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Data as protest. Data as accountability. Data as collective action.

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Elisabetta Matsumoto holds a Geared Cuboctahedral Jitterbug that she designed with mathematician Henry Segerman. Credit Credit Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times

For Elisabetta Matsumoto, knot theory is knit theory.

Elisabetta Matsumoto holds a Geared Cuboctahedral Jitterbug that she designed with mathematician Henry Segerman. Credit Credit Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times

BOSTON - On the eve of the American Physical Society's annual March meeting, a Sunday "stitch 'n bitch" session convened during happy hour at a lobby bar of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel.

Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University, had tweeted notice of the meet-up earlier that day: "Are you a physicist into knitting, crocheting, or other fiber arts?" she asked. "I'll be the one knitting a torus." (A torus is a mathematized doughnut; hers was inspired by a figure in a friend's scientific paper.)

At the bar, amid tables cluttered with balls of yarn, Dr. Daniels absorbed design advice from a group of specialized knitters, among them Elisabetta Matsumoto, an applied mathematician and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-host of the gathering.

For Dr. Matsumoto, knitting is more than a handicraft hobby with health benefits. She is embarking on a five-year project, "What a Tangled Web We Weave," funded by the National Science Foundation, to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of "the ancient technology known as knitting."

Some of the oldest examples date to the 11th century in Egypt. But despite generations of practical and experiential knowledge, the physical and mathematical properties of knitted fabric rarely are studied in a way that produces predictive models about how such fabrics behave.

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Elisabetta Matsumoto, center, with the graduate students Krishma Singal, left, and Danielle Skinner, is a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, embarking on a five-year study of the mathematics and mechanics of knitting. Credit Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times

Dr. Matsumoto argues that "knitting is coding" and that yarn is a programmable material. The potential dividends of her research range from wearable electronics to tissue scaffolding.

During the happy-hour meetup, she knitted a swatch illustrating a plastic surgery technique called Z-plasty. The swatch was for a talk she would deliver at 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning called "Twisted Topological Tangles." Scores of physicists turned up, despite a competing parallel session on " The Extreme Mechanics of Balloons."

"I've been knitting since I was a kid," Dr. Matsumoto told her (mostly male) audience. "That was the thing I did to get along with my mom when I was a teenager. It's just been a dream to take all of this stuff that I learned and played with as a child and turn it into something scientifically rigorous."

As a first step, her team is enumerating all possible knittable stitches: "There's going to be a countably infinite number. How to classify them is what we are working on now."
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The investigation is informed by the mathematical tradition of knot theory. A knot is a tangled circle - a circle embedded with crossings that cannot be untangled. (A circle with no crossings is an "unknot.")

"The knitted stitch is a whole series of slipknots, one after the other," said Dr. Matsumoto. Rows and columns of slipknots form a lattice pattern so regular that it is analogous to crystal structure and crystalline materials.

By way of knot theory, Dr. Matsumoto essentially is developing a knit theory: an alphabet of unit-cell stitches, a glossary of stitch combinations, and a grammar governing the knitted geometry and topology - the fabric's stretchiness, or its "emergent elasticity."

When discussing the emergent properties of knitting, Dr. Matsumoto sometimes makes reference to a butterfly, the vibrant blue morpho. Its color is optically emergent, the result not of chemical pigment but of structure. In effect, each wing is a metamaterial: covered in layers of nanosized scales, arranged in a pattern called a gyroid surface, the wing absorbs most wavelengths of light, but reflects blue.

Knitted fabric is also a metamaterial. A length of yarn is all but inelastic, but when configured in slipknots - in patterns of knits and purls - varying degrees of elasticity emerge.

"Just based on these two stitches, these two fundamental units, we can make a whole series of fabrics, and each of these fabrics has remarkably different elastic properties," Dr. Matsumoto told the audience.

She first combined her math-y and woolly mind-sets as a Ph.D. student, after admiring a friend's crocheted interpretation of the hyperbolic plane (curly kale is a vegetable example) and wondering how to do it differently.

"It irritated me that it wasn't isotropic," she recalled on the day before her talk. She could see where the crochet had begun, whereas a true hyperbolic plane should betray no starting point and no direction.

She thought, "I can fix that."

She crocheted a network of lace-like heptagons that produced a more uniform rendering. The hyperbolic plane has been her constant companion ever since. In April, she had a hyperbolic helicoid - a fantastically swirly helix, somewhat like a seashell - tattooed to her left shoulder.

During her talk, Dr. Matsumoto passed around her hand-knit swatches: stockinette (standard jersey, fairly stretchy, used for T-shirts); garter (stretchier); ribbing (stretchiest); and seed (not so stretchy, but one of her favorites).

A sizable fraction of her audience also flaunted their hand-knits - sweaters, hats, a water-bottle cozy, indeterminate works in progress. Dr. Matsumoto's most prized hand-knit creation is her "dragon of happiness" shawl (from a design by knitter Sharon Winsauer, a.k.a. the Crazy Lace Lady).

Knitting away for two months, Dr. Matsumoto encountered one stitch in the dragon's beard that she had never seen before.

"In the pattern for the dragon, there are all these crazy stitches," she said - stitches that took up not just a single cell on the pattern grid, but stretched across numerous cells, seeming to follow a horizontal array rather than the usual, vertical orientation.

Her team's knit theory will incorporate these and other stitch morphologies, as well as intentional stitch defects and constraints, such as how a yarn bends, twists and compresses; how many plies it has, how thick it is, and how "floofy."

Floofiness refers to a yarn's "halo area, where ephemeral fuzzy fibers stick out," Dr. Matsumoto said, and it changes the way two pieces of yarn interact with each other, their friction and energy exchange. "I'd love to write a paper using the word 'floofy' as a technical term."

Dr. Matsumoto's presentation opened a three-hour session entitled " Fabrics, Knits and Knots " - the first time that the subject had been addressed at the American Physical Society's annual meeting.

"Sabetta is spectacularly creative, and she is doing really mathematically sophisticated work," said Pedro Reis, the session organizer, who leads the Flexible Structures Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. "She is also attracting a lot of people to the field who might not otherwise even think about science."

During his introductory remarks, Dr. Reis had a vexing encounter with an intertwined microphone cord. "This is a good example of why we really care about this topic," he said.

Dr. Reis grapples with the likes of long-overhand shoelace knotting, climbing knots, basket weaving, surgical sutures, and how to pass on the art of surgical-knot craftsmanship to robots. During the session, his lab mates described how they had used a CT scan to probe the internal structure of knot filaments and the friction that arises where filaments touch. After the meeting, Dr. Matsumoto sent him home with some of her swatches.

Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, mentioned variants of sailor's knots, DNA and protein knots, and worms that tie themselves into knots in order to minimize dehydration. He went on discuss "whether a knotted filament with zero points of self-contact may be realized physically." That is, can a knot exist wherein none of its crossings touch? (It can; try it at home with a strip of paper, or a cord.)

And Thomas Plumb-Reyes, an applied physicist at Harvard, presented his research on " Detangling Hair " to a standing-room-only audience.

"What is going on in tangled hair?" he asked. "What is the optimal combing strategy?"

Shashank Markande, a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Matsumoto, reported on their stitch classification work so far. Together, they had derived a conjecture: All knittable stitches must be ribbon knots. (A ribbon knot is a very technical tangle.) And they pondered the corollary: Are all ribbon knots knittable?

Back in February, Mr. Markande (who started knitting only recently for the sake of science) thought he'd found an example of an unknittable ribbon knot, using a knots-and-links software program called SnapPy. He sent Dr. Matsumoto a text message with a sketch: "Tell me if this can be knitted?"

Dr. Matsumoto was just heading out for a run, and by the time she returned, having manipulated the yarn every which way in her head, she had worked out an answer. "I think that can be knitted," she texted back. When Mr. Markande pressed her on how, she added: "It's knittable by our rules, but it isn't trivial to do with needles."

Mr. Markande said later, "I was pretty surprised. With my limited knowledge, I thought it could not be knitted. But Sabetta managed to knit it."

The replica Taitexma Industrial knitting machine in Dr. Matsumoto's lab. Video by Krishma Singal Credit

For the Tangled Web project, most of the experimental knitting is produced by a replica of a vintage 1970s knitting machine, the Taitexma Industrial and Home-Based Knitting Machine Model TH-860, which is operated by Krishma Singal, a doctoral student. The machine can also be programmed by punched cards - as was the Jacquard loom, invented in 1804 by Joseph Marie Jacquard and sometimes called the first digital technology.

Dr. Matsumoto's team likes to contemplate how stitch patterns provide code - more complex code than the 1s and 0s of binary - that creates the program for the elasticity and geometry of knitted fabric. The buzzword is "topological programmable materials," said postdoc Michael Dimitriyev.

He is working on a computer simulation of knitted fabric, inputting yarn properties and stitch topology, and outputting the geometry and elasticity of the real-life finished object. "I'm the killjoy that brings in elasticity," he likes to say.

The team's first paper, currently underway, will verify Dr. Dimitriyev's simulations against Ms. Singal's hard-copy swatches. Once the computer simulation is refined, Dr. Matsumoto and her collaborators can pull out equations and algorithms for knitted fabric behavior, which in turn could be put into physics engines for computer game graphics, or movies.

Pixar's "Brave" and "Monsters, Inc." showcased cutting-edge animation of hair and fur, but yarn has yet to have its time in the spotlight. Fabric animation is still very trial-and-error, and it requires time-intensive supercomputers to render.

"This could go in that direction," said Dr. Matsumoto. It's a good yarn, albeit just at the beginning, and still a bit floofy around the edges.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of some of oldest examples of knitting. They date to the 11th century, not to the 11th century B.C.E.

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'Knitting Is Coding' and Yarn Is Programmable in This Physics Lab

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For Elisabetta Matsumoto, knot theory is knit theory. Elisabetta Matsumoto holds a Geared Cuboctahedral Jitterbug that she designed with mathematician Henry Segerman. Credit Credit Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times BOSTON - On the eve of the American Physical Society's annual March meeting, a Sunday "stitch 'n bitch" session convened during happy hour at a lobby bar of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel.

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We’re changing the NYC tech ecosystem by
strategically investing in tech education to prepare New Yorkers for jobs of the future.|

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The tech industry is growing twice as fast as any other sector in NYC. Businesses are looking to hire diverse and local tech talent as they begin to fully embrace the value of diverse perspectives, life experiences, and backgrounds.

Yet, gaps and disparities exist today, starting from who pursues a tech education to how we educate; where we find talent to how we evaluate them; how we hire to who we hire; how we onboard to how we grow.

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The tech industry is growing twice as fast as any other sector in NYC. Businesses are looking to hire diverse and local tech talent as they begin to fully embrace the value of diverse perspectives, life experiences, and backgrounds.

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"BetaNYC is a civic organization dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. We envision an informed and empowered public that can leverage civic design, technology, and data to hold government accountable, and improve their economic opportunity."

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BetaNYC is a civic organization dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. We envision an informed and empowered public that can leverage civic design, technology, and data to hold government accountable, and improve their economic opportunity.

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Social Justice and Computing Activities and Lessons from NYC Public School teachers

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Social Justice and Computing Activities and Lessons from NYC Public School teachers

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The following are resources CS educators can use in their classroom or to further develop their equitable practices. Many of these resources were created by NYC's CS4All initiative's network of educators.

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The following are resources CS educators can use in their classroom or to further develop their equitable practices. Many of these resources were created by CS4All's network of educators - we are so thankful to them for sharing their insights, work and experiences! When adapting these resources

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At This School, Computer Science Class Now Includes Critiquing Chatbots - By Natasha Singer

Move over, coding. Some schools are asking student programmers to think critically about rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

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At This School, Computer Science Class Now Includes Critiquing Chatbots

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Move over, coding. Some schools are asking student programmers to think critically about rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

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Emoti-Con NYC Youth Digital Media Festival

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Emoti-Con NYC Youth Digital Media Festival

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Emoti-Con is an annual virtual project fair and competition for NYC teens who believe in digital innovation as a tool for positive change in the world around them. Many of those teens have taken part in out-of-school time and in-school programs to support their development as creators, artists, activists and coders.

