MSM 695: The More They Hide, The More They Are Exposed

Welcome to Middle School Matters Podcast number 695. The more they hide, the more they

are exposed. We're going to expose some jokes for you. We're going to talk about some

resources. We're going to talk about things that are going on in the middle of a lead.

So without further ado, here's the wonderful, the Magnanimacy Mr. Troi Patterson.

All right. Welcome back to the show. I am Troi Patterson and with me is the world's greatest

kosho host, Mr. Sean McGurr. Hey, Sean. Well, hello there. How are you? I'm well. Hey,

what do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter? Is that like

dividing by zero? Because I don't know. I thought we'd start with math things for you. Yeah,

yeah, you start easy today. Yeah. Throw it, throw you off here. You get it. Pumpkin pie.

That's more delicious than I thought it was going to be. It's just a tip for you.

Dove chocolate tastes way better than their soap? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It also depends on what country

you're using it too, but we had that experience. How does it feel when you cross a cantaloupe with a

herding dog? Cantaloupe with a herding dog? I don't know. What do you get? Melancholy.

Melancholy. You know what their kids are? Melancholy babies.

I went to the zoo the other day. You did? No. The highlight was seeing an antaloupe.

Okay. I'd never known an insect to run off and get married before. Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah.

I connected a menu phone to the cloud. You did? Yeah, now I'm getting missed calls.

Ah, you didn't see the one coming. Did you? No. Does the name Pavlov ring any bells?

We have a couple of jokes for you that are visual in nature over at middleschoolmatters.com

including one that I just love if you are writing like a series of things like a listing kind of

thing on a sign, you might want to be careful. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Careful how you word that,

how you frame it because, you know, it's there. And then if you're a shelf silverstein fan,

you have. Oh, yeah. You might enjoy as well. All right, let's see here. Let's,

you know, we've been talking a lot about AI and Dave Biedlowski is entered into the AI

conversation as well. And so of course science in AI has a lot to do with each other.

And this is, hmm, good day. So, so fewer listeners may know that like I kid Dave and Sean about

getting about the antiquity of their formatting. Oh, that was priceless. I wish I had a screenshot

of that. And so I usually go through and they use double spaces and stuff like that. And so

I'm surprised when Dave doesn't use a double space. Anyway, this week Dave's got a nice little

bit about AI and what if AI gets it wrong. Teaching the students to detect errors and misleading

models. This is, this is crucial because not only students, but there's a lot of adults that don't

understand this as well, that AI can be wrong. So here without further ado, it's the wonderful

Mr. Dave Biedlowski in the middle school science minute. Hi, this is Dave Biedlowski of k12science.net.

And this is your k12science podcast. I was recently reading the February 18th,

2026 issue of the National Science Teaching Association's blog. And there was an article written

by Valerie Bennett and Christine Ann Royce. And their article was entitled, What if AI gets it wrong?

Teaching students to detect errors and misleading models. And they wrote that in science classrooms,

students are learning to work with a new kind of authority, one that speaks confidently and

writes fluently, but is often wrong in subtle ways. Generative AI can produce explanations,

graphs and models that look and sound correct scientifically, while quietly violating assumptions,

ignoring variables or overstating certainty. For science educators, this moment is not a crisis.

It's an instructional opening. The core question for 2026 is no longer whether students should use AI,

but instead is whether students are learning how to evaluate AI-generated science claims

the way scientists evaluate all claims. In this article, they look at the idea that human

understanding and judgment are still essential when using AI, even when prompts are well written

and information appears correct. Recent scholarship argues that AI literacy and science

must move beyond tool use toward the ability to question how knowledge claims are generated,

justified and limited. In this framing, the use of AI becomes a case study in scientific reasoning

rather than a shortcut around it. Students learn to ask, What assumptions does this model rely on?

What evidence supports or contradicts this explanation? What variables mechanisms or boundary

conditions are missing? And where might this model fail? And then they shared two vignettes

of how they turned AI errors into science learning. Vignette 1 was a middle school or science class

studying climate trends. Students asked an AI tool to explain why global temperatures have

increased over the past century. The AI produces a smooth explanation focused primarily on

carbon dioxide with a simplified linear trend graph. But the teacher then asked students to

compare the AI explanation to real climate data sets and peer reviewed summaries. Students quickly

notice missing elements, including feedback loops, aerosols, ocean heat uptake and regional

variability. The class reframes the AI response as a first draft model and collaboratively

revises it. So the learning payoff was that students practice evaluating explanatory adequacy

and recognize that scientific models are partial and revisable, not authoritative truths.

The second vignette they shared was a physics example on the topic of motion and idealized systems.

The students asked AI to explain projectile motion. The AI provides equations that assume no

air resistance and ideal conditions without explicitly stating those assumptions.

