AI Created Newsletter

 For one of this week's assignments, we had to develop an AI created newsletter.  I asked ChatGPT to create a newsletter for my new Elementary School about non-fiction historical picture book. (which is one of my favorite Youth Book genres)  

Please read over the newsletter and let me know what you think! To me, it sounds really basic and simplified. I only changed one word - it said "we" and since I am the only person working in my new home library, I wanted it to say "I."  I wanted to show the newsletter exactly how AI generated it. 

Here is the newsletter I created: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N4QW_aqE7fflHsj3_SfH9DMSkTp5MXCK/view?usp=sharing

I can see where AI could be helpful with posting on Social Media or creating parent communications. But always, always, always proofread it before you post or send the information out.  

I had played with AI a little bit this past Spring at work. It started with HotpotAi (Hotpot.ai: AI image generator). My next door neighbor and I started making AI images and adding them to our daily Warm-Up slide. We would get a huge laugh out of trying to add Santa Anna to images, since we taught 7th grade Texas History. The Hotpot Art Generator AI did not understand who Santa Anna was and would add misrepresentations of him to the images. For example, in one image, we tried to make an image of Santa Anna on the beach and ended up with an image of an Arabic looking man, riding a reindeer on the beach. When we tried again, we ended up with Santa Claus eating fried chicken on the beach. I asked Hotpot Art Generator AI to create images of Sam Houston riding through the jungle on a unicorn. Sadly, a couple of my students thought it was a real image of Sam Houston.  

"Sam Houston riding a unicorn through a jungle"

"Santa Anna relaxing on the beach"

Our district introduced some teachers to Magic School AI. However, how the district did it was really shady. Those of us who wanted to attend the workshop was given a one week all access account and showed all the wonderful things it could do for us. After the 7 days, our account kicked down to the basic free account. If we wanted to use the features the district Technology Instructional Coach showed us, we had to buy the upgraded account ourselves. 

I used ChatGPT AI created lesson plans for the last six weeks of school. After not writing lesson plans for over 15 years, the AP that took over our department decided we had to turn in detailed lesson plans - down to the minute - the last six weeks of school. Talk about a micromanager and a half! I noticed that you always had to read over the lesson plan and make some changes to it so it would best fit my style of teaching.  I also used ChatGPT to create emails home to parents, since I tend to be "wordy" and "long winded" according to some people. 

I have noticed, along with my chat partners, Barbara Jean and Meghan, that while AI has its place and is a good starting point, it has to be tweaked and changed to fit the user's needs. A lot of times, the verb tense or nouns/pronouns are off. Plus, you have to look for "fill in the blank here" spots. You can never use AI and take it immediately to be used/published.  The more specific you can be, the better the AI generated item will be. 

"a rat terroir dog wearing sunglasses riding a motorcycle on a road through the mountains"

With Pearson using AI to grade the STAAR test and Meghan sharing how many sessions were on AI at TCEA this year, you definitely need to be familiar with AI as a teacher. Students WILL try to use AI as the "easy way" to write an essay or project for a class. As a Librarian, especially if you are in on a secondary campus, you will need to teach teachers how to use and detect AL written assignments. We also will need to teach students the PROPER use of AI.

You also need to be careful of the program you chose to use. My coworker from above, chose to use JustDone AI to detect student AI usage and to make his lesson plans undetectable in AI sites and ended up with a mess. The original cost was advertised as 99 cents. Once he paid the 99 cents, in order to use the basic features, the fee jumped to $20. At this point, he was in for a $21 flat fee. But no. Every time he looked at the features, the prices went up. The AI "rewrite" feature tweaked his lesson plan from talking about the Roaring 1920's to mentioning robots(?) and it went from sounding like an educated person wrote the lesson plan to sounding like my 5-year-old wrote his lesson plan.  He tried to cancel his subscription and saw where after one month; he would be charged over $45 a month to have a really unusable AI program. He cannot cancel his subscription, only postpone it for 6 weeks. He has emailed and emailed and emailed their Customer Service about cancelling their program and has yet to receive a response.  Be careful of who you use!  (I personally like ChatGPT and Hotpot AI the best)

"A hippo on Mars wearing glasses reading a book while eating tacos"