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Emoti-Con is an annual virtual project fair and competition for NYC teens who believe in digital innovation as a tool for positive change in the world around them.

This year's project fair application is now accepting submissions! Here's everything you need:

☑️ Project Fair Guide for Teams: This slide deck tells you everything you need to prep your project, including free templates and activities.

☑️ Application Worksheet: Make a copy to help you get your materials together before you apply.

📝 Apply now: Submit this application by May 16 to be included.

The amazing Rudy Blanco, founder of the Bronx Gaming Network and Director of Entrepreneurship & Gaming at DreamYard Project is our 2022 Keynote! Rudy creates physical and digital gaming communities for BIPOC, queer and women game players and creators. In 2019, he launched BX Start, a physical gaming space dedicated to entrepreneurship, gaming and career exploration in the Bronx.

⭐ May 16: Last day to submit a project

⭐ May 23-June 3: Virtual Project Fair & Judging

⭐ June 10: Award Ceremony & Keynote

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Emoti-Con is an annual virtual project fair and competition for NYC teens who believe in digital innovation as a tool for positive change in the world around them. This year's project fair application is now accepting submissions!

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The YAY Census Inquiry Area Reports serve as a collective summary of data gathered from the Intergenerational Change Initiative's Youth Ask Youth Census. Youth were involved in designing and implementing the Census, and in analyzing and visualizing the data. The topics covered include Community, Policing, Learning, Economics, Covid-19, Civics, and Health.

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The Intergenerational Change Initiative - Brief Intergenerational Change Initiative (ICI)

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Check out this storymap, which includes data analysis and mapping created by youth in the Intergenerational Change Initiative's Summer 2020 Institute.

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Classroom Case Studies from Computing-integrated bilingual classrooms

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Classroom Case Studies from Computing-integrated bilingual classrooms

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Looking for inspiration? Partner teachers from Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS) designed units to start meaningful conversations with bi/multilingual students by bringing together practices from computing, school disciplines, and community.

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Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS)

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General 3 - Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS)

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If you're interested in joining future professional development opportunities we offer, or partnering with us to enhance your own PD, reach out to us: pilacs [at] pilacs.nyc. See below for links to our project's work with other organizations and venues, and a list of our past PD engagements.

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Youth Voices is an open publishing and social networking platform for youth. The site is organized by teachers with support from the National Writing Project.

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The Games for Change (G4C) Student Challenge is the leading national game design program that combines students’ passion for games with digital learning and civic engagement.

Click here to play some of the games created by youth contest entries!

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Check out the "featured projects" and "featured studios" on Scratch to learn about the kinds of projects that children and youth create in this environment, and how they share their work with the community

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Scratch is a free programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations.

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#UNMUTEMEPLZ, A YOUTH-LED SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN

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#UNMUTEMEPLZ, A YOUTH-LED SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN

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Youth are already belittled by adults, particularly in the workforce, given that they are thought of as not having adequate experience, and thus, valuable insight. Destiny, 21, insists that "people often look down on younger adults because of the idea that they do not know any better." Nowadays, because of the pandemic, the story has metamorphosed and not in favor of youth and young adults. Platforms like Google Teams or Zoom are double-edged weapons: although they are extremely helpful for having meetings and classes, young people found their voices left unheard or literally muted by these platforms. As a non-native English speaker and international student, I feel and experience the remnants of such platforms. Nonetheless, as a community of youth and young adults, we feel unheard. We feel voiceless. And, given that voice is power, we feel we are not being given the power we deserve.

Not only is this a problem, but the fact that we feel scared of sharing it is also a problem. Eva, 17, asserts that "I feel scared that the adults in my life will not understand or support me." The fact that there are few to no safe spaces where we, youth, can share our thoughts and concerns on mental health, self-confidence, and power struggles with adults, is problematic. "It's hard to share with my parents, and I feel shame if I share [self-confidence and mental health issues] with my friends. Taking a hold of this shame in a safe space will help me a lot," explains Jalesha, 22.

Therein lies the importance of creative campaigns like #UnmuteMePlz -a social media creative campaign that is taking on the responsibility of creating these safe havens for youth and young adults where they can share their own stories, share advice, and converse. The launch event included the creation of creative masks, the sharing of wishes and desires, and most importantly, it included a panel with the youth creators of the campaign. They engaged with the event attendees by asking questions and telling them to move from side to side depending on whether they agreed or disagreed with the question. They allowed the public to take agency by participating in asking them questions or even answering questions the panel proposed. Likewise, the panelists explained the reasons behind the creation of their campaign and why it is important.

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Storytelling For #unmutemeplz, A Youth-Led Social Media Campaign | By Alexandra Kader

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Youth are already belittled by adults, particularly in the workforce, given that they are thought of as not having adequate experience, and thus, valuable insight. Destiny, 21, insists that "people often look down on younger adults because of the idea that they do not know any better."

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Common Sense Media Video and report: The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Age Zero to Eight, 2020

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For the first time, young kids spend more time watching online videos than doing any other activity on screens. But the content they're seeing on sites like YouTube and TikTok lacks educational value and, in many cases, exposes young children to advertising, violence, and other content that's inappropriate for their ages.

Our fourth iteration of the Common Sense Census: Zero to Eight (ISSN: 2694-4499) is paired with a sister report, YouTube and Kids: How Ads, Toys, and Games Dominate Viewing, to better understand just how the media landscape can be improved for our youngest children. The explosion of online video viewing matters when we consider YouTube's role as the largest free platform for online video in the world. But we also learned that the gap in screen time continues to widen across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, and progress on closing the digital divide has stalled.

For advocates, reporters, and researchers:

Fact Sheets:

At-a-glance data from Zero to Eight, 2020 around key demographics and issues.

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The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Age Zero to Eight, 2020

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This pre-pandemic snapshot of young kids' media use presents a unique opportunity to understand the impact of the pandemic combined with future research. The results of this report support solutions that provide all kids with access to media.

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Common Sense Media’s 2021 Census – Survey of Kids’ Digital Media Use

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Common Sense Media’s 2021 Census – Survey of Kids’ Digital Media Use

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Common Sense Media’s 2021 Census – Survey of Kids’ Digital Media Use

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By Michael Robb | March 23, 2022

Two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're beginning to see a fuller picture of the complex impact it has had on everything from the economy and health care to education and mental health. For parents, caregivers, educators, and policymakers across the country, kids' media use is an issue at the center of this conversation.

Our new report, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021, reveals how the past two years have affected kids' media use. While many pre-pandemic trends continued, we saw acceleration across the board, as well as some shifts amid the emergence of new platforms and behavioral patterns. Here are some trends highlighted by our research on 8- to 18-year-olds:

In the past two years, media use for tweens and teens grew faster than in the four years before the pandemic.
As you might expect, the time spent on screens by kids age 8-18 is a lot higher today than before the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, the total amount of screen media used each day went from 4:44 to 5:33 among tweens, and from 7:22 to 8:39 among teens. That's a 17% increase in the last two years -- and it doesn't include screen time while learning at school or doing homework.

Some have expected that a return to in-person school and regular extracurricular activities will reverse this trend, but it hasn't thus far. Others believe the rising trend will continue, or that the pandemic simply brought on the inevitable. Either way, we will continue to monitor trends in media use, especially as we move into a new phase of the pandemic.

Online video has emerged as the activity of choice for tweens and teens, and YouTube is the must-have platform.
More than 6 in 10 tweens and teens watch online videos every day, and say they enjoy watching "a lot," far more than the percent who enjoy any other media activity that much. And this cuts across different groups. Watching online videos is the activity enjoyed the most among boys and girls, kids who are White, Black, and Hispanic/Latino, and those in lower-, middle-, and higher-income households.

Where are kids going to watch videos? Among the 79% of 13- to 18-year-olds who are regular users of social media and online videos (viewing at least once a week), 83% have used YouTube, and 68% have used TikTok. And nearly a third of kids (32%) age 8-18 say YouTube is the one site they wouldn't want to "live without."

The number of tweens using social media -- before they're technically old enough to do so -- is climbing.
Social media use by tweens climbed during the pandemic, with the percentage of 8- to 12-year-olds reporting that they had ever used some form of social media jumping to 38% in 2021, compared with 31% in 2019. Plus, the time spent using social media is up eight minutes a day among this age group, from 10 to 18 minutes a day, on average. When you zoom in on the 22% of tweens who used social media on the target day we asked about, the average time jumps to 1:20.

Considering tweens aren't technically allowed to be on social media platforms at all, this growth in use should be concerning for advocates for safe, healthy social media platforms.

Media use continues to reflect gender differences, as well as racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences.
Screen time has risen across the board, but what we've seen consistently each time we complete the Census is higher media use by boys, and higher use within communities of color and lower-income households. We can't say from this data why this disparity occurs, or whether it has positive or negative effects on young people. But the disparities persist and are substantial:

Boys use more screen media than girls (76 minutes a day more, on average, among tweens, and 74 more among teens).

Black and Hispanic/Latino children use more screen media than White children (for example, a difference of about two hours [1:57] a day between Black and White tweens, and two and a half hours [2:31] a day between Hispanic/Latino and White tweens).

Tweens and teens in lower-income households engage with substantially more screen media (9:19) than their peers in higher-income households (7:16).

Understanding how kids are using media and what they enjoy is important for parents and caregivers, educators, and the industries creating and distributing media. While we aren't certain what future Census reports will show, it seems that we haven't hit a ceiling on media use for tweens and teens.

Our research findings reinforce how important it is for kids to develop media literacy and for families to choose high-quality media experiences. Understanding kids' preferences, and what they're watching, playing and engaging with, can help families establish healthy boundaries and help create online experiences that are safe and positive for all kids, including teens and tweens.

Watch for future research from our Common Sense Research Program that takes a deeper look at teen media use on smartphones. We hope to capture not only time logged, but also the content kids are exposed to, and to examine relationships between their mobile device use and experiences directly tied to their mental health, such as cyberbullying, hate speech, and diet/body image content. This more comprehensive data will help us learn more about the relationships between media experiences and teen mental health.
Want to explore visual highlights from the Common Sense Census 2021? Check out our infographic.

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Kids' Media Use Accelerated Rapidly During the Pandemic

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The Common Sense Census 2021 reveals what tweens and teens truly enjoy about media ... and what they don't. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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Teens and Mental Health: How Girls Really Feel About Social Media 

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Teens and Mental Health: How Girls Really Feel About Social Media 

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Common Sense Media report: Teens and Mental Health: How Girls Really Feel About Social Media (2023)

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Teens and Mental Health: How Girls Really Feel About Social Media

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Teen girls have a complicated relationship with social media. But a new report from Common Sense looks at the platforms and features that girls like and dislike—giving us a chance to improve their experience online.

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Example Lessons for Integrated Computational Thinking

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Example Lessons for Integrated Computational Thinking

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Contains examples from Language Arts, Social Studies and the Arts

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Making students'' metacognitive thinking about reading visible using a technology platform and metacognitive conversations with a purpose.

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Using Padlet to show the students' thinking.

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Reading with a purpose to support metacognitive conversations

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So, you've heard about the Notice & Note signposts and are curious. Maybe you've seen the books written by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst, like Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading and Reading Nonfiction: Notice & Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies. Maybe a colleague has mentioned how much richer discussions have been since she introduced Notice & Note strategies in her class. Maybe your team is considering adopting them.

The popularity of the Notice & Note strategies for close reading continues to grow among teachers across the country. That's because so many teachers find that their students read more closely and have better discussions when they use these strategies.

At the heart of Notice & Note are the signposts. Beers and Probst, the Notice & Note originators, spent years studying the common features of fiction and nonfiction texts that help students understand and engage with their reading. Then Beers and Probst worked with students and teachers in the classrooms to refine the list of features to include only the most helpful, as shown below.