The teacher then challenged students to design a scenario where the AI explanation would be

inaccurate using lightweight objects, high wind, not earth conditions. Students untested their

predictions using simulations and video analysis. And the learning payoff was that students

connected mathematical models to physical assumptions and learned that wrong models can still be

useful within limits. As AI generated explanations become commonplace, science teachers take on

an increasingly vital role as guides. Their expertise will be most valuable, not in competing with

AI for answers, but in helping students learn to evaluate, revise and frame claims, skills at the

heart of high quality science instruction and strongly aligned with the professional vision

advanced by the National Science Teaching Association. So in 2026, the most important science lesson

may not be how to use AI, but how to question like a scientist. And this has been your K-12 science

podcast. I also shared something earlier and I don't have it up, so I shouldn't probably do this,

but there is at the bottom of, at the bottom is like, AI can make mistakes and you should check

your results and check your results kind of thing, right? And most people read that as it's possible

that AI makes mistakes and you should kind of double check. But what if it really means AI is

permitted to make mistakes and expected to make mistakes and you really need to double check it

because you're responsible for it. Just a different way of looking at that here.

All right, so that is important. This past week, we both worked on Gemini presentations,

which I find interesting. Tell me about yours. So I'm doing an introduction to Gemini.

Since we have the Gemini Pro model, I was trying, and I'm doing mine as kind of a remote video

kind of thing because it's very rare for us to be able to get PG time in front of people.

I was trying to keep it to two minutes. I failed. I got it three minutes and I felt like three minutes

has rushing through and there's a lot of stuff left to do. So it's just a basic introduction to it.

But we're building a library of these so that teachers can do self-directed PD

on their time instead of through formal PD time. So yeah, we've done a few of them.

I went through the different models, thinking, pro, and deep research and then the different tools

that are available as well because you can create music now as well.

Lary of three is out, yeah.

And then the canvas, why you might want to use canvas especially for doing like lesson

plans and stuff because the canvas creates documents right there that you can look at and add it

and work with them and that. And then for us, it's basically unlimited for the fast model.

You get 300 prompts a day. I think it is with the pro model and I think it's 100 prompts a day

with the deep reasoning one.

Did you know that it is possible when preparing a presentation on Google Gemini to run out of those

300 prompts? Wow. That's impressive. How long does it take when to run out of 300 prompts?

If you're building a presentation on it and you're like, no, no, I need to revise this is better.

No, I want to fix this. No, it takes you about two hours, three hours.

It's still some significant time.

Yep. So what you do is you jump over to GNTPT and use that as your backup and you finish your

presentation from there. Yeah. The free version of, in one of the things that I will tell most people

is the free version of most of these tools is not going to be Copa compliant. So

for kids, so that's a, you know, adults are different, but just kind of know that.

But yeah, we're working on putting some things together for staff. It's kind of what they said

they wanted kind of thing. So we're working on that.

And it looks like, so what did you, and so you did a presentation where you ran out of

your 300 prompts? What was your presentation on Google Gemini?

So I was to present to whether or not this is a tool we should be using in our district.

I took it, I didn't take it from the tack that this is something we should let our kids use.

Because I think we need to talk about gradual lease and what that looks like. You know,

we don't hand, we don't have hand keys to a car to a kid who's in sixth grade for a reason.

And we're trying to figure this part out. So I said instead of doing that, let's take a look at it

from another direction. Let's take a look at it as in a not a generic AI generating

work or learning. And then how can we, how can we leverage this so that instead of AI being

transactional, it becomes transformational. And I know one of the things my curriculum

director is looking for is to offload some of the cognitive load on teachers,

probably to put something else in this place. But that's not part of the conversation yet.

The shoe that hasn't dropped. So I did some things and I shared one with you as I made a

this morning. I took and took Marcus Rillius' quotes from meditations and turned it into some

learning cards where the kids then had three levels of evaluation, right? There was just a straight

meaning, you know, application. Here's a scenario. How would you apply it to the scenario?

And then some sort of extension beyond that to hit a higher level thinking skill.

Not increasing the workload, just increasing the complexity.

So did you put in the meditation book or did you put in just quotes from Marcus Rillius?

I didn't even do that. So I didn't make a gem. I'm just using straight up using the AI.

And I said, here's what I want to do. Now granted, the AI and AI and I have been working together

for a while. So it's already assuming certain things, right? It's assuming that I want to apply

Rick Wormley. I want to apply Jack Brickamire. I want to apply Katie Powell. I want to apply all

these different things that I've talked about in the past. Right. So there's starting to get some

topic maintenance with our conversations. And I said, now here's what I want to do. I've got to

get an ancient Roman going to do. So I really, really want to incorporate quotes from Marcus Rillius

to help my kids understand stoicism and stoic thought. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's great,

because everything's great, right? So it's like a it's a golden retriever retriever. So I said,

here's the things I want to do. I want to take and build something using Marcus Rillius' quotes.

