“The greatest efficiencies I have found in my career.” That’s how Julie Thacker describes the various artificial intelligence tools in her edtech toolkit. When you look at Julie’s impressive resume, that’s a bold statement! Here are three ways Executive Director of Student Services Julie Thacker has been using AI to save time, dig deeper, and polish her writing.
Julie often has to tackle lengthy documents as part of her job with Noblesville Schools and graduate work. Lately, she has been uploading PDFs to Notebook LM, an AI-powered note-taking and research tool developed by Google. Notebook LM generates an eerily realistic-sounding podcast based on the document's contents. She then saves the mp3 file to her Google Drive and listens on the go.
AI as a thinking partner? Julie insists on it. An early adopter of ChatGPT, she sprang for the paid upgraded version. Julie bounces ideas back and forth using their dialogue box. Sometimes, she’ll start with a prompt like, “The top researchers in school counseling say x about x topic.” Julie has also relied on tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to assist with creating forms and guidelines. Like anything with AI, she uses ChatGPT and Google Gemini as starting points. Her end product always looks very different from the first draft.
Julie, a longtime fan of Grammarly, uses it daily. Whether she’s drafting an email or writing an academic paper, Grammarly offers real-time suggestions to enhance clarity, grammar, punctuation, and style. Its AI-driven insights provide Julie with tailored recommendations based on the tone and purpose of her writing.
It’s hard not to catch Julie’s enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in education—especially when you realize what’s really motivating her interest. Julie sees AI as a way to spend more time with people, face to face, IRL… and possibly even device-free.
Kristin Patrick
Blended Learning Coach
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