November 2024 | Ed Tech Newsletter
Welcome to the Spring 2025 edition of the Ed Tech Newsletter! As one semester comes to an end and we gear up for another semester, this edition brings you essential updates on Canvas site preparation, the latest in educational tech videos, AI resources, and more. Dive in to find tools, tips, and resources to set up your courses and enhance your teaching experience.
📅 Spring 2025 Canvas Sites are Ready
Created with Google Imagen3 via aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com
Prompt: Award-winning editorial photography: A lush spring scene, with a serene mountain lake nestled between towering cherry blossom trees in full bloom, 24mm f/4, 16:9 aspect ratio, with cinematic color grading, and using the rule of thirds to make the composition more interesting.
Your Canvas sites for Spring 2025 are now live! Here are some resources to help you get started:
- Importing Old Sites: If you’re reusing materials, follow these steps to import content from previous courses seamlessly.
- Law School Design Templates: Utilize the pre-designed law school templates for a professional look. Learn more about using these templates here.
- New Semester Quickstart: For other tips, tricks, and guides for getting up and running with your fresh Canvas sites, review this resource on the Ed Tech Blog.
- Need More Help?: If you need assistance with Canvas course design or technical questions, feel free to contact me directly. For administrative support, such as uploading content or organizing materials, our Law Faculty Support team is here to help. Reach out to them here.
🎥 Latest Ed Tech Videos
Check out the latest videos for insights on leveraging AI in your courses and beyond:
- Can LLMs Perform Basic Legal Research? You’ll have to find out!: Discover how LLMs can support foundational legal research. See the video.
- A Custom GPT to Learn How to Talk to LLMs: Enhance how you interact with language models. Watch here. Quick note: I made a slight modification to the name of my helpful AI Literacy Chatbot. You’ll have to engage with it to find out what it is!
🤖 AI Updates
The world of generative AI is changing fast. Here are some resources to help you stay on top of things.
Ed Tech Custom Chatbots
The first custom assistant is Generative AI Literacy tool. It is meant to help you understand the fundamentals of using Generative AI. Here are a few things you can use it for:
- Building AI literacy
- Improving your prompts
- Understanding and utilizing AI capabilities
- Applying generative AI across different domains of expertise
If everything in this section looks completely foreign to you, don’t worry! This chat assistant is a good place to start.
The second is an AI Course Policy Assistant to help you craft an AI policy for your course. It’s especially good at:
- Working with you collaboratively to identify your needs and adapt an AI policy for your course, individual assignments and assessments, or just clarify your view on whether or not generative AI should have a place in your course.
- It can guide you to AI policy resources and materials to learn more information.
- It can walk you through the steps of implementing your policy into your Canvas course.
You’ll get the most out of these assistants by thinking of them as really smart colleagues. I even recorded a video (linked above) that you can watch to learn more.
BC Enables Google Gemini
You can now sign in and use Google Gemini with your BC Google account. This gives you access to a private and protected chat interface at gemini.google.com. This is similar to our agreement with Microsoft Copilot.
My honest take: It’s best use cases for now are:
- Image Generation
- Simple tasks
- General question and answer conversations
- Quick brainstorming sessions
If you want the MOST power out of Google’s AI models I suggest checking out aistudio.google.com. Just be aware that the information you provide may be used for training purposes. For creative endeavors, improving writing, advanced reasoning, larger context windows, playing around with custom assistants, or just trying out the latest capabilities you won’t be disappointed. Note: Google AI Studio can only be accessed with a personal Google account at this time.
AI Tool Spotlight – NotebookLM
If you haven’t heard the buzz about Google’s NotebookLM yet I highly recommend checking out the two videos below to learn more. You’ll learn what it is and why you should care about it. Note: Google NotebookLM can only be accessed with a personal Google account at this time.
I’ve been personally using NotebookLM for catching up on research, keeping track of my Ed Tech updates, and as a tool to make sure I’m not missing out on critical information when creating educational content. The podcast feature is a must try if you haven’t checked it out yet.
Fun Tip: Throw your resume in and generate a podcast. You’re sure to get a glowing review!
AI Consultations by Request
Need tailored AI guidance? Reach out to schedule a one-on-one consultation and I’d be happy to chat about a few ways to start incorporating AI into your practice.