Give me like three or four different ideas on how we could turn this into a learning situation

for the kids. And I had one in my head, but I just want to see what it would do. And it gave me

four scenarios, but it said the strongest one is taking these quotes and building scenarios

around the quotes where the kids didn't have to apply the quote to the scenario to solve the

situation to solve the scenario's problem. I was like, oh, I like that. And that's where I was

leaning with to begin with. I said, all right, let's I like that one. Let's let's do that. Let's

build that. And it said, well, Marcus really says quotes fall into these eight categories. And here

are six that I would like to do. I said, I like those six too. So let's let's start building. So we

started building and each step along the way would say, so this is what I wanted to hear. This is

it gave me an outline. And I said, I like all of that, but I need I want to do I want to develop

the scenarios. So flesh those out a little more. Don't give them just like one or two sentences.

Flesh it out and give some of my kids a better visual as to the, you know, what could be going on

in that scenario in the building. And it did. And we went through it. I made tweaks and I said,

oh, I like this. Yes, I do like this. And then I said finally, got to the end. Then I said,

all right, build it. And it built it put into a document for me. And I sent that to you. And

yeah. So one of the questions that I have that that comes up is that part of what you mentioned

was context. Right. And one of the things that AI will continue to do is sometimes it runs out

of context. So it starts, it will either summarize what it knows so far. And then kind of go off

that or it just starts deleting some of that context out of its realm. I would. Have you found

more? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Not yet. But what I have found is that it will

preseparate in a bad context if you let it. Okay. Yeah. So if it's doing something you don't like,

you have to catch it right away. Otherwise, it will show up again in areas that you didn't want it.

It's like, and that problem again. It's like squishing a bug. It's a lot like, it's a lot like having.

So I stopped I stopped programming back at Apple Soft Basic back in years ago.

But it reminds me if if I sat down with somebody and I said, I want to code things this way. I want

to code things this way. And essentially, I'm just orally coding this stuff. Right. And it's not

orally typing, but you get the idea. But that's what it feels like. It feels like I'm able to give

it directions and say, you know, build this this way, build this this way. No, I want this.

We need to apply this like one of the things I'm going to try and do. I was listening to

Cult of Pedagogy last week. And Cult of Pedagogy started talking about the warm demander. I was

like, Oh, this is interesting. So what I wanted to do next is say, now how would what would this look

like? If we added in the warm demander feature of teaching, like side of teaching, what, you know,

what would this look like? And it'll build it out for me. Right. So I get a chance to see it.

So the nice thing about this is that I can prototype things a lot faster than if I sat down

and did it myself. And that's an advantage. And we're going to talk about something later. Harvard

Business Review. And you have an article that talks about some of the side effects of all of that.

We'll get to that later in the show. But I have found that I can I produced a mock trial, a simulation,

and a scenario. I guess we can call it set of scenarios. I did that in the space of last night and

this morning. Okay. That that's that that when I did a mock trial, I used to, I used to build

mock trials with another social studies teacher when I was teaching high school. Yeah. And it would,

it would take us week and a half to two weeks to build a good scenario. Right. Because I did that

as well when I talked to social studies, I used several different resources. I had purchased a

couple of either purchased or found. I don't remember which now. They had the whole mock trial

process in it. And then we'd so I'd tweak things from from that. Right.

Well, I have. So yeah. Sorry. Well, I have somebody with me who and the other sounds great,

has done stuff like this. So I have to also tweak it for him so that he's not always over in my

room going, I don't understand what you wrote here. I don't understand what you put here. What does

this mean? And I can actually give him things to support him in the process of his doing it.

And it makes him feel more successful. Right. And so I also have teacher facing pages where I say,

build me a teacher kit. You know, the goes along with this. So I've got my student kit and I got my

teacher kit. And I've got like one or two supplemental things that, yeah, you know, they'll be nice

to have it. I'm going to throw this in there. And then better yet, I'm going to take this. I'm

going to print it off. It's going to show the differentiation. It's going to show the differences

and accommodations for my specialized students. And then I can three whole punch that put that in

the five inch binder and document that I accommodated for my special needs students. The accommodations

where it's at or accommodations or it's at. Yeah, point a small point of bitterness this week.

I was going to say it sounds like there's a story there. 22. I have 22 pages of report to fill out

every single day. 22 pages. That's 900 and some pages. I really generated.

Yeah. That's 100 pages, 110 pages a week. Even I can do that math.

Yes. Yeah. Well, you just started to show with math. So you're prepped in prime to go.

