and so, I hope this email finds you well. And by the way, that is telltale. ChatGPT always hopes to find you well, and they would like to, they would like to delve into the subject, but he needed to request a day off. And it was like, I hope this email finds you well. And it is with great distress that I must bring to your attention. Like, it was this long thing and I was like, whoa, whoa, Whoa. You are 16 and you need to learn how to this skill. Like, you're going to learn how to write an email appropriately. Especially as someone who writes email like, that is literally what I live and breathe. I'm like, you're going to write a proper email and you're not going to use Chat GPT to do it. But, but it opened up a conversation and I kind of, I kind of teased him about it. Like, like, what do you think your manager is going to think when she reads this? But I do think those are the conversations. If, if Chat GPT writes this paper for you, what is it robbing you of? You know? But at the same time, is there a place that Chat GPT can help you? And another thing I forgot to mention, with students, I do think it's a little difficult because how, even as a teacher, when you're helping your students, how much help is too much help, right? That's always the question. How much editing do I want to help them do on this paper? And at what point is it more of my paper than their paper. That's always kind of a tension that exists. But I do think there's a place for sometimes letting ChatGPT give you feedback on your paper. That being said though, I've seen kids, probably my own, try this, writing a sentence, give me feedback on this five paragraph essay. How would you make it better? Well then ChatGPT is writing the paper for you, right? So write the paper the best you can, edit it the best you can, proofread it the best you can, then give it to ChatGPT and ask it to give you feedback. I think there's a place to learn. Oh, because in it and you're going to receive it differently because it's not your mom, it's not your teacher, it's not personal, it's just the computer saying, I think you could say this better, I think you could reword this. So there, that's a way you could use it. But it's also a conversation to have as you're using it, you know, with your, with your student. And I forgot to mention that as a homeschool parent there's a place for soliciting help from the AI technology. My son took chemistry and algebra 2 last year and I took both of those classes and did great in high school. But like I literally could not remember. So I would go. There is a Khan Academy. You're familiar with Khan Academy. So Khan Academy has launched Khanigo, which is a, an AI tutor and it is designed for students to be able to go to this AI tutor and ask for help. And it is programmed in such a way that it does just what a teacher would do. It does not give the student the answer. It, it asks, well, oh that's interesting that you put a, that you added those numbers. Can you tell me why you added those numbers? You know, so it's kind of a cool technology and if you have the account as a parent, it will let you ask the question and it'll give you the answer. So I went to ChatGPT and it's like, I don't know, solve this equation, tell me how you do it. Because I can't help my son, I don't remember the steps right. So it can help in those regards. But it also, sometimes I struggle to give feedback on a written piece of work because my writing style might be different than my students writing style and I prefer a certain choice of words in a certain sentence structure. So it can also help evaluate a paper that you can look at its suggestions and go back to your student and have a Different conversation.
Rebecca: Okay. I. Those are. I can see those reducing a lot of stress.
Trisha: Yeah.
Rebecca: At home, between a tired teenager who just wants to be done.
Trisha: Yes.
Rebecca: A parent is like, I don't know how to do this. I have now, as you've been talking about it, remember that. I don't remember the situation, actually, but there was a time when the tone of my email really mattered. I needed to say something maybe a little hard, and I needed to be very careful that I said it and not too hard of a tone.
Trisha: Right.
Rebecca: And so my husband was like, ask chat. Why do I have such a hard time with that? To say, like, to evaluate the tone of the letter. I wasn't even asking them to evaluate, like, the grammar or anything like that. It was just. Is this with a. An upbeat tone or something? I don't. I'm sure that wasn't the word I used, but. And help me. A positive tone. Maybe it was, you know, and can you help? And it helped me refine it in a couple of different ways till I was happy with it. And. Yeah. So that was another kind of interesting way to. I mean, I think sometimes when kids are writing, it can. They can change their tone. They can change the voice, they can change the sort of perspective. And so is it consistent? Like, is there a consistent tone or voice or whatever through this?
Trisha: Yeah, and that's an easy one. I don't know if you've experienced this in your homeschool, but definitely when you start to get them on the tense shifting or the tone, that seems to be the time they're most frustrated with you as the parent. And how nice to have ChatGPT just pointed out. Don't argue. It's. See, it's true.
