Tag Archives: school

Tasks in my calendar

I’ve got a full day today, but when I look at my calendar I don’t see meetings, I see tasks. For example, a phone call to make, an order to buy, a form submission deadline. I used to just flag tasks but I’ve found that adding them to my calendar is far more effective.

Looking at my calendar on a Monday can sometimes be daunting. So many small tasks that got carried over from the previous week. Yet this is far more effective than having a separate tasks list. Sure I still keep a small paper ‘To Do’ list with some big items that can’t just be checked off in a 15 or 30 minute calendar appointment time, but most of my tasks get calendared.

And sometimes those tasks get moved to the next day. So many times a calendar item gets swallowed up by the daily goings on of a school building. My intention to get 3 tasks done between 9:30-10:30 suddenly becomes 1 task done in the afternoon and the 2 others being pushed to later in the week. But I am definitely more efficient and effective when these tasks are in my calendar.

If I need more information before I can send an email? Slide the email right into my calendar. I need to prep (or read something) for an upcoming meeting? Slide an appointment into my calendar before the meeting.

I look at my calendar all the time. It’s available on all my devices. And consistently adding tasks to my calendar has helped me stay on top of things that can easily be missed when juggling a busy day of distractions. The key is to look back at my calendar at the end of the day and make sure anything missed gets moved forward.

Spring formal

Last night was our senior spring formal. Our school is small enough that we actually hold it for grades 11 & 12 combined because it would be too small for just one grade. This is only our second year running the event, and I’m convinced that we’ll do this every year. Watching our students enjoy the evening together reminded me what a wonderful community we have. Having not just every teacher but also our secretaries join us was also special.

Our students were appreciative, and enjoyed the whole evening, with many making the effort to thank us all for the event. I spent the entire evening taking photos and I am pretty sure I’ve got at least one of every kid that if they don’t love it, at least their parents will. I was reminded of my days taking wedding photos, except that I did that back in the film era and it used to take over a week to know if the pictures I took were good or not. Having instant results is so much better.

It’s wonderful to have a year-end event like this. We will still have our grad night, but for many kids getting decked out for the dinner dance will be as memorable or more memorable than walking across the stage and receiving their diploma. And so I’m glad we are able to provide this experience for our students… despite them not being in a big, more traditional high school.

A good reminder

This time of year can feel like a grind. So much to do, so little time. So when we get a little reminder of why we do what we do, it’s special, and uplifting. Tonight is our senior spring formal and the evening will be one of those reminders. Seeing our now grown up students all dressed up, and remembering their younger selves when they first arrived at the school, will be a reminder of the growth and development we’ve supported in these young adults.

Yesterday we had another little reminder. A card and gifts for the staff from the parents of a grade 12 student. What makes this card extra special is that it comes from a prof in teacher education. Here is the letter, a wonderful battery charge as we head into the final few weeks of school.

Dear IHub Faculty and Staff,

Thank you for an amazing four years! We could not have asked for a better or more supportive learning environment for [student name]. We are so grateful for all you do to provide engaging apportunities for students that connects them with their passions and gifts.

Thank you for supporting [student name] unconditionally and for all your patience and flexibility. You are the gold standard of what education should be. We raise a glass to you all and honour all of your contributions to the lives of the students in the graduating class of 2025!

The tail wagging the dog

I recently wrote, ‘The school experience’ where I stated, “I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence?” In that post I was focused on removing the kind of things we traditionally do with opportunities to experience learning in the classroom (with and without AI).

What’s interesting about this is that the change will indeed come, but not for the right reasons. The reason we’ll see a transformation of schools happen faster than expected is because with AI being constantly used to do homework, take notes, and do textbook assignments, grades are going to be inflated and it will be hard to discern who gets into universities.

This will encourage two kinds of changes in schools. On the one hand we will see a movement backwards to more traditional testing and reduced innovation. This is the group that wants to promote integrity, but blindly produces students who are good memorizers and are good at wrote learning. However, not producing students ready to live in our innovative and ever-changing world.

The second kind of school will promote competencies around thinking, knowing, and doing things collaboratively and creatively. These are the real schools of the future.

But I wonder which of these schools will universities be more interested in? Which practices will universities use? It’s easier to invigilate an exam that is based on wrote learning than it is to mark group projects in a lecture hall of 200+ students. So what kind of students are universities going to be looking for?