There we go. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. No, I mean, but imagine at the end of the year,

I don't plan on storing this in my room. I want to give this to somebody. Yeah. I would like to,

you know, drop it off on a desk and go, I did comply with your request. I don't have a place in my room

for this. So I'm giving it to you. Here you go. Whatever you do with it, please don't tell me.

And so it's not really electronic. It's physical. It has to be paper, right? Because

the county will come in and check like they're coming in this week to check.

Okay. And now I have to have we have to have it on paper. Because

and what happens if something goes down and the electronic is lost?

Now I did do this. So speaking about AI, you do realize how much of our life and how much of

your life is purely digital at this point, right? I understand. It's now it's talking to other

people into it, right? I mean, there's ways of backing things up and stuff.

Correct. Except there are people who live at county ISDs that haven't gotten into that yet.

That's interesting because I think most of them actually have, but

okay. Yeah. Well, especially the department still likes paper. Yeah.

So I did when we got this thing, this information this week, the county was coming in to do an audit.

One of the things I did was I hopped on AI and I said, man, I really don't know what the law

is about this. I imagine there's a law that what does the law exactly say we have to do?

So I asked I said, can you find me where Michigan law says I have what I have to do for accommodations

documentation? What does federal law say about accommodations documentation? And then

I need to know what this looks like. How are people doing this in most efficient way possible?

Like, like, building me something I can see what this looks like. And I got a very interesting

response. Okay. There is no federal law says that I have to have a paper

documentation copy showing that I'm accommodating. I just have to accommodate.

Michigan law says I don't have to have a documentation that I'm accommodating. I just have to

accommodate. It's the county. It's the county that says I do. If I lived in a different county,

I wouldn't have to do this. Or if I taught, I shouldn't say lived. If I taught in a different county,

I wouldn't have to do this because the county is mandating this. It's interesting.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting too. So they produce documents. They produce

copious documents about this very thing. And I said, I don't want to read. I don't want to read

all those documents. Could you just go in and build me a form? And I want a one-pager. And I want

you to keep it simple. I want a one-pager that I can use every day on a kit. And it got done.

And it said, I built you a one-pager. And then it said, this is the best part. Oh, this is

oh, golden. And then it said, you know, half of these, you only have to show one thing per year.

The rest you have to do daily. And I said, oh, tell me more. And I said, well, what we could do is,

I could build you a one-pager that says, here's the things and you just, you put in the one thing

for the year and you're done. And here's the things you have to do daily. And it's going to

greatly decrease your workload. I said, I'm all for decreasing my workload. Could you build me

the, build me two pages, you know, build me the one for the year annual? Then build me the daily.

Give me two documents. And it did. It built me two documents. And I had to go in and I had to change

some of the formatting just a little bit. I had to resize some of the boxes on the table.

And once I did that, I was done. And then I said, site your sources at the bottom of the document.

Right. And so it did. It's cited. This is, this is sourced from and it cited all the,

the recent documents. And then I went to the special ed teacher and I said, hey, I know

this is being audited because we talked about this the other day. So at last night, I sat down and

built this. And she looked at she was, how long did this take you? And I said, hours and hours

and hours. I let her off the hook later. Here's the thing. It probably did take you hours and hours

and hours to acquire the skills. Oh, well, that's true too. Yes. To do so. I'm reminded of the,

you're right. I'm going to go and click right hole here because I'm reminded of the Picasso was

sitting there one day and somebody asked him to draw something. And he drew something on

napkin and said $50,000. Somebody said, what do you mean $50,000? That took you 15 seconds to do.

He said, no, no, no, no. That took me 30 years to be able to do that in 15 seconds.

Right. Yes, you're exactly right. You were not as thrilled with that story as I am.

Okay. I heard it a little differently. I like yours. Yours is much more filled with much more penache.

Okay. So, but I showed it to her and she was like, this is, I think this will work. I said,

I want to, I want your review on it first. And then I didn't wait. I went and made a couple of

revisions and I printed my own copies and I'm starting to use it because I don't want to get,

I don't want to be a great teacher that gets caught on this stuff.

But the best part is that it went into all those documents and said, well, he's going to need this

and he's going to need that. He doesn't need this. So we could build it like this and he could be,

we could help him make his life easier this way. So, and that, you know, in that respect,

it's hugely helpful. And then somebody came to me and said, well, this is what the district gave us

this year and this is what you were supposed to use. And I looked at it and it was a four-page document.

I have one page for my 22 students, each, that's 22 pages. Or I could have four pages times 22

students times 40 weeks. Yeah. I'm going to go with one page. Which one did you go with?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I found a binder already. And it's just like, you know, those things.

Yeah, I found a binder that'll hold 960 pages. Excellent. So do you do this electronically and print this?

