A hotly contested Student Government (STUGO) election this year brought out the best in our student body in Sept. 2023. Leaders like Gavin, Ryland, Adrien and Alivia were ready to hit the ground running. So for this episode, I decided to pull them in for this special episode to talk about their ideas and how they will represent the middle school. By the way, three of them are familiar with being in front of a mic - having hosted student podcasts at the end of the year in my class, in 2022.

A programming note: This is the final episode of Radio 201, as I transition to a new podcast, 'Wide Angle.' Stay tuned!

So much goes on in a school, we sometimes take these things for granted. In my class, there's a constant flurry of activity after school in robotics and eSports, besides tutoring, and students popping in to do homework, quizzes, and edit eBooks. And outside these walls, too! So in this episode I wanted to put together a collection of recordings I made, that capture the force field I encounter every day when I open these doors, and carry with me when I leave. Including a snapshot of an amazing speaker I recorded one morning at one of our morning assemblies.

In this episode, my last podcast for the school year, I invite you to listen to the best student podcasts out of my computer lab. You'll be amazed at the topics and the discussion that ensues. Listen to Xander, Braxton and Anthony discuss social media (they called it "What's wrong with this generation?"), Josh and his 9th grade brother Adam discuss coding ("Coding Games"). Gavin interviews 9th grader Andrew about the airforce program known as 'CAP' ("A Cadet's guide to CAP"). Ava and Georgia discuss orchestra ("Symphony Wars") weighing in on leadership issues. Gia and Magnolia discuss historical fiction that they have published as their eBook project in my class ("Book Talk"). Emmit was so taken up with history he interviews his favorite teacher, Mr. Greer. These were just a smattering of the 15 podcasts recorded last week!

We grownups tend to say that kids say the darndest things. It gets better when we put a mic in front of them! Enjoy!

Being a teacher, I’ve heard it said all too often —  “Schools don’t teach these anymore!” Or that what’s being taught in schools is outdated.

In this podcast you'll hear Dave Conelias talk about what school can and should do. Dave, founder of MilestoneC, an organization that helps bridge that gap between the supply (schools) and demand (industry) speaks his mind about the good, the bad, and the overhyped in tech.

I asked him to weigh in on AI and other emerging tech since I interviewed him a few days after Google announced it would release its own AI, known as Bard, in an apparent mad rush to compete with all the ChatGPT hype. I wanted to know what aspect of this ‘Generative Pretrained Transformer’ (the GPT part of the ChatGPT) was showing up on his radar. His analogies are fabulous.

It was so good I took out my interjections in the interview (by the way, this podcast goes through some heavy duty editing to tighten things up), so as to keep it to just around 11 minutes. If you're a student, this will give you some useful context. If you're a parent or a not-tech person, I hope this addresses some of the questions you probably have. Enjoy!

In my 40th podcast, I wanted to try out a new way to record it with a remote guest: Podcastle. It's a web-based platform that records multiple voices - a bit like Zoom. My guest, was Don Wilde, a software engineer and entrepreneur who once worked at Intel. Don helped me with my Robotics team many years ago. His insights into software and technology through the years has been truly inspiring.

In this podcast, we talk about the inherent bias in software that doesn't happen by accident. The discussion is particularly important to us as we unpack that can of worms we call AI, and the data sets that are being used to train the software. Machines do learn from machines, but the 'data' (images, words, values etc) we feed into these machines will influence what we get out of them. The old adage, 'garbage in, garbage out' has become relevant again. Bias in, Bias out, so to speak.

This short episode is based on a recording of a talk by dance teacher Melanie Ellis, who spoke to our students during our morning assembly, Opening Ceremony at Benjamin Franklin High School.

Ellis draws on an anecdote culled from from construction, from the book, "⁠The Anatomy of Peace⁠," to explore what it means to gain wisdom through mistakes. The idea of having 'to justify' something has two dimensions. The first, which comes from construction, is about making something right. To justify or fix a wall, that is crooked. The second, is what we sometimes resort to when we wiggle out of a problem - using a justification not in keeping with our character. This point nicely dovetailed with the quote of the week, from Marcel Proust, "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."

Another live podcast! This time with three members of the cast of Beauty and the Beast. Josh Williams, Preston Hilton and Cammie Roberts. This follows the highly acclaimed High School musical in February with a cast of hundreds, fabulous sets, stunning vocals and a our amazing orchestra. 

It's about two months since AI apps sprayed their pixie dust all across the Internet. The impact of AI on education --and all content -- is a reality we must face. So I wanted to check things out and run these apps through some testing. I wanted to check my own biases, too, and get to know what it content will look like. I put ChatGPT through several tests, and also the design app, Dall.E. 

In this podcast I explain how these panned out, and how we teachers are approaching this new wave. For now at least I have come to the conclusion that Content creators of the world — authors, journalists, copywriters, podcasters — shouldn’t feel threatened. But as one expert I heard explain, while we are peering into the machine's 'intelligence' --while we are testing these out -  we are actually being lured into being the beta testers of the machines!