Each of the Notice & Note signposts for fiction and nonfiction has an associated anchor question. When students learn to identify the signposts as they read and ask themselves the question, they think more deeply about the author's choices and the meaning of the text.

What Are the 6 Signposts in Reading Fiction?

Contrasts and Contradictions

Aha Moment

Tough Questions

Words of the Wiser

Again and Again

Memory Moment

What Are the 5 Signposts in Reading Nonfiction?

Contrasts and Contradictions

Extreme or Absolute Language

Numbers and Stats

Quoted Words

Word Gaps

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Introducing Notice & Note Signposts in Your Classroom

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Incorporate Notice & Note Signposts into your reading or ELA curriculum with these strategies and tips for teachers.

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Find our why in culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy

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Find our why in culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy

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This workshop by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad provides paths to consider why culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy.

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2022 NYSMBK Symposium Day 1 Breakout Room #5 with Dr. Gholdy Muhammad

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This session offered a unique culturally and historically responsive approach toward the goal of cultivating genius and joy in education. This approach is essential for accelerating the growth of all students and uniquely youth of color, who have been traditionally underserved in learning standards, policies, and school practices.

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"The Open Data Ambassadors (ODA) program recruits, trains, and certifies digitally literate cohorts of volunteer ambassadors to teach about NYC Open Data across the diverse communities of New York City. By working with libraries and community organizations, Open Data Ambassadors will help to bridge data literacy gaps and promote neighborhood and issue-based dialogue. This program is a collaboration between NYC Open Data and BetaNYC."

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NYC Open Data helps New Yorkers use and learn about City data

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The Connected Wellbeing Impact Studio supports early- to mid-stage innovations that foster youth and community wellbeing through strengths-based, socially-connected, and youth-centered approaches.

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The Connected Wellbeing Initiative - Youth powered wellbeing in a a connected world

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Impact Studio - The Connected Wellbeing Initiative

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Impact Studio The Connected Wellbeing Impact Studio supports early- to mid-stage innovations that foster youth and community wellbeing through strengths-based, socially-connected, and youth-centered approaches. The projects in the Studio draw from established and research-informed approaches in the connected learning community.

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Thought knitting as coding lends itself to help kids understand the concept of what coding means.  Loved it.

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Thought knitting as coding lends itself to help kids understand the concept of what coding means.  Loved it.

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Summer camps, projects, clubs for girls in grades 3-12, college prep and internship opportunities to connect girls to tech opportunities.

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Held on January 26, 2024, the Girls Who Code Hiring Summit: Early Career Edition is a one-day event designed to connect the Girls Who Code and wider communities with full-time job opportunities in the technical workforce and to connect hiring managers looking to meet a diverse slate of candidates for jobs. This event welcomes recent college and bootcamp graduates and young professionals to network with companies looking to connect with a talented, ambitious, diverse group of computer science students and professionals.

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coding for girls coding club summer coding girls code reshma saujani coding nonprofit brave not perfect

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Learn to code! Free summer programs and after-school clubs for teen girls. Explore coding in a fun and friendly environment. Find a program near you!

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Inspiring Stories of Kids Using Technology to Change the World – myFirst

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Technology is developing quickly, and it’s fantastic to watch how kids—especially young inventors and youngster coders—are using their knowledge and abilities to improve the world. In this article, we’ll explore some fascinating stories about kids and technology. As well as showcasing the amazing wo…

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Bill T. Jones - AI and Creative Movement

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Bill T. Jones - AI and Creative Movement

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https://experiments.withgoogle.com/billtjonesai

In 1999, Bill T. Jones collaborated with Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to create Ghostcatching, a revolutionary 8-minute digital art installation that combined dance, drawing, sound, and computer composition. This new work is amazing and inspiring and provides opportunities for students to experiment with AI-created dance.

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Body, Movement, Language: AI Sketches With Bill T. Jones by Bill T. Jones & Google Creative Lab - Experiments with Google

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Since 2009, coders have created thousands of amazing experiments using Chrome, Android, AI, WebVR, AR and more. We’re showcasing projects here, along with helpful tools and resources, to inspire others to create new experiments.

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Hi All: I forgot to log in before creating the post above, but I never like to post anonymously, so...that was from me!

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Body, Movement, Language: AI Sketches With Bill T. Jones by Bill T. Jones & Google Creative Lab - Experiments with Google

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Since 2009, coders have created thousands of amazing experiments using Chrome, Android, AI, WebVR, AR and more. We’re showcasing projects here, along with helpful tools and resources, to inspire others to create new experiments.

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CUNY 1969 & struggle for open admissions through choose-your-adventure storyboards

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CUNY 1969 & struggle for open admissions through choose-your-adventure storyboards

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https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/cuny1969/?page_id=1915

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Tensions are high and reach a peak when students and others begin to organize and demonstrate around a set of demands that they say will increase equity and access to CUNY for all. Many are feeling an urgency to figure out how and when to implement open admissions, and they want a say in what that looks like.

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This is a great way to for learning how to create fun projects. I have seen teachers and students use it and create really interesting projects.

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Build and deploy software collaboratively with the power of AI without spending a second on setup.

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In another university, I do a group project with students labeled "Museum of Us". They can make a instagram, website, google slideshow, or even a video of exhibits showcasing who they are as a diverse community. The course I teach deals with the multi-faceted nature of education and how education impacts us as a community, school, and society.

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I just recently attended a training for the Build Design Challenge and think that it is something useful for teachers of grades 7-12. The challenge question that students are investigating is; "How might we develop entrepreneurial solutions to everyday challenges for people in our schools and communities?" This Design Challenge empowers students to take action as they work to develop innovative solutions for their communities. Students are guided through the entire Design Thinking process on the new digital platform. BUILD provides all training and materials for students and schools.

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FREE Curriculum for teachers! Help students solve real-world problems with innovative solutions grounded in empathy and equity.

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Through the Civic Data Design Lab, Project Leads Sarah Williams, Laurie Rubel, Valeria Mogivilevich, and Christine Gaspar implemented mapping software that both high school and community college students used to learn mathematical skills while investigating access to financial institutions (banks, pawn shops, and the lottery). Both investigations were implemented in courses that I had taught.

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2012-2016
︎︎︎ Project Website

Project Leads
Sarah Williams
Laurie Rubel
Valeria Mogivilevich
Christine Gaspar

Researcher Assistants
Pierre Beaudreau
Karuna Mehta
Phil Tinn
Jonah Rogoff
Erica Deahl
Alicia Rouault
Lee Dwyer

Collaborators
Brooklyn College
Center for Urban Pedagogy

Support from
The National Science Foundation

Overview

Data literacy - the ability to work with, analyze and make arguments with data - is essential for understanding and solving social and civic issues. City Digits develops and pilot tests innovative tools that help high school students learn mathematics for investigating their local environment. A collaborative project of MIT's Civic Data Design Lab, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), and CUNY's Brooklyn College, City Digits has developed two place-based curricular modules. Both incorporate geospatial technologies that enable students to explore their local urban landscape, collect field data, and organize and visualize patterns. Our first module, Local Lotto, introduced students to the statewide lottery system. Piloted in April 2013, students investigated the impact of the lotto in local neighborhoods while learning mathematical concepts such as data analysis and probability. The second module, Cash City, allowed students to explore the role and local impact of alternative financial institutions, such as pawnshops and check cashers. In addition to exploring ethical questions, students learned how to calculate interest. Cash City was piloted in Brooklyn's Bushwick School for Social Justice in November 2014.

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL-1222430. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

Students compare lottery spending to social demographics. This map shows the percentage of income spent on lottery per neighborhood.

The map shows the odds of the lottery are slim, the green shows how much people spend on the lottery and the purple how much is won.

Students used tablets to find lottery retailers.

Lottery retailer were asked how much lottery tickets they sell on an average day. They were also asked if they thought playing the lottery is good or bad.

Students explored the maps in class.
Students used tablets or smart phones to add the data they collected to the City Digits website. Interviews were added directly to the City Digits website, which allowed students to explore the qualitative data with quantitative data about the lottery. They used this data to develop arguments about whether the lottery was good or bad.
Active Learning

After the first release of the City Digits software, we found that students did not understand the geography of New York City. For the second release of the curriculum, a large scale map was used to allow students to explore New York City's geography. Students added their home and were led through exercises which allowed them to investigate differences between the communities. Students also drew their maps to show the relationship between the lottery and their community. Students were also asked to take pictures of what the lottery looked like in the areas around the school.

A movie about the City Digits curriculum was displayed in the Copper Hewitt museum in New York City. The exhibit also allowed patrons to use the tool in the museum. A large scale map showed if the lottery was good or bad.

Publications
Lim, Vivian, Laurie Rubel, Lauren Shookhoff, Mathew Sullivan, and Sarah Williams. "The Lottery is a Mathematics Powerball." Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 21, no. 9 (2016): 526-53.

Williams, Sarah, Erica Deahl, Laurie Rubel, and Vivian
Lim. "City Digits: Developing Socially-Grounded Data Literacy Using Digital Tools." Journal of Digital Media Literacy, (2014).

Lim, Vivian, Erica Deahl, Laurie Rubel, and Sarah Williams. "Local Lotto: Mathematics and Mobile." Cases on Technology Integration in Mathematics Education, (2014): 43.

Press
"How Kids Are Learning Math, Maps and Spatial Justice in NYC." MediaShift, July 2015

Workshops for Teachers
The Maps and Math of New York City Pawn Shops Mini-Course at Math for America, New York, NY, 2015.

CityDigits: Critical, Place- Based Approaches to Teaching & Learning Mathematics TODOS Conference. Phoenix, AZ, 2014.

LottaFacts: A Critical Analysis of the State Lottery Through Mathematics
Professional Development Workshop at Math for America. New York, NY, 2014.

LottaFacts: A Critical Analysis of the State Lottery Through Mathematics
Presentation at the Creating Balance for an Unjust World Conference. Los Angeles, CA, January 2014.

Exhibitions
City Digits, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY, 2016.

Making the City, AIGA/Annex South Street Seaport, New York, NY, 2015.

Mapping Brooklyn, BRIC House, Brooklyn NY, 2015.

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2012-2016 ︎︎︎ Project Website Project Leads Sarah WilliamsLaurie Rubel Valeria Mogivilevich Christine Gaspar Researcher Assistants Pierre Beaudreau Karuna Mehta Phil Tinn Jonah Rogoff Erica Deahl Alicia Rouault Lee Dwyer Collaborators Brooklyn College Center for Urban Pedagogy Support from The National Science Foundation Data literacy - the ability to work with, analyze and make arguments with data - is essential for understanding and solving social and civic issues.

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Artificial intelligence might be able to drive cars, treat disease, and train your front door to recognize your face. But can it crack the toughest nut in literacy: Helping kids comprehend what they read?

AI is evolving to meet reading instruction and assessment needs, some experts say. For instance, some believe it won’t be long before tools that use AI’s natural language processing capabilities to measure skills like phonemic awareness are commonplace in schools. Intelligent tutors that can coach students to demonstrate in writing an understanding of a text they’ve read are already emerging.

If AI can improve reading instruction and assessment, it could fill important gaps, educators say.

Khan Academy, a nonprofit digital learning company with more than 145 million registered users, is also considering using AI to help with students’ reading comprehension and writing.

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Artificial intelligence might be able to drive cars, treat disease, and train your front door to recognize your face. But can it crack the toughest nut in literacy: Helping kids comprehend what they read?

AI is evolving to meet reading instruction and assessment needs, some experts say. For instance, some believe it won't be long before tools that use AI's natural language processing capabilities to measure skills like phonemic awareness are commonplace in schools. Intelligent tutors that can coach students to demonstrate in writing an understanding of a text they've read are already emerging.

If AI can improve reading instruction and assessment, it could fill important gaps, educators say.

Reading assessments can serve a variety of purposes: to identify which students need extra help; to diagnose students' trouble spots; and to monitor progress, which can gauge whether a particular intervention is working.