I fear that this might be a case of the tail wagging the dog and that we could see a movement towards ‘traditional learning’ as a pathway to a ‘good’ university… The race to the best marks in a school that tests in traditional ways and has ‘academic rigour’ could be the path that universities push.

This is a mistake.

The worst part of schooling is marks chasing. It undermines meaningful feedback and it misses the point that this is a learning environment with learning opportunities. Instead it’s about the mark. The score that gets averaged into GPA’s and meets minimum requirements to get into programs or schools of choice after high school.

The question I ponder is if universities will continue to focus on that metric and continue to wag the dog in this way, or will they start looking more meaningfully at other metrics like portfolios and presentations? Will they take the time to do the work necessary to really assess the student as a learner, or will they just continue to collect marks chasers and focus on accepting kids who come from schools that are good at differentiating those marks in traditional ways?

This could be an exciting time for universities to lead the way towards truly innovative practices rather than being the last bastion of old ways of teaching and learning… Old ways being perpetuated by a system that values marks over thinking, traditions over progress, and old practices over institutions of truly higher learning.

University entry is the tail wagging the dog, and so the way that universities respond to AI doing work that students have had to do will determine how quickly schools innovate and progress.

The School Experience

I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence? There are some key elements of school that are completely undermined by tools that do the work faster and more effectively than students. Here are three examples:

  1. Homework. If you are sending homework such as an essay home, it’s not a question of whether or not a student uses AI, it’s a question of how much AI is being used. Math homework? That’s just practice for AI, not the student.
  2. Note taking. From recording and dictating words to photographing slides and having them automatically transcribed, if a traditional lecture is the format, AI is going to outperform any physical note taking.
  3. Textbook work? Or questions about what happened in a novel? This hunt-and-peck style assignment used to check to see if a student did the reading, but unless it’s a supervised test situation, a kid can get a perfect score without reading a single page.

So what do we want students to do at school? Ultimately it’s about creating experiences. Give them a task that doesn’t involve taking the project home. Give them a task where they need to problem solve in teams. Engage in content with them then have them debate perspectives… even provide them with opportunities to deepen their perspectives with AI before the debate.

Class time is about engaging in and with the content, with each other, and with tools that help students understand and make meaning.. Class isn’t consumption of content, it’s engaging with content, it’s engaging in collaborative challenges, it’s time to be creative problem-solvers.

Don’t mistake the classroom experience with entertaining students, it’s not about replacing the content or the learning with Bill Nye the Science Guy sound bites of content… it’s about creating experiences where students are challenged, while in the class, to solve problems that engage them. And this doesn’t mean avoiding AI, it does mean that it is used or not used with intentionality and purpose.

We need to examine what the school experience looks like in an era when technology makes traditional schooling obsolete. We didn’t keep scribing books after the printing press. Blacksmiths didn’t keep making hand-forged nails after we could mass produce them. Yet AI can efficiently and effectively produce the traditional work we ask for in schools and somehow we want students to mass produce the work the old way?

How do we transform the school experience so that it is meaningful and engaging for students… not AI?

*I used AI (Copilot) to suggest the production of nails as being a redundant item no longer created by blacksmiths. I also use AI to create most of the images on my blog, including the one with this post, with a prompt that took a couple attempts until Copilot offered, “Here comes a fresh take! A Rube Goldberg-style school, where the entire structure itself is a fantastical machine, churning out students like a whimsical knowledge factory.”

The Right Focus

When I wrote, ‘Google proof vs AI proof‘, I concluded, “We aren’t going to AI proof schoolwork.

While we were successful in Google proofing assignments by creating questions that were not easily answerable using a Google search, we simply can’t make research based questions that will stump a Large Language Model artificial intelligence.

I’ve also previously said that ‘You can’t police it‘. In that post I stated,

“The first instinct with combating new technology is to ban and/or police it: No cell phones in class, leave them in your lockers; You can’t use Wikipedia as a source; Block Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok on the school wifi. These are all gut reactions to new technologies that frame the problem as policeable… Teachers are not teachers, they aren’t teaching, when they are being police.

It comes down to a simple premise:

Focus on what we ‘should do’ with AI, not what we ‘shouldn’t do’.

Outside the classroom AI is getting used everywhere by almost everyone. From programming and creating scripts to reduce workload, to writing email responses, to planning vacations, to note taking in meetings, to creating recipes. So the question isn’t whether we should use AI in schools but what we should use it for?

The simple line that I see starts with the question I would ask about using an encyclopedia, a calculator, or a phone in the classroom, “How can I use this tool to foster or enhance thinking, rather than have the tool do the thinking for the student?

