Tech Talk for Teachers (TTT) Program Notes

Hypothesis, assumptions and learnings from 6 weeks

What is Tech Talk for Teachers?

Online platform for teachers to discuss and explore emerging technologies and its implications on teaching and learning.

Hypothesis for TTT

Teachers are interested to learn about disruptive tech and appreciate a platform to discuss and bounce ideas with fellow teachers
Teachers can create spaces for informal, alternative PD on their own terms (much like how online communities organize to support each other on Stack Overflow, Reddit, Discord, Slack, Quora and others)
Once the platform is created and regular, there will be at least 2 repeat attendees for at least 2 consecutive sessions

Setup for TTT

12 weekly sessions on Zoom on Mondays at 8.30pm from Term 4 2022 to end Jan 2023
Teachers to suggest prompts; at least 1 primary facilitator to anchor and content prep

Recap for Tech Talk for Teachers

Metacognition and Gamification (Ft Twine, SLS and more), sharing by Dilys (MA, EduTech @ Columbia)
Using AI Computer Vision Models (Ft Google's Teachable Machine), sharing by Kahhow
AI Language Models for non-English teachers (Ft Open.AI Playground, Hypothenuse.AI), inputs by Mdm Dewi who provided prompts in Behasa Melayu
What are Language Models and concerns from language teachers (Ft ChatGPT, Quillbot), sharing by Joyce on how AI can be used to support effective teaching of grammar
Can we really detect plagiarism by GPT (Ft originality.ai and GPT detector tool), demo by Kahhow to show that actually bypasses are extremely easy.
Can teachers prepare data to fine-tune GPT effectively? (Part I)
Can teachers prepare data to fine-tune GPT effectively? (Part II) - after this session on 2 Jan, we have 4 more sessions before our first season of Tech Talk for Teachers come to a close

My own learnings running TTT

Which platform is best - Zoom or Discord? Tried to mobilize the teaching community on Discord and run TTT on voice channels but failed - platform familiarity matters
How technical should sessions be? Up to session 5, all sessions were non-technical but I was also genuinely curious about the appetite of finding technical teachers (to build edutech products, close feedback loops for existing products by Ministry and all). Thankfully, participants were mostly supportive and some good-faith attempt to scaffold keeps them engaged.
How to consolidate learnings? Most PD sessions I attend have some attempt to share using hard or soft copy notes but typically are ad hoc and have no continuity. Engineering continuity across different sessions where discussions can go in disparate ways is definitely challenging.
How to market/ reach a teaching audience using existing platforms afforded by the Ministry? SG LDC has been helpful and the mailer before the session was important to bump it up. I do this extremely inconsistently and could be more focused on marketing emails.