Or do you write this in cursive? So some of the blanks, some of the things have to be blanks

because you have to change the date, right? So I write it in cursive. That ancient language of cursive.

Yeah. Which I know. Well, not know. But I'm pretty sure at some point in time, the kids out at

research are going to look at me and go, don't know what that is. I don't care about that.

Right. I've got kids that come up and say, please teach me cursive. We think it's beautiful.

Okay. That's funny, too, because somebody the other day said, my son wants you to write his full

name in cursive forum. I have no idea. But he thinks it looks really cool. So, um,

uh, to my second grade teacher who marked me down on my penmanship.

First of didn't look very good. I'm winning awards.

So, we also talked about like extra additional jobs that like a lot of teachers have in order to

make a living. So, so you could start your own little, uh, um, I will write your name for 10 bucks.

Oh, yeah. That's a scary thought. Custom signatures, 10 dollars.

Well, I, I recall years ago, I think we talked about how you could take your, your handwriting

and turn it into a thought. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Still a thought. Well, I'm thinking that,

you know, somebody's going to make an end run down me and

they'll ask you to write a name that includes every letter in the alphabet.

Never let it come.

Well, they would be characters. They would be, uh, they would be that smart. So,

things like that, they would figure out to throw them off. I'm going to throw in an enteribong.

You're going to throw in a, uh, which bomb?

Um, in, in, in teribong.

Um, isn't that illegal?

It's not that kind of bong.

This show has a clean tag.

Teribong, it's a, it's a, it's a combination of exclamation point and question mark.

It's the, it's, you use it when somebody is exclaiming in surprise.

What?

Right.

You use an enteribong.

There you go.

There you go.

We're bringing back the thorn. We're going to do it.

We're going to bring the thorn.

Okay.

We are way off on our, aren't we?

How do we get back on track?

Okay. Um, so let's see here. We've got, uh, it's, uh,

and in teribong, by the way, so teribong.

And it's, should we, should we throw in, uh, MHD while we're at it?

Because that's, you know, that, that would be kitchen sinky.

Oh, okay, uh, additionally, um, we had, uh, we had our full PD day.

Oh, as a, as a district.

And, um, I had a really good presenter.

She was really, she was dynamic.

She had some, she didn't, uh, a wonderful bit of modeling as well.

So she modeled, she just didn't say it.

She actually did it.

And, um, so it was pretty cool.

It was, uh, very enjoyable.

And, um, the sound and the images and the, um, all the screens worked out,

which was part of my part because sound is always hard and, and screens and

projectors can be hard.

And when you don't have a dedicated, like,

area, just for that, it makes it very difficult.

Right? Because like a gym sound system is not designed for human speech, for a lot of human

speech. Yes. Um, so we ended up using the cafeteria this time and it worked out much better.

The sound system was much better.

And then we had, uh, we ran, uh, ethernet line and put in a second, um, monitor, uh, second

projector so that, um, where people could see, um, probably, if I was doing it again, I'd probably

throw in and run another ethernet line and throw in a third projector, but, um, the two of them

worked out well. And the sound was the most important. And really you could, everyone could see

the screen in front. It's big enough so that everybody could see that. So a part worked out pretty well.

So, um, it is rare that we get PD days and they're so valuable.

So, like I said, one of the things, one of the, the, some of the training that we're looking at

doing, we're looking at doing where it's self-paced because we just don't get that much training time

and teachers deserve and need a lot of support. They should be doing a, um, a lot of training for,

for their job. Just kind of the way it goes. So, um, oh yeah. And then today would be pie day,

but it is. Schools had to do pie day yesterday because there's no screen today, right?

Free pie day, yeah. Yeah.

So, it is also 313 day. Yeah. You don't get that out there.

There's 313 day over here. Yeah, it doesn't, doesn't make any sense where I am.

No. No. They're big on the 207 because the entire state is 207. Got you.

Yeah. You can't get a 313 anymore. It's blocked. Wow. So, if you have one, you are in the elite.

That's interesting because they keep threatening that we're going to run out of numbers and then,

oh, we found some more. Keep pushing it down the road. So, that's interesting.

I should call it the old number that I had. There is, you know, I use your phone number for like,

reward cards and stuff like that. Right. There's some reward cards that are still the old

home phone number. Okay. So, you know, it's like, you have to go, okay.

Let's try this one. Let's try this one. So, yeah. Wow. So, yeah.

All right. Let's see here. Let's swing over to the social web.

Oh, the social web. Well, Google for Education has got some training and they posted

parenting a middle or high schooler in the age of AI. We've got you, Google and National

Nonprofit AIEDU.org partnered up to launch a 10 episode podcast, a series designed to help

parents guide their kids confidently with AI. And then says, listen here, we put a link in the show

notes. So, you can go over there and parents are interested in helping your kids with AI

situation. There's some resources for you. And then, of course, teachers, if you're probably going

to be asked to do some AI training with your kids in the coming days and years. And I imagine that

this might be a go-to resource to help build things like that.