But at this point, there isn't a single digital or analog product on the market that can do all those things well, said Matthew Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Missouri and director of the University of Missouri Center for Collaborative Solutions for Kids, Practice, and Policy.

Moreover, the most important reading skill-comprehension-is also the toughest to measure and teach, Burns said. Partly that's because it must assess what students know and the strength of their vocabulary, not just whether they can sound out words.

"Our assessment of reading comprehension is very surface level," he said. "We have to figure out a better way to do it. I wouldn't be surprised if AI was part of the solution to get a really good assessment" of reading comprehension.

But he added a big caveat: "I don't think technology can replace a teacher."

Digital adaptive tools get good reviews from teachers but can't do it all

For now, digital adaptive tools-most of which don't include an AI component-are among the most widely used technologies to help teachers assess students' reading abilities.

Adaptive reading software adjusts the level of difficulty for students based on what they are mastering, advancing them to higher levels or pushing them back to more basic instruction based on how well they are performing. Adaptive assessments are also used, though plenty of teachers still continue to measure students' reading ability without digital tools.

Digital adaptive tools can save teachers a lot of time and effort, said Heather Esposito, a technology teacher coach for New Jersey's Cherry Hill district who previously worked as an English teacher and reading specialist.

In the past, she said, teachers might sit with a student while they read a few passages from a story or article, keeping track of errors, self-correction, and other factors to determine the child's fluency level. Then they might ask the student to tell them about what they read, asking different questions to gauge comprehension.

"That takes a lot of time," Esposito said. "So that's why software programs came in to try and help with that."

That's likely why Esposito and other educators generally find adaptive reading software useful, according to a survey of 1,058 educators conducted by the EdWeek Research Center from Jan. 26 through Feb. 1. Forty-four percent said they think the tech does a better job of accurately assessing a students' reading level than non-adaptive software or pen-and-paper methods, including 14 percent who said it does a "much better job."

That's compared to just 18 percent who said it does a worse job, including 4 percent who said it is "much worse." Thirty-eight percent said the effectiveness is about the same.

The current tools have clear limitations, however, Esposito pointed out. Teachers should never rely just on adaptive tools to assess student reading levels, she said.

Teachers need to closely supervise students taking adaptive assessments because they "aren't foolproof," said Catherine Snow, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education who specializes in children's literacy development.

Students can press a wrong button without realizing it, altering their score, Snow said. Or kids could get a low score on an adaptive assessment because it's making them do a boring task and they disengage. While the tools can often adapt to a kids' reading level, many are less able to adapt to a students' particular interests, Snow added.

"Kids have things they want to read about and things they don't want to read about," she said. "We sort of ignore that, with a seven-year-old and say, 'He's not reading this! He's not getting his practice in!' Well, it's some story about dolls and princesses. He doesn't really care."

What's more, students might not take the assessment particularly seriously. "We know as adults that this assessment could be consequential," Snow said. "The kid just thinks it's another stupid thing he's being asked to do."

There are structural weaknesses too. Some digital reading tools examine reading fluency in part by looking at how quickly students read, Snow said. "Those assessments, in my view, incentivize teachers to push for speed reading, rather than for deep reading, which often means you have to slow down."

Like Esposito, Snow finds digital tools particularly lacking when it comes to reading comprehension. "Comprehension is what's really hard to measure," Snow said. "There are very few tests that even hint at the deeper comprehension levels that we would really like kids as young as third or fourth grade to be able to get into."

That's not a trivial problem, she added. "Comprehension is what it's all about, right? Really, that's the reason we're teaching kids to read."

Could AI help measure students' reading comprehension and improve writing?

Some educational technology and literacy organizations are optimistic that adding AI to adaptive reading tools might offer the best opportunity yet to tackle that missing reading comprehension piece.

For instance, Quill, a nonprofit ed-tech literacy organization, has created an AI-powered tool that can read students' answers to open-ended questions about a passage or article. The tool can then coach students to use evidence from the text, as well as proper grammar, to improve their responses. That can help give students the practice they need to improve both their reading comprehension and writing skills, said the organization's founder and CEO, Peter Gault.

Building reading comprehension through writing is a contrast from the typical approach, Gault said. "Almost every reading tool today uses multiple-choice questions as the main mechanism for then demonstrating your knowledge of the text. Our perspective on multiple choice is that it is a shallower way of learning."

Khan Academy, a nonprofit digital learning company with more than 145 million registered users, is also considering using AI to help with students' reading comprehension and writing.

"In the next year, there's going to be ways that you can actually do reading comprehension and writing at the same time, where there's a passage, and then the AI essentially works with the student to construct essentially a five-paragraph essay, arguing a point anchored in that essay," said the organization's founder, Sal Khan, in an interview. "So, it's both reading comprehension and writing at the same time. Stuff like this never happened before."

For her part, Esposito has already been experimenting with the latest version of ChatGPT, the AI-powered writing tool that emerged late last year. She's asked it, for instance, to explain the hero cycle-a common language arts concept-to a 10-year-old who loves video games, or a 15-year-old who reads manga, a popular genre of Japanese graphic novels. The tool produced responses that were much better than she had expected.

"You could take a topic or a concept and ask it to level it" to match the students' reading level and "to make it more meaningful" given a kid's personal interests, Esposito said. And she expects the tools will only improve with time.

"AI is a hard trend," Esposito said, meaning it's here for the long term. ChatGPT is just an early iteration, she said, likening it to the search engines of the late 1990s.

But even powerful AI technology still needs substantial teacher input, she said. "It's about striking a really good balance of seeing the potential that's out there with AI, finding the tools that work best for you and your students and knowing that you can pivot at any point," Esposito said.

Snow seconded that sentiment, and cautioned teachers to rely on their own judgement even as increasingly complex AI reading tools emerge.

"Teachers should always know that their instincts might be better" than the people who designed the software or the school leaders who purchased it, Snow said. "If they think something is not really working very well, it might be because it's not really working very well, and they should be cautious about imposing it on students."

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Measuring Reading Comprehension Is Hard. Can AI and Adaptive Tools Help?

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Artificial intelligence might be able to drive cars, treat disease, and train your front door to recognize your face. But can it crack the toughest nut in literacy: Helping kids comprehend what they read? AI is evolving to meet reading instruction and assessment needs, some experts say.

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https://www.scaffoldedmath.com/2020/09/digital-math-escape-rooms.html

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Differentiated math teaching ideas, including math word walls, math escape rooms, math pennants, math cheat sheets, consumer math, and math décor

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Persuasion and manipulation--critical reading skills and differences between consumer and citizen. That is one of my goals in the class that I teach; the former is more prevalent but the latter is the main challenge. 

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Persuasion and manipulation--critical reading skills and differences between consumer and citizen. That is one of my goals in the class that I teach; the former is more prevalent but the latter is the main challenge. 

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This short film explains a process in which students at different Transfer HS made documentaries - using tech tools for research and documenting the process. This one is about the process. I will post the Student Film (about Policing) separately

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This is the project I supported with - led by students - using lots of digital tools and literacies -

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Is Justice an Anomaly- Youth Perspectives on Policing.mp4

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Multimodality - Digital Tools and Literacies - Incarcerated Youth

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Multimodality - Digital Tools and Literacies - Incarcerated Youth

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This explains work we did a few years back around the notion of multimodality to transform identities through digital tools - and the arts.

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This was informative and it was organized in a user friendly manner!

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This was informative and it was organized in a user friendly manner!

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Computing integrated high school lessons with a focus on equitable approaches

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Computing integrated high school lessons with a focus on equitable approaches

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Scroll to the section of the page called "Sample Lessons"

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Our Work

The Equitable CS Curriculum Initiative is a multi-year endeavor designed to create engaging computer science education experiences for children and youth in grades K-12. We will achieve this through intentional and collaborative efforts that dismantle racism and bias (individual and institutional), center CS learning on student assets, culture, and experience, and elevate the value that families and communities bring to the learning process.

Ultimately, we aim to ensure CS educators and education systems are equipped with resources needed to create and develop engagement, identity, and persistence in computing pathways for Black, Latinx, Native American and girls, and gender non-binary students, to ensure they have opportunities to pursue computing pathways in college and career.

Addressing the Issue

Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Computer
Science Education: A Framework

In June 2021, Kapor Center released the CRCS Framework, developed in partnership with a national collective of education advocates to create more pathways for Black, Latinx, Native American, and other marginalized students to computer science education, tech careers, and STEM-related fields. This work will continue to grow and take shape as the need for CS education becomes more prevalent in communities across the country and educators seek new opportunities to lead positive change.

Culturally Responsive/Sustaining CS Classroom Resources

Culturally responsive-sustaining computer science pedagogy ensures that students' interests, identities, and cultures are embraced and validated, students develop knowledge of computing content and its utility in the world, strong CS identities are developed, and students engage in larger socio-political critiques about technology's purpose, potential, and impact. To provide tangible examples for expanding equitable and just computer science outcomes at the K12 level, we have developed a set of resources for teachers, school administrators, computer science instructional coaches, district administrators, and curriculum providers. These practical resources are intended to enhance integration of the CRCS Framework core components, CRCS instructional practices, CRCS pedagogical skills, and other computer science resources and are suitable for usage by any stakeholder in K12 computer science. We will be updating and adding to these resources to share broadly with the K-12 CS community.

Instructional/Pedagogical Tools

Classroom Instructional Strategies

National Advisory Board

The National Advisory of the Equitable CS Curriculum Initiative is a dynamic collaborative of thought leaders with expertise in such disciplines as racial equity, social justice, community building, education, and computer science education. Their insights, experiences, and recommendations have provided the foundation for the project's efforts to achieve collective impact among CS educators, researchers, policymakers, students, and other advocates in K-12 schools.

National Student Leadership Team

In Fall of 2020, Kapor Center held a national search to identify a group of young leaders to form the 2020-2021 inaugural cohort of the Equitable CS National Student Leadership Team. Meeting bi-monthly, nine high school students representing seven states in nine communities throughout the U.S., gathered for thoughtful discussions exploring computer science and technology, leadership development, and unique opportunities to network with leaders in the field of racial equity, social justice, education, and computer science through live video conference sessions. These student leaders have proven themselves invaluable in articulating their vision for achieving equity in CS classrooms for themselves and their peers.

To learn more about this dynamic group of youth and their experiences: Watch: Elevating Student Voice: Student Solutions to Achieving Equity in CS Education.

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Addressing the Issue Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Computer Science Education: A Framework In June 2021, Kapor Center released the CRCS Framework, developed in partnership with a national collective of education advocates toContinue reading "Equitable CS"

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 Mayra:   Teaching Technology will help to the students to improve their math skills.

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 Mayra:   Teaching Technology will help to the students to improve their math skills.

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Here I have a student who is observing how the teacher is explaining the addition problem. I observed that he is a visual learner and very engaged. Using Technology in a variety of math function, students are able to engage more easier than using a mechanic way. (writing on the board or notebook). Technology allow you to play math games and keep your brain connected to it.

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This article provides insight to Educators on the use of AI, gamification, etc is being used.

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New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

"Technology is a game-changer for education - it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching," said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. "But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren't great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently."

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students' use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities - for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. "I'm heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers' lives better - not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do," he said. "I hope to see more on that front."

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. "AI is not going away," said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. "We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology."

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

"This is an area that's really going to explode over the next couple of years," said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. "Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live."

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. "If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers."

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students' attention.

"Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful," said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. "If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn't mean I'm going to be motivated to do math anywhere else."

Gamification sometimes tries to make "chocolate-covered broccoli," Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students' activities in the classroom and online. "We're now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes," said Schwartz - data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data - now owned by tech companies - is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students' interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that's being collected, said Schwartz - and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is "requiring people to check their assumptions about education," said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. "But it's also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It's an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching - this is the path I hope to see."

