Ben's Workshops

The Connected Classroom: Providing Space for Student Learning

The Connected Classroom is about encouraging teachers as curators of content rather than delivery of content. Helping young people make evaluative judgements about content and providing space for students to learn is the order of the day.  We will explore how the Connected Classroom has four teachers:

• adult - the facilitator

• student - the learner/explorer/self-teacher

• external experts -

• AI - the machine

In this workshop, you will look at your existing learning materials (you don’t need to bring them!) and then explore them in light of the four teachers. This will allow us to make critical thinking value judgements about information, explore our own biases, and then tweak our content accordingly. We will deep dive into a range of curation tools that can be used in your classroom.

Canva: Making Your Classroom Resources Look Great!

In this workshop, we will explore the wonderful world of Canva as a tool for teachers to produce stunning content in a simple fashion. With guidance on how to use templates, colour palettes and the new presentation and AI elements, this will be a very practical workshop to develop our creative skills that can have an impact on students. As Canva now integrates with almost every LMS, we will discover the ease with which you can bring your tools together.

You will learn how to create stunning presentations that follow common design guidelines, use intuitive tools to help with creative lesson resources, such as infographics and social media cards, how to publish Canva assignments to Google Classroom or Teams, and how to leverage the power of AI within Canva. These tools will all be hands-on creations.

ChatGPT and the AI Revolution

This is a critical look at the technology that is shifting our education systems. Using a toolkit methodology, we will consider why we need to teach decision making in a world of machines, how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools effectively to save teachers time and then what we need to do to embrace the future of technology.

You will see a demonstration the use of ChatGPT for teachers, including developing literacy skills and prompts, and then have a go at doing this yourself. Additionally, you will use it to develop lesson resources around your given topic and then how students and teachers might use the chat elements to help with developing understanding and deepening learning. This will also involve a discussion about its limitations and how you can develop critical thinking through AI tools. You will create a number of takeaway lesson resources that are generated through ChatGPT and other AI tools.