Reading Time: 2 minutes Like my colleagues, I spent three days at the AECT conference. I had contemplated not going because of mental fatigue. But I decided David Wiley—Chief Academic Officer for Lumen Learning and former president of AECT—may have something interesting to say about AI. As I approached his session, it was standing room only. Attendees filled the seats and others stood in the back and in the doorways. I found a table right outside and put my headphones in and joined the Zoom session from my iPad. I felt a little like Zacchaeus. From the start, the session was different from what Mr. Wiley had originally planned. He…
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ChatGPT: What’s Next?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Vaulting onto my stand-up stool, I contorted into a jockey’s position while piping the Classical Motivation playlist from Apple’s freshly minted Classical Music app–off to the races of the new, new frontier. Using the old to discuss the new isn’t unfamiliar, but Apple isn’t the only tech company to release something recently. OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, released ChatGPT-4 last week–a total paradigm shift. Below is an example of the power of ChatGPT-4. I fed it my first two ChatGPT blog posts and asked it to write the next post. As we continue to grapple with the integration of AI tools like ChatGPT into our…
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ChatGPT: Issues in Teaching and Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutes Standing at my trusty stand-up desk, I again pondered the beginning of this post. Yearning to recapture the muse from my last blog post, I leveled up my music selection to Snarky Puppy’s Trinity and again directed my web browser to chat.openai.com. After acknowledging ChatGPT’s stability warning due to heavy usage, I asked my question: “what are the top three teaching and learning issues with ChatGPT?” ChatGPT provided the following: 1. Bias and ethical considerations: ChatGPT is trained on large amounts of text data from the internet and can reflect the biases in that data. This could potentially impact the accuracy and fairness of responses provided…
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ChatGPT: The New Frontier
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sitting at my stand-up desk, I mused about the beginning of this post. Thwack! The idea came to me like a bug playing tag with my windshield on a South Dakota interstate in the middle of June. I would use ChatGPT, a freshly minted artificial intelligence (AI) chat robot. I asked Siri to play the theme from the movie Inception and carefully steered my browser to http://chat.openai.com. With Hans Zimmers’ electronic sound garden in the background, I placed my cursor in the chat box and typed, “Write a 300 word introduction to Servant Teaching.” ChatGPT began working on the query and produced, word-by-word, six paragraphs. I…
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Top 3 Ways to Use Announcements
Reading Time: < 1 minute As the semester continues, we want to keep exploring ways to effectively communicate with students. We’ve talked about three tips for writing clear content. And today, we’re looking at one of the areas to apply those principles – the Canvas Announcements tool. These tips below are suggestions to boost communication and support your students throughout the course. Manage your students’ expectations regularly If you want to do more than provide textual guidance, you can embed video from Kaltura. Providing a video or audio announcement adds a personal dimension that many students enjoy. Finally, you can pre-program your announcements and then delay them from posting. Keep…
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Prayer: A Great Place to Start
Reading Time: 2 minutes It feels like fall today. In Cedarville and much of the surrounding area, it is raining and there is a dull grey blue glow in the sky. Some may think it’s a perfect day for a hot bowl of soup or a hot beverage infused with pumpkin spice. For others it may provide a more somber or bleak outlook because of difficult circumstances in which they find themselves. For teachers this may represent the start of the year with the disruptive effects of COVID-19. COVID-19 disrupted the start of the school year making normal teacher/student relationships more of a challenge—especially for new students and faculty. Even…
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Servant Teaching with the Mind of Christ
Reading Time: < 1 minute Those whom God has called to serve have an extraordinary calling – to be conformed to the image of Christ through the power of Christ’s Spirit. This calling is true of every person who confesses Jesus as Lord. Phil. 2:1-18 shows Christ as our example of humility and can be summed up in the phrase “seeking to serve.” While this phrase is simple, the concept is also nuanced – anyone acting on Christ’s model with Christ’s mind will encounter conflict both internal and external. These conflicts are humbling, and they require honest reflection which reveals the need for supernatural power to overcome the situation. But you may ask “What does that have to do…
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TurnItIn: Three Tips for Accurate Similarity Report Assessment
Reading Time: 2 minutes Cedarville University (CU) provides all faculty and students access to TurnItIn to help improve writing and prevent plagiarism. TurnItIn accepts user documents and compares them to material located on the Internet and in TurnItIn’s document repository. After the documents are compared, TurnItIn produces the Similarity Report which shows the parts of a student’s paper that are similar to other sources. Here are three tips to help you read the Similarity Report. Tip 1: Familiarize yourself with what Canvas and TurnItIn can do Get up to speed with all of the functionality the Canvas and TurnItIn integration has to offer by viewing or downloading the Canvas Plagiarism…
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Calibrate: Interview with Rob McDole about InstructureCon
Reading Time: 2 minutes So, Rob, you went to a conference a couple of weeks ago. Can you tell me what conference it was and a little bit about it? I went to InstructureCon in Long Beach, CA. Instructure is the parent company of Canvas, the new learning management system (LMS) that Cedarville University is using in the upcoming 2019/2020 school year. This conference is geared towards administrators, teachers, developers, instructional designers, and technical support professionals who work with Canvas. There were approximately 3,000 attendees representing various businesses and institutions that use Canvas to accomplish their educational goals. Sessions included Canvas tool usage, previews of new tools that are being…
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A Midsummer Guide to Canvas Setup
Reading Time: 2 minutes Deep in thought and focused on my very important game of Sudoku, my wife broke my concentration with sudden alarm and proclaimed, “Oh my goodness, it‘s only 6 months until Christmas Eve!” While six months is still a little while, what is drawing closer is the start of the 2019-2020 school year. In less than two months, Cedarville University will welcome students back and embark on a journey of transformation for the Word of God and Testimony of Jesus Christ. Fall 2019 brings a change from Moodle to Canvas for the entire campus, and everyone will be adjusting to the new normal. For faculty, the challenge…