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How technology is reinventing K-12 education

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Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

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A project I've been involved in is called the AUMI - Adaptive Use Musical Instrument. It is a program/app, most commonly placed on iPads that have allowed persons of all abilities - even those with extremely limited mobility such as only eye movements - to be able to improvise and create music using an eye tracker that will pick up nuances including shadows (even when you don't want it to). While this isn't necessarily a digital literacy to learn, it is a digital tool that has opened greater access into music. Moreover, in it's improvisational nature, it has also pushed musicians and non-musicians to rethink what music means and what it means to use sound to express oneself.

https://aumiapp.com/aumi.php

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November 2024: There are some new AUMI videos to see in the AUMI Media page.!

AUMI for iOS 2.2.2 is now (April 22, 2024) in the App Store!.

There are many redesigns and fixes in version 2.2.2! It fixes the fact that 2.2.1 needed iOS 17 to run, but 2.2.2 works down to iOS 12.5.7! Look for better camera support, motion smoothing, the exciting "Take 5" rhythm, a few more tunings, and more! Click here: for more information about AUMI 2.2.2
The Instructions have also been spruced up so take a look at the AUMI 2.2.1 Instructions PDF file. (2.2.2 pdf to come soon)

On January 27th, 2023, Henry Lowengard talked about AUMI Together and other AUMI subjects for the DISABILITY STUDIES SEMINAR of the Universisty of Kansas.

AUMI featured as part of the activities in the Deep Listening PLAZA DREAM TENT

Henry Lowengard and Leaf Miller led the crowd in some AUMI improv, featuring the voice, music, and laughter of Dr. Pauline Oliveros for her 90th birthday celebration.
If you have an AUMI/iOS 2.1 or newer, you can load the Dr. PO AUMI Instrument from the AUMI Instrument page

AUMI Book Update! (July 2021)

The AUMI Editorial Collective has submitted a book manuscript, Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) to a book series entitled Music & Social Justice at University of Michigan Press. Our call for chapters-of-all-shapes-and-sizes yielded a wealth of essays, poems, artwork, and media. The manuscript we submitted contains 33 chapters, as well as accompanying media files-audio and video. We hope to hear from the press this fall, and will share updates at that time. Many thanks to all of the musicians, dancers, composers, poets, theatre artists, visual artists, programmers, developers, and designers; all the occupational and music therapists and teachers, communities, librarians, disability advocates, and activists for social justice who work with AUMI and who contributed to this exciting volume. We look forward to sharing more widely the work you have shared with us.

AUMI for iOS Update information:

AUMI for iOS version 2.2 has been released! (December 2022)

There are many redesigns and fixes in version 2.2! The Instructions have also been spruced up so take a look at the AUMI 2.2 Instructions PDF file

Here are a few ways to find out what's going on with AUMI:

AUMI presentations

December 8-9, 2018 : IONE's Dream Festival featured AUMI. Broadcast live on WGXC

AUMI was presented at 2018 OHMI Conference Sept 7-8, 2018 in Birmingham, UK

AUMI was discussed at ISATMA - International Symposium on Assistive Technology for Music and Art:
May 20, 2018 athttp://isatma.org and #ISATMA on Twitter.

AUMI Celebrated its 10th Anniversary at ISATMA 2017 (Oct. 20-22)! On Saturday, October 21, the focus was on AUMI all day long, with panels, workshops, and performances at EMPAC, RPI, Troy, NY. See the ISATMA Webpage at ISATMA.org #ISATMA

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November 2024: There are some new AUMI videos to see in the AUMI Media page.! There are many redesigns and fixes in version 2.2.2! It fixes the fact that 2.2.1 needed iOS 17 to run, but 2.2.2 works down to iOS 12.5.7!

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https://www.edweek.org/technology/opinion-ai-can-save-teachers-time-and-stress-heres-how/2025/06 I believe that in many cases, the arrival of AI has been seen with a negative connotation. However, I think it can be used as an ally, as long as we are conscious of how we use it, in what situations, and with what purpose.

In a world where people are increasingly exposed to various stimuli that can sometimes affect their mental health, I believe that considering an ally for certain situations could be valuable.

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Today's post continues a series in which educators share how they are-or are not-using artificial intelligence in their practice.

Saving Time
Donna L. Shrum is an educator, researcher, and freelance author in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
I shared my new AI romance with a former teaching partner as we drove to a conference. His face twisted as so many teachers' do when they hear AI and immediately picture a student hunched over the computer, hacking into the newest version of "copy and paste."

"Ethically," he said, "I just don't think I ever could use it. It doesn't seem fair."

I sighed. "Picture yourself when everyone is switching from the wooden plow to the steel. You say, 'I just don't think I can use this new tool that will save me hours of grunt work. It doesn't seem fair.'"

My school system has totally blocked AI for student use, so we're only dealing with cheating when they use it from home. I asked permission to unblock an AI tool to provide immediate writing feedback during workshop time. I first vetted the tool and ascertained students couldn't use it to cheat. I was refused for a similar reason we'd refuse a student: "The reason why AI writing feedback is blocked is because we have encountered situations where student writing was not read by a teacher, and the AI was providing feedback that the teacher was not able to see. We value the teacher's role in the feedback cycle so students can have discussions with the teacher about their writing and for the teacher to have an understanding of students' writing needs in order to plan next steps in instruction."

The brave new world of AI comes with so many negative connotations and preconceived ideas like those above that AI has become synonymous with cheating, whether by student or teacher. I was fortunate to have enthusiastic AI users in my professional learning network who pushed me to try it.

My go-to is Magic School. Just as I've learned to recognize student voice in writing, I quickly discerned the bland voice of AI. I tested its ability to create lesson plans, and each one was similar. AI does not have the ability to be creative. Each tool I tried showed me its limitations but also the potential to get rid of hours of grunt work.

I learned to use AI just before I was knocked out by emergency gallbladder surgery. The surgeon said to stay off work for two weeks; I stubbornly went back after a week. My utter mental and physical exhaustion soon showed me why I shouldn't have. If not for AI, I'd never have made it.

AI can summarize text, adjust reading levels, create stories or nonfiction text from a prompt or information you feed it, and create discussion and multiple-choice questions. What it spews out in a matter of seconds is not a finished product to my standards, but a rough draft I finish crafting.

Particularly when I'm mentally exhausted, I can use this tool to create my starting point, not my finished product. Before, this part ate up time and energy. AI prepares the rough draft of an assignment so I can focus my energy on the real work of crafting and creating. Using my AI "plow" to break ground has increased the quality of my lessons because I no longer waste mental acuity cobbling together the rough draft.

As an example, I recently created an assignment for a colleague. I pasted several different chunks of information into "Academic Content" and asked Magic School to create a textbook page. I added state standard terms and other revisions to it, then pasted sections into "Text Dependent Questions" and asked for three multiple-choice questions. I did it in sections because I've found the question quality is better if I don't paste the whole article at once. I then proofed, revised the questions, and was ready to print. The whole process from start to finish was about 15 minutes.

The levels of my classes range from honors to remedial. I can plug the same assignment into AI to adjust the reading level and translate it for English learners. I've always done that, but it took hours. Now it takes minutes.

AI in Science Class
Bonnie Nieves is an educator and consultant who specializes in the intersection of next generation science teaching, culturally responsive methods, and artificial intelligence to provide authentic learning experiences for every student:
As a high school science teacher, I have always been committed to providing my students with the tools and skills they need to engage with scientific research. However, the dense language and complex concepts found in peer-reviewed journals often present barriers for students. To overcome this challenge, I have integrated AI tools into my teaching practice, making research more accessible and fostering a deeper understanding of scientific research papers.

Peer-reviewed research articles are crucial for advancing scientific knowledge, but they can be daunting for high school students due to their complexity. The specialized language and advanced methodologies often leave students feeling overwhelmed, preventing them from engaging with the content.

To address this issue, I introduced PerplexityAI into my classroom. This AI-driven platform helps break down complex research articles, making them more approachable for students. By using AI as a learning aid, Perplexity has contributed to an inclusive learning environment where every student can confidently explore and understand advanced scientific content.
The Process of Using AI Tools
I began by introducing Perplexity to my students as a resource for accessing peer-reviewed research. This AI tool summarizes and simplifies complex content while maintaining the meaning of the article. By doing so, students can better comprehend the material and engage in meaningful discussions about their findings.

Guided Introduction: Initially, I use a hybrid approach, having students use Perplexity to "ask questions" to the peer-reviewed articles they found in Gale Databases. I provide students with guided prompts to use with Perplexity, helping them understand how to extract information from research articles. This method allows students to see how AI could assist in breaking down complicated information into manageable pieces.

Encouraging Independent Exploration: Once students become comfortable with the tool, I encourage them to generate their own prompts. This practice empowered them to take ownership of their learning, enabling them to tailor their research approach based on their interests and curiosities.

Promoting Critical Reflection: Students document their interactions with the AI tool, reflecting on how it influenced their understanding and approach to the research. This reflection process has proved helpful in developing their critical-thinking skills and encouraging them to evaluate the validity and reliability of the AI-generated information.
Cultivating Inquiry and Engagement
By integrating AI into my teaching, I hope to cultivate a culture of inquiry and engagement. Students have been encouraged to explore topics that pique their interest, leading to more meaningful and personalized learning experiences. This new routine has made it much easier to scaffold differentiated instruction while empowering students to engage with content that resonates with them personally.

AI tools do more than facilitate individual exploration-they can also enhance collaborative learning. Encouraging students to share their findings and interpretations in group discussions promotes diverse perspectives and deeper understanding. This collaborative approach mirrors the real-world scientific community, where researchers work together to tackle complex problems.
Assessing Progress and Growth
I found the need to adjust my assessment methods to evaluate both the process and the product of student learning. Students documented their research journey, including the prompts used and responses generated by PerplexityAI. This documentation served as a reflective tool, allowing them and me to analyze their approach and refine their strategies.

Regular reflection exercises and guided discussions helped build metacognitive awareness. In addition to content discussions, students participated in sessions where they shared strategies that worked, challenges they faced, and how they overcame them. Students began to notice that the balance of peer review of content and process mirrored scientific research in the real world.

Integrating AI research tools like Perplexity into the classroom has transformed how my students access and engage with peer-reviewed research. By removing barriers, AI empowers students to explore scientific articles with confidence and curiosity. Even with my high expectations, I was impressed with how it not only improved students' understanding of scientific concepts but also equipped them with critical-thinking skills essential for success in the modern world.

Through this journey, I've witnessed firsthand the power of AI in education and the profound impact it can have on student learning. By leveraging AI, we can create a more inclusive and engaging learning environment that prepares students for the challenges and opportunities of the future.

Reducing Stress
Kayla Towner is a product manager and technology instructor for Utah Education Network (UEN)Emails and a Hope Street Fellow in Salt Lake City. Follow her on Twitter @mrstowner9 or email her at kayla@uen.org:
I specialize in supporting adult educators, and one of my areas of focus is demonstrating how artificial intelligence can alleviate stress. Here are five ways I have used AI to reduce my stress, and these strategies can benefit other educators and students.

Behavior-Notice Templates: Use AI to draft behavior-notice templates for informing parents about incidents. These templates can be customized and personalized while maintaining a professional tone.

Multilingual Communication: If you need to communicate with parents who speak different languages, AI can accurately translate your messages into dozens of languages.

Weekly Newsletters: Create engaging weekly newsletters for classroom updates. AI can help you generate content quickly. Therefore, you're maintaining consistent and engaging content.

Educators and administrators often find themselves flooded with emails. The sheer volume of messages can be overwhelming, making it challenging to respond promptly. Striking the right balance between clear, professional communication and a personable tone can be tricky.

Ask the tool to take on a persona: 5th grade elementary teacher.

Provide an objective that tells the tools what to do or produce: Draft a welcome letter for 5th grade.

Define the audience who will be using it: for families and 5th grade students.

Include context that gives the tool background information: introduction that talks about how excited we are for the upcoming school year. We will be learning about the American Revolution, BizTown, multiplying fractions, earth movements, opinion writing, and more.

Set boundaries that limit or constrain responses: The paragraph should be written in plain text using an informal tone so that 5th graders will understand it.