Rebecca: So what are some dangers or concerns?
Trisha: So we talked about some of the pitfalls. Privacy. It's an interesting. We were talking before the show about how different generations seem to have different varying levels of comfort with sharing information and all of those. But one of the most current concerns that I've been made aware of and looking at it as a staff. Right. You know, we. When Claire and I were working on the guidelines that we were developing, it was like, hey, we need to make sure that our staff members know that we cannot put sensitive information into something like ChatGPT. Like, we can't say, here's all my students and their district IDs and their test scores, because if it gets hacked, you've got sensitive information. So there. There is that concern that, you know.
Rebecca: That you might not want to give. Give it your Social Security.
Trisha: Exactly. So you want to be careful. It gives you the best results the more specific you are. But you don't have to give it sensitive information to be specific. So that would be, that would be probably one of the number one. And then also just. I think another danger would be over reliance on it with like getting to the point where we're using the AI technology instead of our own, our own creativity. And then you get real comfortable with it. That gives you really good results most of the time. But if we're not checking, you know, I, I know a lot of people use it for email or other written communication and I will admit I use it sometimes when I'm struggling with word choice or. But taking that extra time to make sure what it wrote accurately reflects how you want to be represented. If you're using it to help you with those things is really important because as I mentioned before, it can have bias, it can have inaccurate information and we want to make sure we're using it as the tool. But ultimately we have the control over how we are utilizing what it gives us.
Rebecca: It's still a machine.
Trisha: Yes.
Rebecca: Based off of human error prone information. It is not infallible. It is not all knowing.
Trisha: It's not like a calculator. Even though sometimes, you know, like a calculator is not. As long as you push the buttons right. The calculator is not going to give you the wrong answer. You can think of it that way, but it's not because it's been fed. Like you said, the information that it has is only, it's only as good as the information that it has. And the information came from all kinds.
Rebecca: Of sources I was mentioning to you earlier. But this is such an interesting situation. Just yesterday my couple of my kids ended up in a sort of a, an AI game where they allowed some AI program into their Spotify accounts to evaluate their music choices. And it was, it was meant to be funny. I think the AI was programmed to sort of roast them a little bit like it was. And they were. And it was all in a chat with a bunch of friends where they were each comparing their. And I found that I had no response for. I, I'm super uncomfortable with the idea of it. Like wait, you let AI into your account? And I, this doesn't feel right. But I don't actually have the information or knowledge to say if that was an okay idea and just a fun way to pass some time with the friend, with your friends or whether that was a terrible idea. But, but I, I mean, at least it's just a Spotify. Stop.
Trisha: I don't know.
Rebecca: I don't know. That felt like a slippery slope. And maybe especially because if we're. If we're honest, most of us share passwords across different accounts or. I don't know. I don't. I don't know. What if that had been your kids? Where would you go with that?
Trisha: I probably would have had the similar reaction to you, like, wait a minute, is this a good idea? But again, it gives you an opportunity. Okay, Because I want to take it back again. I'm going to tie this back to the digital literacy and Internet safety discussion. Technology is moving so fast. It's changing so fast. We can't know all the answers right now. All we can know are the right. Not even the right questions, but we can have. The question can be, what happens if. What could happen? You know, to practice that, pausing and thinking, what could. What. What's the downside of this? You know, and thinking of things, looking at it critically, not just the benefits, because the benefits are going to jump out at you. Look at how efficient this is. Look at how fun this is. Okay, but what are. What are the potential downsides? We tested a technology in a meeting yesterday. So there is an AI assistant that you can launch in Zoom. And we were in a meeting, and one of the attendees launched it because they didn't know what it did. And then we all. And then it was requesting from the host permission to allow the AI assistant. And so we all, as a group, said, okay, well, let's allow it and see what happens. So the AI assistant joined the Zoom meeting as a separate participant. As soon as it was allowed, it joined as a separate participant and transcribed the entire meeting. So I watched in real time as the AI transcribed the whole meeting, including screenshots. Then at the end of the meeting, it sent a summary to the original member who launched the program, and she forwarded it to me. It gave her a summary of the meeting, a detailed to do list, and then the full transcript. And I see your face right now. There are two sides of it, right? From one perspective, you're like, this could be amazing in certain settings.
Rebecca: On the other side, everything you just said is in some data center now in the middle of North Carolina or something.
