Teaching online, I often find it useful to develop tools that provide instruction and scaffolding for idea development. Many of my courses explore ideas around educational technology, and a lot of these concepts benefit from something beyond reading and responding.
This semester, my colleague Nada Hour and I have created several new tools, and we’ve found them useful for scaffolding complex ideas and concepts.
This kind of approach was possible before GenAI, apart from the versions that generate feedback and content, but being able to produce these mini-apps quickly has been very useful.
There have been some challenges. Just a few days after I assigned one of these tools, Anthropic changed how artifacts work, which made the generative parts of the app hard to use. However, we’ve created stand-alone HTML versions of each tool for stability. They work in any web browser, even without internet access.
I’ve also used these kinds of tools for my own qualitative data analysis, with mixed success. I made a quick demo with simulated data to show how they could work, and I hope to build a fuller version for my Qualitative Research class next term!
Here’s what what’s new (see all activities here):
- Anatomy of an Article: Analyzing the argument of an academic journal article
- Educational Technology Adoption Simulation: provides two goals–either aim for school-wide adoption or try to get all teachers to make a well-informed decision about a new tool
- Trope Check (developed with Nada Hour): recognize and critique AI tropes thinking critically about what the words mean
- AI-Tool for Custom Qualitative Data Analysis: Demo