AI Advocates

S2 E6: How AI Can Personalize Learning Your Journey

• Lisa Dieker • Season 2 • Episode 6

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In this episode of AI Advocates, Lisa Dieker and Maggie Mosher explore how AI can support the creation and implementation of individualized education programs (IEPs), functional behavioral assessments (FBAs), and behavior intervention plans (BIPs). Framed as “a friend” in these processes, AI is discussed as a tool that can help teachers gather, analyze, and organize student data more efficiently without replacing the need for professional judgment. The episode also emphasizes the importance of data privacy, the teacher's role in customizing AI output, and practical examples of how AI can enhance student centered planning and interventions in both general and special education contexts.

AI Tools:
accessiBE - https://accessibe.com/
Be My Eyes - https://www.bemyeyes.com/

Social Media:
X - https://x.com/KUFLITECenter
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/Center-for-Flexible-Learning-through-Innovations-in-Technology-Education/61563791019174/
LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/aai-flite-center

Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Lisa Dieker.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Maggie Mosher.

Lisa Dieker:

And we're excited today to talk about a topic that all of you, no matter whether you're a general ed or a special education teacher has probably encountered. And we're going to talk about AI as a friend for individualized education program, development, functional behavioral analysis and behavioral intervention plan. So Maggie, what's your first tip? It's about keep the data safe.

Maggie Mosher:

No, it is. But first, actually, I'd start even before, keep the data safe, which remembering that the teacher is the one in charge no matter what on this every teacher knows the goal of an IEP is to provide a truly individualized roadmap for a student. Every teacher wants to be the one to provide that roadmap, to give the good instruction, to make sure those students are reaching the goal. But I know for myself, like I've been a teacher, special ed teacher since 2001. What got in the way? Paperwork and managing resources, that was always what got in the way, and that's where AI can be a game changing partner. AI doesn't replace the special educator's expertise or their compassion or their human capabilities. It just amplifies them, so it handles that resource hunting, so educators can really focus on human connections and the strategy and the direct instruction that really helps students thrive.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and so I'm going to start with something that is not AI. I know this is AI Advocates, but to help you build the AI, because we both, as we talked about this podcast, we really both are staying up at night to just, we can't say it enough. Never, ever, ever, never, ever, name not enough to identify any kid you're putting in there, you know, saying that the kid has a feeding tube or is of this certain age and has had this surgery. Like, just be careful. We just can't caution you enough. So one of my favorite things to recommend when I co teach with somebody, like, say I was co-teaching with Maggie, is to have an IEP matrix form. I usually make it in Excel. Pretty simple. It's just a table kids names across the top, IEP goals and a snapshot on the left, and I put a dot if that's on that kid's IEP, okay, so following me there. So names across the top, goals on the left hand side dot if, it's on that IEP. I then, as I went to write IEPs for the next year, take that AI, that IEP snapshot and ask it to write goals with no kids names just on. I take that x, that Excel top row off and say, can you write me some template goals for these goals? Well, guess what? I know exactly how those goals are aligned, but that's a great way to get a bank of goals that you're still going to personalize and individualize. Or I can say I need a goal for this, for starting a task without teacher support, for students that I have three different students, and one loves soccer, one loves Shakespeare and one doesn't love any literacy. How do I help them in a language arts class? And it will give me different goals. But thinking about some cluster work like that that will keep it from knowing it's this kid. I think that's really important as you start to write. But your thoughts, Maggie?

Maggie Mosher:

Well, what I love about what you just said, Lisa, is that ability to come up with ideas and why I like. Once you have those goals that you just created and those even progress monitoring ideas, the teacher can then decide what she likes, what she doesn't like, and then she can take that and say, make the student tracking sheets to go with this goal. Have AI create those tracking sheets. The teacher can even say, I had AI, do this for my sister in her classroom. Make the tracking sheets on Minecraft, because the student loves Minecraft. Make the tracking sheets a Harry Potter goal because the student loves it. So she can personalize them in seconds. These tracking sheets so the student can monitor their own progress in a way that's fun and really be involved and take those home and show their parents. Hey, look how I'm growing in my goal. And I would also say you can also add to that, here's the goal, here's the monitoring, again, no names, no student identification, but give me some accessibility tools that I already have available that would help this student, and they'll pull up things like acessiBE or user way that offers some free ways to take any website and automatically make it accessible by clicking a button while you're on that website. So it takes it beyond just. Go ahead.

Lisa Dieker:

Sorry, can you see those two sites again? Because you said them fast. I didn't get them.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah.

Lisa Dieker:

So say that one more time. Sorry.