Trisha: Who knows where. Yeah.
Rebecca: Oh.
Trisha: So that was. That was eye opening, but that's. That's how fast technology is moving. It was like, we got this update, and she was like, I don't know what this thing does. And then we had this conversation, you know, and then I was talking in.
Rebecca: Another meeting, but talk about sensitive information, like you're having a work conversation over zoom, which is. Ah, yeah, well.
Trisha: And the good news is you have to grant it permission. And so I, I would imagine it's not going to be a normal thing, but it was a good thing for us to say, hey, yeah, this is, let's see what happened. And we actually talked in another group. Apparently it will attend meetings for you if you can't make it. And it'll give you a transcript of the meeting. And someone was saying, apparently, like worldwide, they're having a problem with employees sending their AI assistant students sending their AI assistant to class. Okay. So obviously we can see a lot of concerns with that there. But there, there's in the other piece where you're like a student who needs a scribe or there's a, you know, there's an occasional time where you're like, I can't make it, you know. But I think the concerns, the red flags are just everywhere. Right.
Rebecca: But there's that. Maybe that's that generational concern for privacy again. Like, I'm thinking, I don't want all this stuff sitting in a data center.
Trisha: Well, in my thought was somebody else.
Rebecca: Can get to it.
Trisha: There are times that you pick up the phone and it's not because you're going to say something inappropriate. It's because you need your tone to accompany your words. You need your voice.
Rebecca: Right.
Trisha: And that was my immediate concern is like in a meeting, it's similar to a phone call. You may say something, but without the tone behind it. What does that look like in print?
Rebecca: Yeah.
Trisha: So that's just an example of a brand new technology I didn't even know about until yesterday. And that's how fast though it's moving. It moves. And so I guess. But that's. I hope I don't want the takeaway from this conversation to be fear, fear, fear, fear. It's more like we are still the humans and as parents and learning coaches, we definitely have this responsibility to teach our kids to question, to think critically before diving into a technology.
Rebecca: I was thinking that earlier when you were talking about like, okay, so this new thing with my kids and this game with Spotify, that they don't have the big enough understanding of the things in the world that could be. So, yeah, they see the positive. This was a fun way to connect with friends, but they don't understand all of the news stories I've heard for the last 30 years that send alarm bells off in my.
Trisha: Yes.
Rebecca: For ways that Their, I don't know, identity could be stolen or something. Again, I'm still processing like what is even the concern with that, but talking through, helping to expand their understanding of why this could be a bad thing or at least a cautious thing.
Trisha: And I think like overall that's, that is our role as parents, learning coaches is we are the adults, we do have the life experience. And so I would also encourage parents because I think we've all had that experience with a kid knowing what, how to use the remote or how to program. So like you're like what? I don't even know what you just did. How like, but, but at the same time, just because they know how to do certain things online maybe better than you do, you're still the adult that has that life experience that's so crucial to raising them up to be responsible digital citizens, to, to teach them. I mean, because I think like I said we mentioned bias, inaccurate information, you know, these are all skills that we want to teach them anyway. Whether they're using AI technology or not. We want them to learn to look at what the, what is being generated on their computer with a critical eye.
Rebecca: So it's a really cool tool. It's growing by leaps and bounds. By the time this publishes, it could be outdated. But there are some concerns and we need to use it as parents before we turn our kids loose on it and then use it with them. Like be care, be careful of that age level thing. Just because your tech savvy 8 year old can use it doesn't mean they should necessarily.
Trisha: Right, Right.
Rebecca: Do you have some resources we can put in our note show notes?
Trisha: Yeah, I will definitely know more about that. Okay. I will definitely add some resources and definitely I would encourage anyone who hasn't visited the talk about digital literacy and Internet safety that's first because it's really those same principles. It's just AI technology is a new thing. And also just don't be afraid of it. Use it to the varying levels that you're comfortable. But it really, we didn't even like really tip the iceberg of the different practical applications, but you could, you could use AI to give you a list of ways to use AI in your home school.
Rebecca: Well, it's entirely possible that in another year we will have another conversation. Thank you so much, Trisha for coming and helping us to just scratch the surface of this topic, which is so fast moving and a little befuddling for a lot of adults.
Trisha: Yeah, thank you for having me.