Because like I said back in 2010,

A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.”

Ultimately our focus needs to be on what we can and should use any tool for, and AI isn’t an exception.

Day of meetings

Being an online school principal means that my position in my district is quite unique. As it turns out, my day-to-day experience has more in common with the other online principals from other districts than it has in common with other principals in my district. And so it’s always great to connect with these distant colleagues who face similar challenges and experiences as me.

Today is a day of meetings with these colleagues. We start the day together, then meet with the Ministry, then continue our meetings. Once done for the day, I have a dinner meeting with the Executive of our online principal’s organization.

While I’m not a fan of being in meetings all day, it’s wonderful to connect with these amazing educators that have similar yet unique jobs across the province. We often meet online as well, and some of our colleagues will be joining us online today, but the chance to connect, to have side conversations about our programs, and to be in the same room with each other, is really wonderful.

I am excited about the day in a way that is counter to how I usually feel about a day of meetings… I’m actually looking forward to it!

Deadlines and consequences

William Ferriter recently shared, “When it Comes to Deadlines, the “Real World” is Far More Flexible than Many Teachers.” And he gives some real world examples to consider, such as his power bill giving him 30 days to pay… and even if he misses that deadline the consequence over the next month is a whopping $1.08! That’s a lot different than giving a zero in an assignment with the excuse that this is a ‘real world’ consequence.

In a comment, I shared how a teacher at my school uses a zero as a potential consequence:

I have one teacher who uses zero’s as a ‘placeholder’ for late work. So for an easy example, in a course where there are only 100 marks given and a kid has 50/60 so far, the kid is at 83%. Now let’s say the kid doesn’t hand in an assignment worth 15% on time. The kid gets a placeholder zero, and the immediate consequence is that the 83% in the gradebook becomes 50/75 or 67%.
So the student sees the consequence of not handing in the work! BUT… if the kid hands it in later, and gets 13/15, the mark immediately changes in the gradebook to 63/75 or 84% (no marks off for late).
In a course where the gradebook is always visible, this allows the kid to see the potential consequence of a zero/no submission, but provides the opportunity to make it go away completely.

Hard but good choices

Conversation 1

I was talking to a parent interested in bringing her child to our school. But he also wanted a chance to play sports at a big high school and because BC School Sports has treated our tiny program unfairly, he can’t play with them if he joins our program, which is too small to field a team.

His mom really wants him to come to our school, but doesn’t want him to lose out on playing sports in his catchment school. I reminded her that the big high school he wants to go to is an excellent school, and that he is going to get a good education at whichever school he chooses.

I said, I know that this is a tough decision to make, but it’s a good decision either way.

Conversation 2

A student I had previously spoken to had mentioned that he wanted to go to a school that’s out of the Vancouver Lower Mainland, and that if he did, he was going to live in residence. I told him that my experience with living in residence was really wonderful and that I’d recommend it.

A few days later he came back to me and said that he thought about it more and financially it didn’t make sense for him to spend most of his school budget on his first year just so he could go away and live in residence.

So, I told him that while my wife and I both loved the experience, and recommended it to our oldest daughter, she enjoyed residence living the least of any of her 4 years at school. And, my youngest daughter chose a school where she commuted from home and enjoyed her first year quite a bit.

I explained that while it’s a good choice to make for many, it’s not for everyone and you can have a great first year with or without living in residence.

Conversation 3

I had a student explain to me that she got into the top two programs she wanted and she couldn’t decide which one she really wanted. She gave me a couple reasons why she wanted both programs and said she really didn’t know which way to go.

Paraphrasing my simple reply, I said, ‘What a great problem to have! I know this isn’t easy, but of all the dilemmas you could be going through, this one is a pretty good one!’

Sometimes even the good decisions are hard to make. It’s important to keep this in perspective and not stress as much as when the decision is more challenging and stress inducing.

The other advice I often give in all three of these conversations is that once you make the decision, jump in with both feet! When you finally decide, be firm with your decision, and don’t look back. Instead, think and believe that you made the right decision, at the right time… and give that choice 100% of your effort. Remember that you had a hard, but good decision to make, and whatever choice you made was right for you!

AI and academic integrity

I’ve been using AI to add images to my blog since June of 2022 when I discovered AI generated art: DALL•E. I don’t credit it, I just use it, and find it much easier to generate than to find royalty free alternatives. I haven’t yet used AI as a writing or editing tool on my blog. While I’m sure it would make my writing better, I am writing to write, and I usually do so early in the morning and have limited time.