Thankfully, Generative AI platforms like Chat GPT, Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot can streamline this process. Here are some ways you can leverage these tools:

Planning
Imagine you want to create a welcome letter for 5th grade students and their families at the beginning of the school year. By providing context and setting boundaries, you can quickly draft a personalized letter using an AI platform. Let's create a 'Welcome Newsletter.' Go to any AI platform and type in the following prompt criteria:

For example use this prompt: "Create a one-week lesson plan for 5th grade science that focuses on the human body and its major organ systems. Make sure the activities are engaging and age-appropriate and incorporate hands-on experiments where possible."

Remember to maintain professionalism and clarity in your communication. And as a side note, if you're using a free AI version, avoid using real names of students or parents. Paid versions of Generative AI typically do not save conversations for model training, but always check the fine print.
Accessibility/Differentiation
Planning consumes a significant amount of time for teachers and administrators. However, they can streamline this process using AI generators to create engaging lesson plans. By inputting specific criteria-such as subject, learning objectives, engagement strategies, age-appropriateness, lesson duration, and pacing-into a generative AI platform, teachers can receive customized lesson plans.

See what kind of lesson plan it produces and how you make your lesson more streamlined, especially if you teach multiple grade levels or groups.

Another example prompt: "Write a prompt about Minecraft for 7th graders. Make sure to follow this writing standard: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence. Ensure that the prompt is at a 5th grade level."
Marketing/Creating
Artificial intelligence is transforming education by tailoring learning experiences to individual learning styles and needs. Adaptive-learning platforms use AI to adjust the curriculum based on student understanding, pacing, and mastery. These platforms provide personalized pathways, additional resources, and real-time feedback.

Prompt example: "Create a poster of a young Korean girl traveling to Greece."

Instead of manually creating specialized prompts or quizzes, AI tools can "read" PDFs and generate differentiated questions. For instance, you can have AI read an article on westward expansion (for 5th graders) and create a quiz with 2nd-grade-level multiple-choice questions.

Today, creativity isn't limited to master artists. AI-powered tools like Adobe Express, Canva Magic Studio, Microsoft Designer, and Google's AI Test Kitchen enable anyone to explore their creative side. For instance, in Canva Magic Studio, you can create custom images. If your students are researching different countries and need to design a poster, they can use these tools to bring their project to life.

See what kind of images can be created to bring this project to life.

Go to Google or Bing and ask a question like "How would you use an addendum to a contract?" At the top of the search engine, you'll find a heading that says 'AI Overview' with a short summary, links, and guidelines to follow.

Searching for Information

Today, search engines like Google or Bing have integrated generative AI into their platforms that will provide conversational answers based on up-to-date information found throughout the internet. These AI-powered ones provide real-time information and up-to-date answers.

See if the results are something that could support you. However, it's essential to be aware that some of the information may carry biases or discrimination. As best practices, always verify the credibility of the resources you find, which reinforce human oversight and the importance of critical thinking.

Overall, when faced with something new, taking that initial step can feel daunting, but it is important we take that step. I encourage you to explore AI tools and resources to help alleviate your daily life stresses. Remember: 'Work smarter, not harder.'

Note: AI tools assisted me in clarifying, organizing, and checking the grammar of this article.

What are specific ways you are using-or not using-artificial intelligence in your teaching?
Thanks to Donna, Bonnie, and Kayla for contributing their thoughts!

Today's post answered this question:

Sarah Cooper, Adam Moler, and Meghan Hargrave shared their responses in Part One.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 13 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here.
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

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AI Can Save Teachers Time and Stress. Here's How (Opinion)

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What once took teachers hours to prepare now takes minutes, creating new opportunities for instruction.

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Storytelling through Digital Media (Julian Best)

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Storytelling through Digital Media (Julian Best)

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Community Storytelling through Digital Media: In schools, students co-designed a digital storytelling workshop where they create short films and photo essays about their neighborhood. These projects help them reshape the narrative about their communities, while learning video editing, scripting, and digital publishing skills

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I very much like and use this website in my foundations of bilingual education class. There are stories of ELL students and their struggles as well as insights. It shows both similarities, but also individual differences of students. Most importantly, it reflects that in addition to English language, these students are tackling with a lot of other new things.

https://ilearnamerica.com/human-library/

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Youth from our partnered schools have created and posted the stories. Many of our young storytellers are new to English. Consequently, some of the texts may not be grammatically perfect. Unfiltered, unedited, raw and from the heart, they are that much closer to the students. LISTEN, LEARN and CARE.

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Immigrant youth and students share their stories of coming of age in between cutlure, building themselves in new land - Immigration storytelling

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AR to help improve social interactions in schools for children with ASD.

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AR to help improve social interactions in schools for children with ASD.

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I think this is amazing. I work with children with ASD and social interactions is something that many of them find challenging. Furthermore, many teachers have difficulties understanding how to teach appropriate social skills/interactions. This type of technology can help increase social interactions and give these students wider access to inclusive school settings.

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Brain Power, Cambridge, MA, United States

Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States

Background: Impairment in social communication is the primary deficit in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research has shown that there are efficacious interventions to address social communication deficits, yet their delivery is hampered by the lack of human and time resources. Emerging assistive technologies, such as smartglasses, may be able to help augment the social communication interventions currently provided by human educators and therapists. While emerging research suggests assistive socio-emotional coaching smartglasses can be effective and usable in research settings, they have yet to be studied amidst the complex social, physical, and time-constrained environment of the school classroom. This structured case study reports on the feasibility and efficacy of 16 intervention sessions of the Empowered Brain Face2Face module, a smartglasses-based social communication intervention.

Methods: A 13-year-old fully-verbal adolescent male student with a diagnosis of ASD received a total of 16 smartglasses-aided intervention sessions over a 2-week period. Interventions occurred twice-daily during school days and were facilitated by school professionals in a middle school in Massachusetts, USA. Outcomes were measured using the Social Responsiveness Scale 2 (SRS-2), a commonly used validated measure of social communication in children with ASD, by the participant's parent, paraprofessional, and two teachers. Difficulties in usability during the study were recorded through observation notes.

Results: The participant completed the 3-week study [one pre-intervention week (baseline) and two intervention weeks] without any observations of adverse effects or usability concerns. The parent and three educators completed the SRS-2 for the baseline and intervention weeks, and results demonstrated significant improvement in social communication after the intervention relative to baseline. The parent, special education teacher, and general education teacher noted marked reductions in SRS-2 total T score, with improvement in SRS-2 social communication, social motivation, social cognition, and restricted interests and repetitive behavior subscales.

Conclusion: Smartglasses are a novel assistive technology that can help facilitate social communication and behavioral coaching for students with ASD. The use of the Face2Face module by educators over a 2-week period was associated with improvements in social communication.This study supports the use of this novel technology to deliver assistive social communication and behavioral coaching in schools.

Introduction

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a childhood onset developmental condition with a rapidly increasing prevalence, and is present in 1 in 59 school-aged children ( Baio et al., 2018). Impairment in social communication is the hallmark feature of ASD, encompassing perseverative deficits in verbal and non-verbal communication (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Evidence suggests that social communication can be improved through a range of interventions for children with ASD ( Locke et al., 2013; Watkins et al., 2017). While these efficacious interventions have been studied in the school environment, their implementation has been somewhat thwarted by a lack of educational resources as schools attempt to provide specialized educational needs to a growing number of children with ASD. The magnitude of the demand for specialized educational resources is considerable, with the US school system providing half a million children with ASD federally-mandated special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) ( Snyder et al., 2016). The mismatch between supply and demand of such educational interventions has not only led to limited support for students with ASD, but also to parental dissatisfaction ( White, 2014) and burnout among school professionals ( Corona et al., 2017).

Children are spending more time in school, with the length of the school day increased to ~7 h over the last few decades ( Kolbe et al., 2012). With almost a third of their day being spent at school, schools have become a central part of children's lives. Schools are not only educational establishments, but highly social environments, with many interpersonal relationships and interactions between students, teachers, and other educational professionals.

Schools are fertile ground for social interventions that have been found to be broadly effective ( Locke et al., 2013; Watkins et al., 2017), increase both peer and teacher interactions, and may help improve non-targeted skills such as language and inappropriate behavior ( Rogers, 2000) in children with ASD. Within schools, there has been a move toward incorporating students with ASD in inclusive classrooms where they learn alongside their neurotypical peers. However, this has not resolved many of the social functioning limitations seen in students with ASD, many of whom struggle with feelings of isolation and loneliness during school time ( Bauminger and Kasari, 2000). Teachers have identified many barriers to implementing successful inclusion programs, with lack of training, time, and administrative support being key factors ( Werts et al., 1996).

Prompt detection of ASD and early intervention are thought to be critical to long term outcomes ( Dawson et al., 2010). Interventions for social communication, especially those delivered around school-settings, are also important for long term success. As children with ASD mature, they gain greater insight into their social communication deficits. This realization has a series of consequences, including increased stress when interacting with unfamiliar peers ( Lopata et al., 2008; Corbett et al., 2010), and greater anxiety in social situations where they have repeatedly been unsuccessful ( Bellini, 2006; Corbett et al., 2014). While there is concern that without intervention, impairment in social functioning may be lifelong, role-play exercises and interactive games between humans can significantly increase social skills ( Corbett et al., 2014).

While individuals with ASD express a desire to have a job ( Hendricks, 2010), persisting social skill deficits may pose a key challenge ( Hurlbutt and Chalmers, 2004). People with ASD experience high rates of unemployment/underemployment that exceed other groups with disabilities ( Shattuck et al., 2012). People with ASD also often have unflattering work histories, with short-lived periods of work interspersed with long periods of unemployment ( Ohl et al., 2000). While there are many barriers to people with ASD obtaining employment, it has been found that the social demands that accompany jobs are a key challenge. Social skills such as small talk ( Holmes and Fillary, 2010), eye contact ( Amalfitano and Kalt, 1977), emotion recognition ( Kee et al., 2003), and conveyance of emotions ( Zapf, 2002), have all been found to be important for jobs and job interviews. Technology-aided social skills interventions have become increasingly studied, and may provide long term benefits to people with ASD who are seeking employment ( Wainer and Ingersoll, 2011; Walsh et al., 2016), however the majority target job-specific skills such as cleaning tasks ( Van Laarhoven et al., 2012) or shirt folding ( Bennett et al., 2013). There is an immense need to develop social skills focused interventions that aid more generalized workplace interactions ( Fast, 2004).

Novel assistive technology may potentially address this disconnect between demand and availability, with the promise of improved quality of education, reduced burden on teachers, and potentially reduced costs for school districts. Socially focused interventions may be especially suitable to digitization given that they can be particularly useful for children with ASD ( Locke et al., 2013), but are hampered by limited training of human providers alongside lack of physical resources ( Dingfelder and Mandell, 2011; Locke et al., 2015). A range of assistive technologies have proven to be effective interventions in ASD ( Bauminger-Zviely et al., 2013; Grynszpan et al., 2014), and assistive technology provides one of the most common teacher-led strategies for helping students with ASD in both general and special education classrooms ( Hess et al., 2008). While technologies such as the iPad have undergone considerable research ( McMurray and Pierson, 2016), newer technologies such as smartglasses have also attracted interest ( Liu et al., 2017).

The Empowered Brain Technology Platform

The Empowered Brain is a tool that provides socio-emotional coaching to children and adults with ASD ( Keshav et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2017). The Empowered Brain consists of a smartglasses platform in combination with a series of software modules that focus on key coaching areas, such as improving attention to social cues, helping coach facial emotion recognition, and aiding in transitioning between different environments. In this study, the Empowered Brain Face2Face module was tested on Google Glass smartglasses hardware.

Smartglasses, like Google Glass, are head-worn computerized glasses that can transmit visual and auditory information to users through a small clear optical display(s) and bone conduction/audio speaker, respectively. Smartglasses, like smartphones, typically contain a wide variety of sensors that can collect data regarding the user's body movements and interactions with the environment. These sensors include a camera, a microphone, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth.