Mariel Nafal, an AWFAL. And he's making a reply, ironically, to himself.

And it looks like it's a series of questions. And question two was, AI and the students are

answer to AI in the classroom. Students' worst nightmare is here. AI now decides who gets to be

called on in the board using advanced neural networks, the system analyzes facial expressions,

and emotions to spot those who may be unprepared or trying to avoid attention. And then,

it calls on them. I put a link into the video. It's kind of fun to watch. And the kids are getting

a kick out of it because as they try to hide, the more they hide, the more they're exposed.

Yeah. Let's see here. Oh, Susie Dent at Susie Dent word, words that, those guys at social.

Word of the day is fan, fan, fan, fan, fanada. I'm going to go with that pronunciation. It's

a 19th century word to strut and swagger about as if you own the stage. And that, of course,

is my seven graders. And I hope they don't lose it. Air Kurtz has an upcoming webinar, notebooks,

our notebook LM for schools. And it's got sources, Ed sources, grounded chat, generate audio,

videos, slides, reports, and more. Uses for staff and students. It's going to be on March 17th at

3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. It'll be live streamed and recorded. And you can get a registration

link in our show notes. And then if you can't make it, if you go on YouTube and follow Eric

Kurtz's channel, it'll pop up in your feed. And I've added it to my video feed and now

I'm part of the Google Education Group. Congratulations. Yeah. Yeah. I get some good information

out there. He had a really good one on Google Gems. And he did, he's got one, once a month, he'll

update all the things that are coming down from Google and what they're updating, what they're fixing,

what they're not fixing. And it's kind of nice because it's easier to keep up on what Google's

doing because you never know what's headed off to the graveyard and what they're fixing. I

really haven't seen a lot of new things come out from Google. There's some Google arts and culture

things, but you can't be watching everything all the time, right? Not when you're spending three

hours on AI. Yeah. Yeah. That's yeah. Hey, I had a kid come out to me the other day. And the

kid said, Mr. McGurr, Mr. McGurr, what is the oldest language that I could study? And I was like,

um, do you want one that you like, you still use today and that you could speak? And he says,

let's start there. I said, well, you're probably going to go with Lithuanian. I said, that's the

closest thing, the Sanskrit. And it's a living language that people are using today. And it's one

that you could learn. And then two weeks later, he came up to me and said, what if we just went with

oldest? And I said, well, I remember seeing a link about that. Let me see if I can find it. And they

did. I found it. It's the dictionary to the world's oldest written language. It's free. It's online.

And you too can learn Akkadian. Bring that thing back to life.

Yeah. And maybe you could pair it with Easter eggs because, you know, Easter is coming up.

Yep.

Or you could also check out Pocket, Ireland, which has kind of a word of the day kind of thing.

Rare and unusual words paired with beautiful smartphone photos. And I sent this one to you

earlier this week. And I thought I would tie it in with your oldest language.

And this is kind of neat because they take the the word and they define it, but then they also add

a picture into it. And we know that adding in a visual element helps kids remember it. And you

can also you can challenge your kids to come up with an image as well. But I thought I'd throw

that in there as well. I like it. All right. Speaking of Google over at TCEA.

I know where that is. And you know where that is. They have eight Google Easter eggs.

And that you might forget about we've talked about I think we've talked about we probably have

talked about all of these, but maybe not about three or four I remember. Yes.

Yeah. There's several of them that we have. I'm just looking at them thinking about I don't know

if we talked about tic-tac-toe. But we did talk about quick draw where it is powered by artificial

intelligence. You draw simple objects and Google tries to guess what you're sketching.

It's good good introduction to like AI and pattern recognition and that kind of thing.

Tic-tac-toe pretty obvious you get to play tic-tac-toe against the Google.

Spinner. This is one of the things that can be useful in a classroom. You can get a numbered spinner

and you can use that to randomly select students, give every student a number and do that.

Or you could do a variety of things. You could have a number of questions up there and you could

say, okay, we're going to answer, you know, you have five questions up there. You could have

the spinner decide which of the five questions you were going to do and then do the rest of them,

metronome. We've talked about blob opera before. Yeah, that's a fun one. That's a fun one.

I'm feeling curious. I would have a bonus Easter egg. Type in six, seven in Google and see what

happens. Oh no. Oh no. Okay. So you can check that out. That is something that's kind of

kind of fun. And then I know Sean that you are wondering that you asked yourself. You said,

self, what are the most popular YouTube channels of all time for teachers? I did. I did do that. Yeah.