I already have to limit the time I spend creating an image, if I also had to use AI to edit and revise my work I’d probably only have 15-20 minutes to write… and I write to write, not to use an AI to write or edit for me. That said, I’m not disparaging anyone who uses AI to edit, I think it’s useful and will sometimes use it on emails, I simply don’t want that to be how I spend my (limited) writing time.

I really like the way Chris Kennedy both uses AI and also credits it on his blog. For example, in his recent post, ‘Could AI Reduce Student Technology Use?’ Chris ends with a disclosure: “For this post, I used several AI tools (Chat GPT, Claude, Magic School) as feedback helpers to refine my thinking and assist in the editing process.”

Related side note, I commented on that post,

The magic sauce lies in this part of your post:
“AI won’t automatically shift the focus to human connection—we have to intentionally design learning environments that prioritize it. This involves rethinking instruction, supporting teachers, and ensuring that we use AI as a tool to enhance, not replace, the human elements of education.”

A simple example: I think about the time my teachers spend making students think about formatting their PowerPoint slides, think about colour pallets, theme, aesthetics, and of course messaging… and wonder what they lose in presentation preparation when AI just pumps out a slide or even whole presentation for them? 

“Enhance but not replace,” this is the key, and yet this post really strikes a chord with me because the focus is not just the learning but the human connection, and I think if that is the focus it doesn’t matter if the use of technology is more, less, or the same, what matters is that the activities we do enrich how we engage with each other in the learning.

Take the time to read Chris’ post. He is really thinking deeply about how to use AI effectively in classrooms.

However I’m thinking about the reality that it is a lot harder today to know when a student is using AI to avoid thinking and working. Actually, it’s not just about work avoidance, it’s also about chasing marks. Admittance to university has gotten significantly more challenging, and students care a lot about getting an extra 2-5% in their courses because that difference could mean getting into their choice university or not. So incentives are high… and our ability to detect AI use is getting a lot harder.

Yes, there are AI detectors that we can use, but I could write a complex sentence in three different ways, put it into an AI detector, and one version could say ‘Not AI’, one could say 50% chance that it was written by AI and the third version might say 80% chance of AI… all written by me. 20 years ago, I’d read a complex sentence written in my Grade 8 English class and think, ‘That’s not this kid’s work’. So, I’d put the sentence in quotes in the Google search bar and out would pop the source. When AI is generating the text, the detection is not nearly as simple.

Case in point: ‘The Backlash Against AI Accusations’, and shared in that post, ‘She lost her scholarship over an AI allegation — and it impacted her mental health’. And while I can remember the craze about making assignments ‘Google proof’ by asking questions that can’t easily be answered with Google searches, it is getting significantly harder to create an ‘AI proof’ assessment… and I’d argue that this is getting even harder on a daily basis with AI advances.

Essentially, it’s becoming a simple set of questions that students need to be facing: Do you want to learn this? Do you want to formulate your ideas and improve your thinking? Or do you just want AI to do it for you? The challenge is, if a kid doesn’t care, or if they care more about their mark than their learning, it’s going to be hard to prove they used AI even if you believe they did.

Are there ways to catch students? Yes. But for every example I can think of, I can also think about ways to avoid detection. Here is one example: Microsoft Word documents have version tracking. As a teacher I can look at versions and see large swaths of cut-and-paste sections of writing to ‘prove’ the student is cheating. However, a student could say, “I wrote that part on my phone and sent it to myself to add to the essay”. Or a savvy student could use AI but type the work in rather than pasting it in. All this to say that if a kid really wants to use AI, in many cases they can get away with it.

So what’s the best way to battle this? I’m not sure? What I do know is that taking the policing and detecting approach is a losing battle. Here are my ‘simple to say’ but ‘not so simple to execute’ ideas:

  1. The final product matters less than the process. Have ideation, drafts, and discussions count towards the final grade.
  2. Foster collaboration, have components of the work depend on other student input. Examples include interviews, or reflections of work presented in class, where context matters.
  3. Inject appropriate use of AI into an assignment, so that students learn to use it appropriately and effectively.

Will this prevent inappropriate AI use. No, but it will make the effort to use AI almost as hard as just doing the work. In the end, if a kid wants to use it, it will be harder and harder to detect, so the best strategy is to create assignments that are engaging and fun to do, which also meet the learning objectives that are required… Again, easier said than done.