Face2Face Module

The human face is one of the most powerful tools in social communication ( Jack and Schyns, 2015), and is of fundamental importance in interpersonal interactions ( Pavlova et al., 2017). Faces display information regarding traits, stable features such as gender and identity, and more dynamic facial data that helps with understanding of emotion, intention, attention, and understanding speech ( Lee et al., 1998; Pascalis et al., 2011).

Impairment in social cognition ( Baron-Cohen, 1991; Baron-Cohen et al., 1995) and social motivation ( Chevallier et al., 2012) have both been described as being relevant to the facial perception, processing, and recognition difficulties of people with ASD ( Kirchner et al., 2011; Tang et al., 2015; Tanaka and Sung, 2016), including how much attention they pay to socially salient features, such as the eyes of others ( Klin et al., 2002; Jones et al., 2008; Kirchner et al., 2011). Gaze indifference and gaze aversion are two proposed hypotheses that may help to explain the altered eye gaze behavior seen in ASD. In gaze indifference, the eyes of others are not seen as an important or engaging stimulus ( Moriuchi et al., 2017), while in gaze aversion, eye contact is avoided as it is seen as threatening ( Tottenham et al., 2014) or results in sensory overstimulation ( Corden et al., 2008). These altered patterns of attention to faces and eyes may be especially pronounced during non-passive circumstances, such as interactive social situations ( von dem Hagen and Bright, 2017). Certainly, given the heterogeneity of ASD in both neurobiological underpinnings and behavioral presentation, it is unlikely that one unified theory alone will explain the multitude of altered facial processing abilities or eye gaze patterns that have been described.

It is in this context that the Empowered Brain Face2Face module aims to provide a social communication intervention that improves social motivation and cognition, while simultaneously addressing the underlying challenges described by both gaze indifference and gaze aversion hypotheses. Face2Face achieves this, in part, by utilizing game-like augmented reality (AR) to increase the social motivation of the user to engage with the face of another person (Figure 1). Face2Face also provides an intervention that is graduated in intensity, difficulty, and is highly customizable through both human and artificially intelligent machine input. Face2Face relies on utilizing the relatively preserved visual skills in ASD when delivering its cues, and uses audio alerts that are considerate of the sound hypersensitivity experienced by many with ASD. The approach of Face2Face is reflective of its origins as an updated and enhanced version of Face Game, a previously described smartglasses research app that has been studied in ASD ( Keshav et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2017).

Figure 1. Intervention aimed to increase face-directed gaze via an augmented-reality game on smartglasses. (A) User can start the game (Face2Face) by voice command or tapping the side trackpad of the glasses (Google Glass Explorer Edition). He sees and hears feedback via the screen and bone-conduction speaker. (B) User has a social interaction (e.g., a conversation, in the case of a verbal participant), and the game gives feedback in realtime while the pair maintain interaction. (C) Representation of on-screen feedback: the user has maintained gaze with the partner for a predefined period and earns a star and temporary face mask as reward. (D) When mutual gaze is lost, the user receives graphical, verbal, and auditory coaching to resume. (E) As the game progresses, it takes longer periods of gaze maintenance to earn further stars and masks.

To play Face2Face, the user wears the smartglasses system while the Face2Face module is running, and interacts with another person who will be positioned in front of the user. This interactive facilitation recognizes that "real-world" situations allow for the challenges of social communication to be most apparent ( von dem Hagen and Bright, 2017), and reduce barriers to generalizability of learned skills ( Shindorf, 2016). The Face2Face module requires two people to be present: the user and the facilitator (another person who will help facilitate the Empowered Brain-augmented interaction).

The Empowered Brain can detect the presence of a human face, determine where a user is looking relative to that face, and help guide user's gaze toward the face in real-time. Guidance to the user is provided through visual directional prompts and auditory tones that vary depending on the positioning of the user's gaze and the positioning of the detected face. The Empowered Brain modules use developmentally and contextually appropriate game-like elements to make the experience engaging and fun for both child, adolescent, and adult users. For example, a cartoon-like character is optically superimposed over the face that they are being guided toward.

This cartoon-like character gradually fades as the user moves his gaze toward the target face, eventually disappearing completely. At this point the user obtains points for successful task completion. The module has a series of levels and difficulty settings. Specific game data elements are recorded and transmitted to a secure central artificial intelligence (AI) powered processing center where they are available for viewing through a web-based dashboard. User performance is measured through graphs of rewards, events, and attention data. The socio-emotional coaching apps of the Empowered Brain have been previously found to be well-tolerated ( Keshav et al., 2017), feasible to use ( Liu et al., 2017), free from adverse effects in people with ASD ( Sahin et al., 2018), and associated with improvements in the symptoms of ASD ( Liu et al., 2017) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( Vahabzadeh et al., 2018). These studies were, however, conducted in controlled research settings, utilizing the caregivers of participants with ASD, and were based on a single intervention session.

The Empowered Brain features key innovations in physical design, AI, and data analytics, and is supported by software, engineering, and data partnerships with a number of technology companies including X (formerly Google X, Mountain View, CA), Affectiva (a leading Emotion AI company, Boston, MA), and Amazon (use of an experimental AI technology).

Educator-Facilitated and Classroom-Based

The real-world school setting has proven itself to be a more difficult environment to provide a social communication intervention than a controlled research setting ( Lawton and Kasari, 2012). Teachers and their paraprofessional colleagues may be ideal personnel to help deliver school-based communication interventions in students with ASD ( Lawton and Kasari, 2012). Their intimate knowledge of a student's strengths, weaknesses, and style of learning, combined with their established position in delivering guidance, places them in a unique position. Students' perception of teacher support and teacher-led promotion of interaction and respect have been linked to increased student motivation and engagement ( Ryan and Patrick, 2001).

This report outlines the efficacy, usability, and safety of the Empowered Brain Face2Face module intervention twice during every school day over a 2-week time period. In this report, the facilitators were several of the school professionals who were familiar with the research participant (education paraprofessional, special education teacher, general education teacher). Additionally, the intervention was used during the school day, and within an inclusive classroom setting. Outcomes were measured with the Social Responsiveness Scale 2 (SRS-2) School-age Form. The SRS-2 is a validated social communication measure used in ASD populations ( Constantino and Gruber, 2012), and consists of 65 items, resulting in a total score, and five subscale scores (social awareness, social cognition, social communication, social motivation, and restricted interested and repetitive behaviors). The SRS-2 can be completed by teachers ( Dickson et al., 2017) and parents ( Ashman et al., 2017), with recent research noting that parental ratings may be higher than that of teachers ( Nelson et al., 2016).

This case study attempted to use some elements of a single-subject design, although did not include repeated measures during individual phases of the study, an important element of single-subject studies. The focus on incorporating some elements of single-subject design was deemed to be important as single-subject research can be used as a means to testing and understanding the use of novel technology in educational settings, and has been identified as an important contributor to evidence-based practice in special education ( Horner et al., 2005). Single-subject research has already helped to identify computer-assisted guidance for students with ASD as an evidence-based practice ( Barton et al., 2017). The lack of repeated measures during individual phases is however a key limitation.

Methods

A 3-week structured case study of the Empowered Brain Face2Face module was conducted in a 13-year-old male student with ASD ("the participant"), in a middle school in Massachusetts.

A Case Study Incorporating Elements of a Single-Case Design

This case study utilized some components of single-case experimental design. Single-case experimental approaches have been shown to be methodologically sound ( Horner et al., 2005; Kratochwill and Levin, 2010; Smith, 2012), capable of demonstrating effectiveness of interventions, and is especially suitable for the assessment of outcomes of psychological/behavioral interventions ( Robey et al., 1999; Borckardt et al., 2008; Smith, 2012).

Our case study incorporated the four of key features of a high-quality single-case design as far as it was possible to do so ( McMillan, 2004). One of these features is using ratings or measures that are reliable and consistent. Our study uses a validated and reliable 65-item scale that is viewed as a gold standard measure for measuring social communication in people with ASD. Three other important features that have been identified, and are included in our methodology, are: (1) having a detailed description of the measurement and treatment conditions (the school classroom); (2) having at least one baseline and treatment phase; and (3) changing only one variable between phases (use of the Empowered Brain smartglasses).

The fifth and final feature of single-case design is the ability to repeat the measurement as often as necessary. In our study, the key behavioral measure was repeated three times, at the end of the baseline week, and at the end of each of the two intervention weeks. While having repeated measures within each study week would offer more data, and would more robustly fulfill this fifth feature on paper, there were a number of factors that made this impractical. Firstly, the educators in our sample had limited time to provide more regular rating assessments as they were not only the facilitators of the intervention, but also continued in their full-time teaching role throughout the study. Secondly, the use of the SRS-2 as a daily measure of social communication has not been studied, and the authors believe that other simpler behavioral measures may be more appropriate if more regular measurements were needed. Thirdly, a reasonable amount of data was collected during our study. The SRS-2 is a robust assessment of social communication, with 65 different scored items, and was performed by four different individuals on three different occasions, providing a total of 780 rated items regarding the participant. However, the lack of daily/near daily data are noted by the authors as a limitation in this study, and makes the study design most consistent with a case study.

The study commenced with a baseline week (Week 1), during which the participant received no intervention, and had his regular school and home schedule. At the end of the week, school educators and his mother completed the SRS-2 based on the interactions and behaviors they witnessed during the baseline week. The SRS-2 was completed by three school educators: the participant's special education teacher, general education teacher, and assigned paraprofessional. The use of cross-informant (educator and parental) ratings is the gold standard in child behavioral assessments ( Dickson et al., 2017). The participant's baseline week was the control for this report.

The study then proceeded to the first intervention week (Week 2) where the participant received twice-daily Face2Face interventions. The intervention was facilitated by one of his school educators, during which time the participant continued to be in the classroom alongside his peers. The intervention was 10 min long and was delivered at approximately the same times each day. At the end of Week 2, following eight intervention sessions, the participant's educators and parent each completed an SRS-2 based on the behavior seen during that week. The second intervention week (Week 3) was a duplicate of the first intervention week, and a repeat SRS-2 was completed at the end of the week.

The participant completed the intervention during two class periods, one general education class and one special education class. The structure of both classes allowed for the teacher to facilitate the intervention for 10 min during the class period, within his classroom, while another education professional was in the room.

The Intervention

During the intervention weeks, the participant received the intervention twice every school day during the same school periods (Figure 2). The intervention was provided by his general education teacher in the morning, and his special education teacher in the afternoon. One of the 16 interventions was provided by the paraprofessional during a class when the special education teacher was unexpectedly unavailable. The intervention ran concurrently to the class the participant was attending. The educator identifies a peripheral location in the classroom where the intervention was performed, with the student and educator sat facing each other (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Study design. (A) Overall design of the 3-week study. A baseline week was followed by 2 weeks where Empowered Brain intervention was added to the interventions the school otherwise proveded. At the end of the baseline week and each Empowered Brain week, the participant was rated according to the gold-standard autism rating scale, the Social Responsiveness Scale-2nd Edition (SRS-2) (See Figure 4). SRS-2 ratings were conducted in all cases by the participant's general education teacher, the special education teacher, paraprofessional, and the parent. (B) Design of each day of the study during the intervention period. Two 10-min intervention sessions were run daily, with a late morning session in the participant's regularly scheduled general-education class (See Figure 3), and an afternoon session in his regularly scheduled special-education pullout class.

Figure 3. Intervention in the context of an inclusive, general-education classroom. (A) Teacher and study participant before onset of an intervention session. (B) Intervention session begins when participant puts on the smartglasses running the Face2Face software. (C,D) Teacher and learner have one-on-one time, and discuss mostly academic topics while the AR smartglasses provide rewards for mutual gaze. (E) Half the intervention sessions in this study were conducted within a general-education classroom. (F) The teacher succeeded in conducting the one-on-one session in the back of the classroom, while simultaneously managing the rest of the classroom. In this example other students were delivering presentations of their class projects. Consent was obtained to publish this photograph in a publicly accessible research journal.

