Library Media Tech Talk

What if students could interview an AI pretending to be a literary character — and grade it?   It is indeed possible. This is how we tried it for the first time! I was so excited to have an immersive collaboration at Malvern Middle School based on The Outsiders novel. Mrs. Terah Rash and I created 4 learning stations to help bring the book and era to life for her 8th grade ELA classes. There was one additional station that we didn't have time to implement. Since learning more deeply about AI in 2025, I wanted to try a character emulation activity with students. The goal was to allow the AI to pretend to be Ponyboy Curtis and have the students evaluate the "performance" based on the accuracy according to the book character. In a world where most activities involve AI answering questions or simply producing a product for use, I wanted to turn the tables and have student evaluate the AI and what it did. I experimented with this in the video below before school started with s...

AI Basic Training: What Happened When a Librarian and Coach Brought the Army and AI to Middle School Coach Whitlow and I brought Army training culture into the library for a middle school AI best practices lesson. The handouts said UNCLASSIFIED TRAINING MATERIAL across the top. I was in Army camo. Coach Whitlow was in her camo. And her middle school class was about to get their first real lesson in AI best practices. That's how AI Basic Training was born. An Unexpected Conversation Coach Whitlow teaches Career Development and Tools at our middle school, in addition to her coaching responsibilities. Because of our different schedules, we had barely crossed paths before she approached me about doing a collaborative lesson on AI best practices. It happened while I was talking to the Vocabulary & Numeracy teacher, who is also a Coach. That coach and I had done several literacy based collaborations, and I can't help but wonder if she had told Coach Whitlow about our library anti...