Maggie Mosher:

No, you're good. UserWay has a piece called acessiBE. It's A, C, C, E, S, S, I, B, E, and acessiBE goes right on the bottom of your website, and you can click whenever you're on a website, whenever you're on a page, you can click it and say, make these fonts dyslexia, appropriate for student with dyslexia, but specific like, I want the font blue. I want the page white. I want no glare, like you can do all of it. I want read aloud whenever they hover over. I don't want to read aloud every time they just open the page, because that can be annoying. So you can really you or the student can really hone in on this is the way I learn best in my technology. I love it for reasons like audio eye, but I also love it for things that are full on, accessible, that allow other people to be involved, like there's a visual AI app called Be My Eyes that uses the meta glasses and will allow someone to talk to the person and tell them in real time, what they're seeing, and that's a real person on the other end. For Be My Eyes, these are volunteers, but things like this just change the game for students with disabilities, because they make it really accessible in ways that we hadn't even considered 20 years ago.

Lisa Dieker:

And so I love that. You know, again, when you're always saying, What can I put in that technology box again, what I think you'll keep hearing from us, what's free and expensive, what could we add? And then I think if you go to the next level, when you get into functional behavior analysis and behavioral intervention plans, and I know Maggie, that's like your guru expertise, but I'm going to make like a parent comment, having had a son, and analyze for that as a as a wonderful middle schooler, that all middle schoolers deserve to have some kind of intervention because they're middle schoolers, but that was the part that time. It was really hard, and we chose not to go down that path for lots of reasons. But if I were doing that today, I would say, look, I would like to have some of those FBA goals for me at home, like, can we do this together? So thinking about partnering with parents and putting into the AI agent, what do we both want from that kid? I know what an FBA is supposed to do that. But then I also think giving it like my favorite prompt in an FBA or a BIP, give me three ideas that can be used in art and PE and music. Because, again, as kids get into middle school, we have these general goals, like, you know, we'll use positive language with peers, and we'll self regulate. Well, great, but self regulation in an art room where it's noisy and there's 60 kids, is very different than self regulation in a language arts class. We're reading a silent reading and I want to make noises to disrupt the learning environment. So I feel like what we can do now is, as you said, so well, personalized and individualized. Don't need a name on there to say, here's the kid's goal. How would that look different in art now you shared that goal, plus the suggestion with the art teacher. That's one of my favorite, favorite things about FBAs and BIPs being taken to the next level. How about you?

Maggie Mosher:

And I love when you said that they're taken to the next level, because essentially, we as special education teachers have a certain kind of training that not everyone gets when they're going through their education degrees, and so we have paraprofessionals or parents who might not have that training, but you could have AI take those goals and again, say, How can an art teacher monitor the consequence, the behavior, what the antecedent, what might be causing this behavior? How can an art teacher who hasn't been trained in this give them a quick way to monitor this so that they can help me as the special education teacher, figure out what's going on in art class that caught could be causing this behavior to show up only during this class. So it also gives us more eyes and ears on the ground and more people with specialized background to help really figure out what the student really needs. Because essentially, we create behavior intervention plans and functional behavioral assessments. We create those things to figure out what's happening so that we can help. We don't create them because the student's wrong, the student's bad. There's behavior that shouldn't be happening. We create it because there's a reason this is happening, and how can we stop the problem that's occurring that's causing this behavior. And I think that AI can really help us to hone in on some of that where we don't always have a lot of teachers, to be able to watch students 24 hours a day to see what that could be. AI could help us with that.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and I highly don't recommend this, but you could use it to write one for your spouse, your friend, your co-worker. Again, just as a good laugh. But that is the beauty of AI. You know, give me a functional behavior analysis and a behavior intervention plan for blank, and you could put anything in there, but I think Maggie, I'm my last comment is going to be something you said so beautifully about the example of that personalized goal for Minecraft and and and Harry Potter, for a kid who might enjoy that. Do know that that one of the research hatties, effect size, talks about what is a researcher who talks about what makes the greatest impact? And the third level of that, effect size, highest effect for learning outcomes, is when kids monitor and assess themselves. And I know we both believe that greatly, but I like not only it's personalized, but that our teacher, who has 60 kids in the class, can there be every kid monitoring their behavior, can every kid and now those kids is personalized and individualized, because we know that's good for every kid. So I think I've mentioned this before, but one of my friends has her Google Home. It's an AI tool in her classroom every 10 minutes. Say, self check. You know, well, if a kid has a behavior intervention plan, that self check could be for that plan. So again, thinking about, how do we do things for all that are then also personalized? I think that's where AI is my favorite reason in this particular topic.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, and I would add the very last thing is, being a person with disabilities, I am not going to have that teacher with me who can tell me what I need and how I'm going to need it the rest of my life, but if I know how to track my own goals, if I know how to break down my goals and monitor my progress, I'm going to have that with me the rest of my life. And so that's important a life skill that I can take with me. And it's important for teachers to help me to learn those skills while I have the support so that I can take those skills and use them the rest of my life. So we are continuing to help teachers to save time and spend more time with students.