And this is done. There's plenty of tabs at the bottom. There are a ton of tabs at the bottom.

I mean a ton where they have resources to and links to the YouTube to the YouTube video to

formative assistant, an interactive video, printable worksheet. They've got all kinds of stuff.

But they've got this broken up by science, by subjects, sorry, science, social studies, math,

ELA, multiple topics. And you can, you can click on the,

I'm the link and it'll take you to one of those tabs where they have a bunch of the videos

and the resources. Since it is a Google doc, you can make a copy of this and you can add

things that you like. You can share it. You can do all that good stuff.

Yeah. Nice. But social studies, there's a lot of, from Crash Course. And

Heimler's History video. Like Reconstruction failed a push review. So these look like I'll

a push, well, no, several a push reviews. But there are, as I'm scrolling,

founder Heimler's History video. There are 570 rankings. And again, they have the video,

formative assessment, interactive video, and printable worksheet. So I think it's a good resource

to have in your back pocket. There. All right. You've done wonderful wordies before

correction. I don't think I have done wonderful wordlies. I think that you have, I'm not sure

that you called them wonderful wordies. Okay. They're the visual puzzles. And these are called

wicked wonderful wordies. Let me, let me pop an example in here for you.

Here we go. I mean, there you go. And the show notes will have one.

And this is a box with the word clam right underneath the top line of the box. So what would that

be, Sean? That would be a shellfish that is absolutely delicious and cooked properly. But what

would this be a wonderful birdie of? This would be clam up. Oh, I got you know, all right,

not where I thought we were going with this. Okay. All right. So there's,

yeah, that makes sense though. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of these. They're just

visual puzzles. There are, I don't think there's 33 pages of them.

Nice. It's a 33 page booklet. There's a really fun and easy to use. You can pop them up

one at a time. You can print out one sheet at a time and the kids can work through it. And it's

good for just engaging the brain, learning a little bit about language. And these are all

absolutely free. They're just, they're shared. And there's some, some other links. This is from,

I forgot his name. Mike Rune. Sorry. I forgot his name. But he teaches at King Philip Regional

Middle School in Norfolk, Massachusetts, taught science and computer skills to 7th and 8th grade

students for many years. So I'm sure he had some of them. Some of these were probably having the

kids create them as well. I'll got Rune then. Yes. Yes. There you go. All right. Let's see. H5P awards.

This one was you. Well, congratulations to Trey Patterson on his,

his top five finish in the category of innovative use of a content type.

And I would like to thank him for submitting the one I gave him.

I was going to say, let's be clear here. Oh, no. I was going to say it says by Sean McCurk.

It does say that. Yeah. I've said I'd not know you put my name on there. Yes. Absolutely.

From Middle School matters. Yes. That's how I know you're the one who put it in. Because when I tried

to do a second one, they were like, no, sorry. Your email address has already tried this. And I was like,

oh, that's, so I asked try to put it in. He did. He put it in. But I did. I thought, I didn't know you

put my name in there. I thought you, of course, it is. I don't think for stuff that you do.

I was going to say, I don't think it's great for stuff that you do. And they're like, wow.

I don't, honestly, I always try to make sure that I did. It's like, look, Sean did this kind of

thing. So yeah. But I just give him a lot of stuff to use. So it's not, I don't worry about it.

The nice thing about this, though, and the link that I put in is that it gives you a lot of

great examples of what people are doing with all different kinds of H5P content types. And

they're highlighting this year, the memory game one. So what's I think they've done some creative

stuff with? But there's some very creative uses of H5P content all throughout the awards

nominees thing. So I put a link in there. Go take a look at it. If you're ever curious about H5P

and what it could do, this might spark some creativity in your part. And I encourage you to go

go try stuff, you know, go make and then go make. Let us, let us click that reuse, but yours.

Or have your kids make? I can't. Yes, that's true. I can't stress enough that kids can make the

stuff too. Yep, definitely. Hey, hey, we've been talking about AI. I'm going to go ahead and

just go with the next story here. So got me off if you think so. We've been talking a lot about

AI and using AI. And this week I ran across an article not knowing you were going to run across

your own article. I ran across an article from Harvard Business Review that takes a look at how