Each intervention session was split into three segments, during which time the teacher was encouraged to engage in a natural conversation with the participant about relevant academic topics, for example a student's current project, homework assignments, or academic activities of the day. Each intervention lasted 10-min. The three phases were as follows:

1) "Pre- Face2Face," in which the participant and facilitator conversed without the Empowered Brain for 1 min;

2) " Face2Face," in which the participant and facilitator conversed while the participant wore Empowered Brain running the Face2Face module for 8 min; and

3) "Post- Face2Face," in which the participant and facilitator conversed without the Empowered Brain for 1 min.

During the Face2Face phase (Phase 2), the participant would wear the Empowered Brain and would experience the feedback coaching of the Face2Face module as he conversed with the educator. During the conversation, the Face2Face module monitored the level of attention the participant was directing to the educator's face. The participant could gain game-like points and AR rewards when he looked toward the educator during the conversation. If the participant looked away from the educator, he would get visual and auditory guidance to help him redirect his attention back to the educator.

The Participant

The participant was a white Caucasian male aged 13 years and 11 months. He was diagnosed with ASD by his pediatrician at the age of 2. He receives special education services with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) at a mainstream public school in Massachusetts.

The participant previously had ASD-related interventions including applied behavioral analysis, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy. He has previous experience with smartphone and tablet devices. He has no concurrent psychiatric disorders and was not receiving any psychotropic medication at the time of the study. Additionally, he has no history of epilepsy or seizures.

The Classroom Setting

This study was performed in a public middle school in Massachusetts, USA. The intervention was delivered twice-daily during school days. The first session was delivered by the student's general education teacher during the morning general education class. This classroom setting consisted of 2 educators, the general educator teacher and a paraprofessional, looking after a class of 23 students. The second daily session was delivered by the student's special education teacher during an afternoon special education class. The special education teacher was aided by a paraprofessional in looking after the 11 students in this class.

Consent and IRB Statement

The use of the Empowered Brain running on multiple head-worn computing devices by children and adults with ASD was approved by Asentral, Inc., Institutional Review Board, an affiliate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The study was performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations, and in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration. Written informed consent was obtained from all parents/legal guardians of all minors involved in this study. Consent to conduct this research was also obtained from all educators involved in the study. Written informed consent was obtained from the participant's parent for the publication of their identifiable information.

Results

The baseline school week concluded with no concerns by the participant's teachers or parent (mother). All three school educators and parent completed the baseline SRS-2 at the end of the initial week.

The intervention was delivered to the participant on a total of 16 occasions over the 2-week intervention period, twice-daily during the 4 days of school in each week. School educators and the parent noted no usability or adverse effects that resulted in an intervention session being terminated early or being postponed. All three school educators and the participant's parent completed an SRS-2 at the end of Week 2 and Week 3, following eight total intervention sessions and 16 total intervention sessions, respectively. The results of the SRS-2 ratings are outlined in Tables 1- 4 (and in graphic format in Figure 4).

Discussion

Emerging assistive technologies may help to augment the delivery of social communication interventions in educational settings. There is great demand for such technologies given the growing ASD student population and current lack of access to specialized resources. However, it is important to study several aspects of these technologies, including their usability, reliability, efficacy, but also the ability for users to use and benefit from the technologies in real-world settings. This is especially important when technologies are created for use in schools given the challenges in integrating assistive digital tools in the busy schedule and environment of a classroom.

The findings of our case study demonstrate preliminary evidence that this particular autism-focused intervention, the Empowered Brain, is associated with improvements in social communication. This improvement was observed through the use of the SRS-2, a gold standard and validated social communication scale. The student's parent (mother), special educator teacher, and general education teacher, reported an improvement in the SRS-2 global scale in addition to improvement in social communication, social cognition, social motivation, and restricted interests and repetitive behavior subscales. The paraprofessional, who only provided a single intervention, did not note any substantial change in the SRS-2 total score.

Our findings have a number of implications and limitations, adding to the current literature in several important ways. Firstly, it was evident that a wide variety of school educators were able to use this smartglasses intervention with the student, despite this being their first experience with smartglasses. The school educators were keen to support the student's social communication needs through technology. Secondly, the educators were able to use this technology in the school setting, and specifically within the same classroom that the child would otherwise be attending. Compared to a research setting, this dynamic classroom/school environment poses considerably more sensory, social, physical, and organizational challenges. Finally, the successful and timely completion of all 16 intervention sessions of Face2Face demonstrates that this is a practical and usable technology in this setting. At no time were any issues of usability or negative effects with the use of Face2Face noted, and lack of adverse effects have been previously reported in a larger population ( Sahin et al., 2018).

The potential adoption of this technology may have broad implications on the educational system. Anecdotal feedback from educators involved in the study suggested that they found the 10 min intervention sessions to be an important time period for assessment and relationship building. This has implications for the larger context of education, as it provides the teacher with additional tools (data and trust/social capital) to increase personal agency and effectiveness. The findings may also indicate a role for this intervention to address the socio-communicative challenges that often interfere with student engagement and teacher effectiveness in schools. Classrooms endeavoring to deliver an inclusive learning experience must balance administering differentiated content-based instruction that engages the unique abilities and needs of a neurodiverse student population while simultaneously identifying individual-specific disruptions in the learning process and implementing targeted interventions informed by data derived from observation and assessment (Table 5). Smartglasses, worn by student, can potentially serve as a non-invasive mechanism (or platform) to administer and monitor differentiated learning content as well as user-specific targeted interventions. Smart glasses, worn by the teacher, can potentially help to facilitate the collection of observational data in real-time and provide immediate feedback for action as well as long term goal setting and strategy developed during the IEP process (this has not yet been tested). Smart glasses and augmented reality as platforms for differentiated instruction and targeted intervention in schools (as described above) can theoretically be applied to every student in the classroom (based on their specific needs) and can fundamentally change the way academic content and curriculum is delivered as well as impacting the way educators are trained and evaluated. Software development for the device that can effectively address many of the pain points and lingering challenges educators and parents face is necessary to fully realize the potential of the platform.

Consideration must be given to a number of limitations of the study, both in regards to methodology and the findings. Firstly, this report is a case study, and there are limitations to the generalizability of our findings to the broader ASD student population. We have also noted that we had a limited number of data points in our study. While research on smartglasses in ASD has been quite limited, cohort studies following multiple learners would help to improve our understanding of the efficacy of such interventions across the spectrum. Further testing of this technology requires continuous measures to supplement the pre- and post-measures that have been obtained in this study. Additionally, it is important to replicate these results in order to understand causality.

Additionally, we have designed this intervention for use in the educational system of the United States. There is considerable variance in the curriculum, use of assistive technology, and availability of special education resources in educational systems across the world. While some systems would share many similarities with the United States, there may be a need to make cultural and country-specific adjustments to the technology. The authors note that the base hardware of the Empowered Brain, Google Glass, was never available for purchase in many countries across the world. Importantly, there are a number of additional challenges to the adoption of this technology by the educational system, including educator attitudes and cost-implications (Table 6).

As with any intervention, there is always a possibility of a placebo effect. The smartglasses provide a game-like experience that augments a person's normal perceptual experience. It is possible that such a novel experience is particularly prone to a placebo effect on the student, as well as the raters. On the other hand, people with ASD struggle with new experiences, and may also demonstrate extreme reactions to experiences that are difficult to their normal schedule, or that incorporate novel sensory stimuli (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). It was therefore reassuring that over 16 sessions, this digital perceptual experience did not result in these well-documented ASD-related adverse behaviors such as tantrums and/or meltdowns.

In future studies, we intend to broaden the scope of our target population to include students with other cognitive-based learning disabilities. While measuring the effectiveness of particular apps, we will also monitor the impact on overall quality of time-on-task for teachers and students. Social and behavioral issues often interfere with both a teacher's ability to convey content and skill, and the students' ability to receive and absorb that content and skill. If our intervention can increase attending and reduce behavioral distractions, it should also have a positive impact on the quantity and quality of time spent "on task" for both teachers and students. If this proves to be the case, we can begin to predict and plan for how much time "on task" will be required to move toward proficiency and mastery for each child in the classroom.

Availability of Data and Material

Collected data (SRS-2) is included in this paper.

Author Contributions

NS, JS, RL, RA-S, NK, and AV designed and undertook the intervention. The writing of this technology report was led by AV, and all authors contributed.

Funding

The authors have received generous funding support from the Game On For Autism Research (GoFAR) Foundation and Leslie S. T. Fang Foundation. Additionally, this work has been supported by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, through the Autism Research Program under Award No. W81XWH 17-1-0449. Early work to transform smartglasses into biomedical sensors was supported in part by the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command under Contract No. W81XWH-14-C-0007 (awarded to TIAX, LLC). Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Department of Defense.

Conflict of Interest Statement

This report was supported by Brain Power, a neurotechnology company developing a range of artificially intelligent wearable technologies. Brain Power has engineering and technical partnerships with major technology companies and also receives funding support from federal and congressional sources. The authors all hold research or technical affiliations or employment with Brain Power. NS is the inventor of the Empowered Brain, and has multiple patents pending worldwide in relation to this intervention.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants for their time and important contributions to our work. The authors thank Google, Inc., (Mountain View, CA, USA) for a generous grant and also the Glass team at X (formerly Google X) for technical guidance on Glass software development. The authors also thank Amazon and Amazon Web Services for support, guidance, and access to pre-release artificial intelligence tools. The authors are also grateful to Affectiva for their emotion artificial intelligence technology that has helped to enable this work.

Abbreviations

AI, Artificial Intelligence; AR, Augmented Reality; ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder; IEP, Individualized Education Program; SRS-2, Social Responsiveness Scale 2.

References

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Frontiers | Case Study of a Digital Augmented Reality Intervention for Autism in School Classrooms: Associated With Improved Social Communication, Cognition, and Motivation via Educator and Parent Assessment

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Background: Impairment in social communication is the primary deficit in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research has shown that th...

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As a coach, I have been working to examine mindsets and values around computing and digital literacies in early childhood. There are differing beliefs about what young children are capable of, what “counts” as computing, and who has access to meaningful digital learning experiences. These differences often show up in assumptions about play versus academics, screen time versus creativity, and technology as a tool for consumption rather than expression. By grounding our work in developmentally appropriate practice, cultural responsiveness, and equity, I aim to support educators in seeing digital literacies as an extension of play, storytelling, problem-solving, and identity—where children can tinker, create, collaborate, and make meaning in ways that honor their lived experiences and funds of knowledge.

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Emoti-Con NYC Youth Digital Media Festival

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Emoti-Con NYC Youth Digital Media Festival

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These were some interesting apps such the (planner/homework helper) that are useful in helping students to prioritize their learning and taking ownership and responsibilities over meeting deadlines for assignments. It was good to see that there are also apps dedicated to help students improve their health and wellness.

J. Maitre

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Response to PiLa CS Educator Resources - Amanda Moody Maestranzi

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Response to PiLa CS Educator Resources - Amanda Moody Maestranzi

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Wow, reviewing the PiLa CS Educator Resources page was eye opening for me! The creating telenovelas in Scratch could be done with any kind of dialogue or script that students could imagine creating, and the teacher can explicitly connect the act of creating to computational thinking and composition in general. It would be great to do this as a critical response to an important news story or event in the community or in students' lives, or a literary response to a graphic novel or key chapter of a text. This is making me realize that my understanding of computational thinking was quite limited and narrow before, but it is expanding. I can imagine students using this to create a translanguaging text about personal identity or experiences too.

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This has been said before and it will continue to be said by many after-we need to teach our students HOW to use AI. We need to embrace the development of technology to better help our students prepare for the "real world" and job market. We need to have open discussions about ethical vs unethical use of AI.

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I looked at the emoticon NYC website and decided to look through it. I found an app created by a HS student combining Google Classroom and the game Among Us. Here is the link: https://emoticon.mouse.org/2026/among-the-classroom

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The way our team thought this through was by combining the game “Among us” with the well-known school app called Google Classroom. We know that at times,…