AI is changing the nature of business. And their survey and their study found that a lot of people

are reporting something that's called brain fry. What they're discovering is that AI, yes, it does

help them get work done. But the problem is that the spaces that are left over nature of horse

of vacuum and people are just naturally filling it with more work. And so when they get done

at the end of the day, there, there, there might be cognitive offload going on, but some other

task is taking its place and is texting their cognitive load even more. They're walking up

tired, more tired than they would if they were doing it without AI, which I thought was a very

interesting study result. Absolutely. And one of the key parts of the

research is they're looking at high performers, right? The people that you'd think are,

that you'd already consider is successful. And they're describing brain fry symptoms and they

did it in similar language. They reported a buzzing feeling or a mental bog. Other symptoms

included headaches and slower decision making. So, yep. The decision making process is really

fatiguing. Right. Yeah. I bet it changes how you think. Well, it's going to say another thing

that they talk about is there's a correlation between the self-reported brain fry and an

employees intent to quit the company. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, okay, I've, I've had enough. I'm

going to, I'm going to go. So it might be, there's the potential that it could be advantageous in

this short term, but not so much in the long term, because AI has been being, is being found to

actually intensify work instead of reducing workloads. So people are potentially becoming burned

out. Okay. On another note from this one from Scientific American. And this is one that, you

know, we, we talk about bias or we, we say we should talk about bias more than we actually talk

about bias. But I found this one and I thought it was interesting because it's an auto complete.

And I think a lot of times we don't even think of auto complete as AI anymore. It's just kind of,

you know, you start writing that email and all of a sudden, it's offering that, it's offering

this thing that's close to what you're going to say. So you just hit tab and, and move on.

Um, and I like this too. Auto complete suggestions are perhaps one of the most annoying useful tools

for writing. And then it is kind of everywhere. What they have discovered, though, is that there's

some bias built in that can sway users belief beliefs. And I thought that was interesting.

And it becomes just becomes another point of concern. And what they did is that they looked at

some of the AI auto complete answers. And some of them become biased towards one issue or one

side of an issue. And those participants kind of start believing what the auto correct is,

is suggesting. So it's another one of those spots where I think we need to be careful.

All right. I found a site, the, I found this actually a couple of weeks ago. And it wasn't,

it was kind of overloaded, I think. But the site is called, they see your photos.com.

And this is an interesting little site. You, you upload a picture. And the premise of it is

your photos reveal a lot of private information. In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API

to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo.

And so you upload a photo of a person needs to have a person or more than one person in it.

And you get results. Did you upload a photo of your own, Sean or no?

No, I just did the, so I did something with your

the activity. Yeah. And it's in a vacuum. So what I did is I took a photo that I knew Sean was in,

which was, it was a 10 year old photo when we were in China. And in the photo, there's a bunch of

people, right? I don't remember how many people. One, two, three, four, there's five people,

but one of them you can't really see. So you can see four people. And they, you end up with a

description. And I just uploaded the photo again. And I think I got a different description.

Oh, it appears to be a private room, possibly in Beijing, a group of friends gather around a

table, laden with food, a woman stands holding a camera, employees to capture the moment while

others converse. But wallpaper has a subtle floral pattern and light filters through a nearby

window. These people seem to display a moderate level of extroversion along side a hint of

self-doubt and impulsivity. We can, we can target them with experiences instead of symbols.

And that's the description. And there's also a data where they define the people,

the race, income range, religion. This time we have atheist and Hindu, by the way.

Oh, sexual orientation, emotions, clothing, interest, political affiliations, biases,

objects, insights, and targeted ads. Remember, this is, comes from the Google Vision API, right?

So partly what I think this does is this kind of exposes, and this is, I think, their intent.

This exposes what it is that is being used to target you, the target individuals. They also have

a couple of photos there, by the way, where you can just, you can just drag in their photo

and use that. But I would, I would say, you know, if you haven't, you know what they would do with a cartoon.

Anyway, I think this is interesting. Some of it seems to me to be kind of horoscopy,

like we say, some generic things. And you're going to go, yeah, that's, that's right.

But, but yeah, it's interesting for, for what they have. And you know that this is, some of this is

what they're, this is what's happening for it with things that are on the web.

All right, I'll just do this one real quick, because I'm taking a quick look at the time here.

And this is from Taylor Laurent Lorenz, which is, the world wants to ban children from social media,

but there will be grave consequences for us all. And this goes back to the whole idea of age

verification. And you can't just age verify the kids under 18. You have to age verify every

one, which means then that somebody's going to know who you are, where you are, what you're

doing at all times. And it gets a, it's another piece of the big brother kind of concept.

But it is an interesting article. But you know, if you're interested in that, you can go ahead and

give that a little read. And of course, you can find links to that and everything else that we have

talked about this week over at middleschoolmatters.com. Just head on over there. And again,

you've short right up of what we talked about. And of course, there's links to reach out to us.

We would love to hear from you. And of course, we'd love it if you'd tell your friends, tell

you those people and the social medias to check out the show. And head over to the podcast

catcher of your choice. Give us a five star rating. Tell us why Sean is the world's greatest

co-show host. That would be wonderful. And with that, this has been Middle School Matters

for Middle School Educators You Care. All opinions expressed on this podcast are exclusively

the opinions of the hosts and guests and not indicative of any employer.